A new government, a northern nerve centre, and what it all means for corporate training
British politics has always had a talent for the dramatic, and the past few weeks have not disappointed. Keir Starmer resigned on 22 June, Angela Rayner had already gone, Wes Streeting declined to stand, and Andy Burnham, who had to win a by-election simply to be eligible to enter the contest, is now odds-on to take possession of Downing Street before the month is out. A leadership election in which only one person stands is, technically, still a democratic process. One does not wish to be uncharitable about it.
The training sector, watching from the side-lines, might be forgiven for treating all of this as theatre: enjoyable to observe, unlikely to change anything that actually matters. That instinct is usually correct. Government reshuffles tend to produce consultation documents, roundtables, frameworks, and the occasional white paper, most of which arrive at conclusions that practitioners have been reaching independently for years. The gap between policy announcement and anything resembling on-the-ground change has historically been considerable enough to plan a career around.
This time, however, the specifics are worth paying attention to. Burnham's skills agenda is more concrete than most, the mechanisms he has described are ones that will actually reach corporate training budgets, and the direction of travel on apprenticeships has been moving for long enough that it is no longer quite accurate to call it speculative.
Who Burnham is, and why it matters
The Greater Manchester mayor has spent a decade doing something that Westminster tends to find slightly exotic: running things. The homelessness programme, the integrated health and social care plans, the Metrolink expansion, the Greater Manchester Apprenticeships and Careers Service, the Greater Manchester Baccalaureate, which is a serious attempt to give technical and vocational education the same standing as the academic route through school. These are not white papers. They are operational. Whether you agree with all of them is beside the point; the point is that they happened.
The philosophy he has described as "Manchesterism" is, at its core, an argument that Britain is one of the most over-centralised countries in the developed world, and that economic growth has been held back by power remaining in Whitehall when it should sit with the people who actually understand local conditions. Devolution, in Burnham's framing, is not a concession to the regions; it is the structural precondition for the country working properly. That view has acquired rather more credibility given where centralisation has got us over the last several years, though one hesitates to make the observation too loudly in polite company.
No. 10 North
The headline proposal is the establishment of a second operational base for the Prime Minister's office in Manchester: "Number 10 North," which Burnham has described as the nerve centre of a re-wired Britain. The idea is that it would not merely be a symbolic northern outpost, but a genuinely operational hub from which devolution could be driven, regional policy co-ordinated, and the signal sent that government works from more than one postcode.
The planned location is the Manchester Digital Campus, currently under construction in New Islington. It is, on current projections, unlikely to be ready before 2032. One supposes something can be arranged in the meantime. The point is not the building; it is the intent, and the intent is to make power flow outward to mayors, councils, and regional governments across the country. Burnham has been explicit that this includes London as much as the north, which is either admirable even-handedness or very good politics, depending on one's level of cynicism.
For the skills sector specifically, the consequence is that Skills England, the national body set up to co-ordinate skills commissioning, is in Burnham's crosshairs. His argument is that skills are inherently local, and that a national agency sitting in London is not well placed to understand whether the Tees Valley needs more engineers or whether Greater Manchester needs more digital project managers. Devolved skills commissioning, if it arrives, will mean that the funding priorities, approved standards, and employer engagement frameworks that shape what training gets bought will increasingly be set at a regional level rather than a national one.
Apprenticeships and the procurement lever
This is the part where the policy becomes genuinely consequential for corporate buyers. Burnham's proposal on public procurement is to link contract award to apprenticeship creation. The government spends roughly £350 billion a year on procurement. Burnham wants to use that as an economic lever: companies seeking government work will be expected to demonstrate that they are creating apprenticeships and work placements for young people. Procurement as a social value mechanism is not a new idea, but the framing here is more explicit and more demanding than previous iterations of it.
The logic is straightforward enough. If you want a share of the government's supplier spend, you need to show you are investing in the workforce. The effect, for organisations in regulated sectors or those with significant public-sector contract revenue, is that the business case for structured training and apprenticeship programmes stops being an internal argument about L&D budgets and starts being a commercial requirement. That is a different conversation entirely.
There are also changes already in motion that sit alongside this agenda. From the 2026 to 2027 academic year, apprenticeships for workers under 25 at non-levy-paying employers will be fully funded by government. From October, a payment of up to £2,000 will be available to smaller employers who recruit new apprentices aged 16 to 24. The Growth and Skills Levy, which replaced the original apprenticeship levy, also gives larger employers more flexibility in how their ring-fenced training funds can be spent, including on shorter bootcamp-style interventions rather than only on full apprenticeship standards. None of this is cosmetic.
Burnham has also said, with some directness, that the days of a school system configured entirely around the university route are over. This is a statement he has been making in various forms for the best part of a decade. What is different now is that he is likely to be in a position to do something about it. The practical implication for organisations is that the pipeline of young people with technical, vocational qualifications, rather than degrees, is going to grow, and the frameworks to recognise and develop those people within corporate environments will matter more than they currently do.
What the "buy British" angle actually means
Burnham has been clear that the procurement reform is not simply about social value; it is also about domestic supply chain preference. The argument is that £350 billion of annual government spending should, where possible, support UK-based businesses and create British jobs rather than flowing to overseas suppliers through frameworks that have historically been designed around open competition rather than domestic benefit. Whether one regards this as economic pragmatism or mild protectionism rather depends on one's reading of recent economic history, and we will leave the interested reader to draw their own conclusions.
For the training sector specifically, the direct effect is probably limited: the large training providers operating in the UK are mostly UK-domiciled regardless of their ownership structure. The indirect effect, however, is more interesting. If the procurement logic takes hold broadly, it will encourage organisations across the economy to be seen to invest in British skills and British workers. Training, particularly apprenticeship-linked training, becomes part of that story. The narrative around skills investment shifts from cost management to strategic positioning, which is a more comfortable place for L&D teams to be having the conversation with their boards.
What to do with any of this
The sensible response to a change of government is usually to wait. Policy announcements have a long journey from speech to delivery, and the graveyard of skills reform initiatives from the last three governments is large enough to inspire a reasonable scepticism. The levy became the Growth and Skills Levy. Skills England replaced the Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, which had replaced the Skills Funding Agency. The names change; the fundamental structural tensions remain.
That said, the direction of travel on apprenticeships is clear enough that it is no longer entirely prudent to treat it as future tense. The funding improvements are already in place. The procurement linkage, if it arrives, will create real commercial pressure rather than moral encouragement. Devolved skills commissioning will change the landscape for how training gets funded and prioritised regionally. Organisations that have structured apprenticeship and training frameworks already will navigate this more easily than those that have been booking courses on an ad hoc basis and calling it an L&D strategy.
In our experience, the conversations that matter in this area are rarely about individual courses. They are about whether the organisation has a coherent picture of what capabilities it needs, where it currently is, and how training investment maps onto a genuine development pathway. That picture is useful regardless of who is in Downing Street, but it becomes considerably more useful when the government starts asking about it in contract negotiations.
If your organisation is starting to have that conversation, we are happy to be part of it.