U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced Monday that he’s stepping down, paving the way for public transit-enthusiast Andy Burnham, to likely take his place at the head of the Labour Party. Burnham, the former mayor of Manchester who just this morning was sworn in as a member of Parliament, would be the country’s seventh prime minister in a decade.
A major part of Burnham’s left-leaning platform is to have local governments take more control of public services like utilities and transportation, The Guardian reported, citing sources close to him. His team is reportedly already drafting a proposal to transfer private grid operators like National Grid, which owns transmission and distribution lines, to public ownership. Power generation would be left in private hands.
This comes as the U.K. grapples with an affordability crisis. Electricity prices are on the rise due to the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran that choked oil and gas shipments through the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, the U.K.’s public transportation costs are already generally higher than in the rest of Europe.
Burnham’s model for public control as a way to bring down public service costs was tested during his tenure as mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017 until this year. He brought the county’s transit system under local government control after decades of privatization. Just last month, Burnham sat down with the ModeShift podcast (from Latitude Studios and the transportation company Via) to discuss the benefits of the overhaul.
Burnham in 2023 announced that Greater Manchester would take back control of its bus network, capping fares and setting routes. The overhaul extended to trams, bikeshares, and trains in order to integrate the entire public transit system under a newly named “Bee Network.”
For more from Andy Burnham’s take on overhauling Manchester’s public transit system, listen to his interview on the ModeShift podcast: