✊ What has Manchesterism ever done for us?
Its easy to think of Manchester in terms of the Metrolink, buses, and active travel. But changes in process and governance that made it happen should be how we think of Manchesterism.
Good day my good friend.
This week’s newsletter is a good example of something where I set out to write one thing, did the research, and actually found out something more interesting and instead I am writing about that. Yes, I am writing about Andy Burnham - everyone seems to be after all - but this is not a story solely about him. And it explains a lot about how Manchester has come to be seen positively in transport circles.
This year, Mobility Camp is coming to Sheffield on 30th September, and it promises to be another amazing day of discussion, debate, and taking action. Anyone with an interest in transport should be there, and so should you. You can get tickets here.
You have probably read a lot about Manchesterism in recent weeks. You might be sick of reading about it, or at least sick of every person saying that their specific viewpoint on the world is somehow the defining feature of Manchesterism.
For those of you who have somehow escaped the political shenanigans that now seems to define British politics, Manchesterism is the brain child of former Mayor for Greater Manchester Andy Burnham. As the Wikipedia article defines it:
Burnham has characterised Manchesterism as “the end of neo-liberalism”, “business-friendly socialism” and “a modern and functional response to the high-inequality, low-growth trap that came from the 1980s drive to privatise economic power and overcentralise political power in the Treasury”. In a speech to the Centre for Cities, Burnham described it as a perspective that aimed to combine economic development with social benefits, with policies designed to explicitly channel the proceeds of growth towards communities, rejecting trickle-down economics.
The funny thing is, this isn’t the first Manchesterism that we have seen. The original Manchesterism emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century. To the creed of Cobden and Bright and the Anti-Corn Law League, this meant free trade, open markets and a deep suspicion of the state’s hand in the economy. With a more equitable society resulting from this, especially through the abolition of the Corn Laws which kept food prices artificially high. It was laissez-faire with a Lancashire accent. Nowadays, it is known as Manchester Liberalism.
There is a quiet irony, then, in the fact that the city which once exported economic liberalism to the world is now lending its name to something close to the opposite. The flagship achievement of the Burnham era, bus franchising, is the reassertion of public control over a market that was set free in 1986. Today’s Manchesterism is municipal, interventionist and proud of it. It has become the standard-bearer for a new English devolution.
That makes it tempting to do a very simple thing. You look at the trams gliding through the city centre, or the yellow Bee Network buses, or the integrated ticketing, and you think “I want some of that.” You are a convert. Manchesterism works, you conclude, and Burnham is its embodiment. The trouble is that there is more to the story than bees on buses. What you are actually looking at is not the achievement of one mayor or one term. It is the downstream consequence of a long, often unglamorous and frequently losing campaign, fought across decades, to wrestle power and money away from Whitehall. The trams are the easy part to see. The fight that produced them is the part that actually matters, and it is the part most likely to be missed by anyone trying to copy it.
Greater Manchester did not wake up with devolved transport powers. It built the institutions to hold them over more than half a century. The body now called Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM) began life as the SELNEC Passenger Transport Executive in 1969, became the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive in 1974, and was rebranded and re-empowered as TfGM in 2011.
The Manchester Metrolink also had a somewhat humble start. The Manchester Corporation Tramways shut all tram lines in 1949. Early ideas for improving public transport in their absence included a railway tunnel between Manchester Piccadilly and Manchester Victoria, and countless studies were undertaken by local councils on the viability of light rail systems for the city. Eventually, what was known as Project Light Rail got the green light, and in 1992 Phase 1 of Metrolink - between Bury and Altrincham via Piccadilly - opened to the public.
Over the years, the Metrolink has slowly expanded. The Eccles branch opened in 2000. The MediaCity spur opened in 2010. Between 2011 and 2013, lines towards Droylsden, Oldham, and St Werbugh’s Road opened. In 2014, this extended further to Rochdale, Ashton, East Didsbury, and Manchester Airport. All done line by line, government grant by government grant, long before any mayor existed. By the time Andy Burnham was elected in 2017, the city-region already ran the largest tram network outside London and had the institutional muscle memory of having built it.
That muscle memory was the work of people as much as structures. The council leaders Graham Stringer and then Sir Richard Leese, paired with the long-serving chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein, built the pragmatic, deal-making, public-private approach that became known as the Manchester model. Stringer’s council had already shown what the approach could do, driving the expansion of the publicly owned Manchester Airport into a national asset and bidding, repeatedly and at first unsuccessfully, for the Olympic Games. The bids lost, but the habit of bidding, of assembling coalitions and making the case to government, became a civic skill in its own right. Losing taught Manchester how to win, and the Commonwealth Games of 2002 were the proof.
Bernstein in particular, an officer of Manchester City Council for forty-six years and its chief executive from 1998 to 2017, was as clerk to the old passenger transport authority one of the people who pushed the original Metrolink into being. He led the city centre’s reconstruction after the 1996 IRA bomb, brought the 2002 Commonwealth Games and the regeneration of east Manchester, helped create the Combined Authority in 2011, and led the negotiations for the 2014 devolution deal. The tributes after his death in 2024 called him the architect of English devolution, and that was not hyperbole. He retired in the spring of 2017, the same season Burnham was first elected. The machine passed, substantially complete, from one to the other.
The single most instructive episode in the whole saga was, with some degree of irony, a defeat. In December 2008, Greater Manchester held a referendum on a £3bn transport package part-funded by a peak-time congestion charge and part-funded by the Department for Transport. All ten boroughs rejected it, by around seventy-nine per cent on a turnout close to half the electorate. It was a comprehensive rejection of a big-bang, vision-led, demand-management scheme put directly to the public.
And yet the striking thing is what happened next. The Department for Transport did not walk away. It would have been easy to, and no doubt the Treasury would welcome that saving. But it didn’t. Its £1.5bn in funding remained on the table, and funded the expansions of the Metrolink towards Droylsden, Oldham, and St Werbugh’s Road. Manchester lost the public debate on road user charging, but kept much of the money anyway.
The lesson the city drew from that defeat is the hinge of the entire story. It stopped asking the public to swallow grand, abstract, all-at-once schemes, and it started earning trust through visible, incremental delivery. Build a tram line. Open it, ideally early. Show Whitehall that the money was well spent. Ask for the next line. This is the discipline of the quick win, and it does two things at once. It gives residents something tangible to ride, and it builds delivery confidence in the one audience that ultimately controls the purse, which is central government. Devolution in Greater Manchester was never simply seized. It was earned, deal by deal, by a place that kept proving it could deliver.
The institutional record bears this out. After a statutory city-region pilot in 2009, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority was established in 2011, the first in England, with the ten boroughs choosing to pool sovereignty over transport, planning and economic development when nobody was forcing them. The 2014 devolution agreement with George Osborne created the elected mayor and transferred real transport powers, and it was explicitly built on that track record. It even included an earn-back mechanism, which tied a share of future funding to the economic growth the investment generated, the principle of delivery confidence written directly into the financial settlement.
A sequence of further devolution deals followed, deepening the powers each time, culminating in the 2023 trailblazer agreement and a single, integrated funding settlement of the kind previously reserved for Scotland and Wales. The mayoralty itself was the unlock for the boldest move of all, because the Bus Services Act 2017 reserved bus franchising powers for places with an elected mayor, which is why Greater Manchester could do what no other English authority outside London had dared since deregulation.
It is easy to conclude from this what Whitehall continually lost a political battle against savvy local authorities from one of the major cities of the UK. But its not quite like this. It was Whitehall repeatedly choosing to back the place that kept delivering, and Manchester trail-blazed the template that other city-regions are now asked to follow.
It would be dishonest to present this as a clean run of victories, because the transport policy itself has been distinctly uneven.
The clear success is bus franchising. Greater Manchester became the first place in England to take its buses back into public control since deregulation in 1986, and the early operational data in the GMCA’s Delivering the Bee Network update is genuinely encouraging. Patronage is up, by around fourteen per cent year on year in the first franchised areas. Punctuality has climbed from roughly two thirds of services on time before franchising to about seventy-six per cent by early 2025. The zero-emission share of the fleet has gone from under two per cent to seventeen per cent. A flat £2 single fare, held since 2022, made the network markedly cheaper, especially as the national cap was raised to £3. These are improvements that passengers can feel, and they arrived quickly.
Franchising is the quick-win discipline applied to the hardest target on the network, and so far it is working. The necessary honesty flag is that the pre-franchising comparison rests on a reconstructed baseline, because network-wide patronage data did not exist before the TfGM took control, and some of the growth reflects the wider recovery from the pandemic and a rising population rather than people switching out of cars. The story is strong. It is not yet finished.
Road safety deserves a place alongside it, as a quieter quick win that rarely makes the headlines. The casualty data shows people killed or seriously injured on Greater Manchester’s roads falling from 1,187 in 2017 to 799 in 2023, a reduction of nearly a third, with a formal Vision Zero target of eliminating road deaths by 2040 now in place. The caveat is familiar, that the fall broadly tracks a national trend and that the lockdown years distort the middle of the series, so the local contribution is real but hard to isolate. It is progress earned steadily rather than a single dramatic intervention, which is rather the point.
Active travel tells a more chastening story. The ambition set out in Chris Boardman’s Made to Move work was genuinely radical, including a target of getting cycling to ten per cent of trips. The honest assessment, made most plainly by researchers at the Manchester Urban Institute, is that cycling mode share has stagnated at around two per cent, nowhere near that headline figure. What this forced was a radical recalibration of expectations. The early assumption that building the network would quickly deliver the behaviour change was wrong, or at least wildly optimistic on timing. The work had to be reframed around the patient accumulation of safe, connected infrastructure, more than 130 kilometres of it now in the ground, in the understanding that the riders follow the network only slowly. That recalibration is only now beginning to bear fruit, and even then the returns are modest and local rather than transformational.
Behind both stories sits the headline ambition of the Greater Manchester Transport Strategy 2040, which is to get car use down to no more than half of all trips. On the published travel-diary data, car driver and passenger trips together still account for somewhere around fifty-six to fifty-eight per cent of journeys. The dial has barely moved. Modal shift, the thing the entire strategy exists to achieve, has been the most stubborn target of all, and progress on it is notably slow. That is not a Manchester failing so much as a reminder of how hard the underlying behavioural problem is, even for the best-resourced city-region in England.
Transport impacts are felt years, often decades, after delivery. The effects of a new tram network accrue as people slowly reorganise their journeys, as homes and offices and shops cluster around the stops, as land values shift and development follows. The benefit is real but it is also diffuse, lagged and entangled with everything else happening in the economy. The strongest evidence we have that transport investment has paid off in Greater Manchester comes from the Metrolink Phase 3 evaluation of lines completed between 2010 and 2014, well before Burnham, precisely because enough time has now passed to measure them. The Bee Network, completed as an integrated system only in 2025, is far too young for any equivalent verdict.
The economic claims made for the network show how careful one has to be here. It is easy to find large figures attached to Metrolink’s contribution to the regional economy, but the most-quoted of these trace back to authority-commissioned research rather than independent appraisal, and they bundle together effects that no single scheme can claim on its own. Manchester’s economy has grown faster than the national average for two decades, and the transport network is plainly part of that, but so are the airport, the universities, the financial and creative sectors and a planning system that pushed density into the core.
The honest statement is narrow and unsatisfying. Good transport almost certainly helped, the precise contribution is unknowable in the short term, and anyone offering a confident pounds-and-pence figure is selling something. If no improvements to transport were made, the city would almost certainly be in a worse position than it is now.
The consequence is that understanding the impact of what has been delivered is necessarily indirect and inferred. Often you cannot draw a clean straight line from a specific scheme to a specific outcome in the wider city. The environmental record makes the point sharply. The GMCA’s own Five-Year Environment Plan concedes that transport emissions have been broadly static since 1990. Roadside nitrogen dioxide has improved, with exceedance sites falling sharply according to Clean Air GM, but much of that reflects national fleet renewal rather than local policy.
This is exactly why consistent delivery matters more than any single scheme. If you cannot prove the impact of one tram line in the short term, the rational strategy is not to wait for proof before building the next. It is to keep delivering, steadily and credibly, on the reasoned expectation that the accumulated effect will show up later at some point. Devolution gives a city-region the one thing that makes that long game playable, which is a stable, locally accountable institution able to keep delivering across electoral cycles. The point of the machine is not that it guarantees the impact. It is that it sustains the delivery long enough for the impact to arrive.
The obvious question for everywhere else is whether other city-regions can simply jump to where Greater Manchester is now, skipping nearly fifty years of learning the hard way. The honest answer is that the leap is genuinely hard, and it is worth being clear about why.
Manchester’s position rests on things that cannot be conjured quickly. It has unusually cohesive boroughs with a long habit of cooperation, and a geography where the police, health and transport boundaries broadly align, which makes integration far easier than in more fragmented regions. It has decades of officer-level continuity, embodied by figures like Bernstein. It has a major asset base already built, the largest tram network outside the capital. And, crucially, it has a track record that earned Whitehall’s trust and, with it, a uniquely favourable funding settlement.
Most newer combined authorities have thinner institutions, messier geographies, a weaker asset base and, above all, no comparable history of delivery to point to when they ask the Treasury for money. Many of them are barely a decade old, created in the mid-2010s wave of city-region deals, and several cover areas where the constituent councils have no deep tradition of working together at all. Some are being set up right at this moment. Delivery capability, the unglamorous machinery of engineering, procurement, data and programme management, is the hardest thing of all to acquire, because it is learned by doing rather than legislated into being.
And yet the attempt to leapfrog is necessary, and should be encouraged rather than discouraged. No region can afford to spend another fifty years building capability from scratch, and none should be asked to. The way to read Manchester is not as a finish line that others must somehow teleport to, but as proof that the apprenticeship is real and that it ends somewhere worthwhile. Other city-regions have to start delivering now, accept that their early wins will be modest, and use those wins to build exactly the delivery confidence, locally and in Whitehall, that Manchester spent decades accumulating.
The leapfrog will likely be imperfect and the early results will underwhelm. That is not a reason to hold back. It is the necessary, unavoidable process by which regional delivery capability gets built in the first place. The mistake would be to look at Manchester’s polished network and conclude that the capability comes first and the delivery second. It is the other way around.
So what is Manchesterism, really? Stripped of the branding, it is not yet a story about measurable transport outcomes only. It is a story about process and philosophy. It is about where decisions get made, and by whom, and about the patient, decades-long construction of institutions capable of making decisions and delivering against them. The trams and the franchised buses are evidence that the process works as a process. They are not yet evidence that it has transformed how a city-region lives and moves, because that evidence takes a generation to mature.
That reframing changes the questions worth asking. The real questions Manchesterism poses are not whether Burnham has already delivered modal shift, because he plainly has not, or whether the carbon numbers have fallen, because they largely have not. The real questions are these. Should power over transport be devolved to the places that live with the consequences? I think it clearly should. And should we build serious delivery organisations, with real capability and real money, rooted in the regions rather than in Whitehall? Again, yes. Greater Manchester is the best evidence we have that both answers are right, not because it has finished the job, but because it has shown that a place given control and held to account will build the machine to use it.
The impact will come. It will arrive slowly, indirectly and years from now, and it will be hard to attribute cleanly to any one decision Burnham or Bernstein ever made. But it will come, because the delivery has been consistent and the institution is built to last. To sign up to Manchesterism on the strength of the trams alone is to admire the wrong thing. The achievement worth admiring, and worth copying, is the fifty-year fight that made the trams possible, and the simple, radical proposition underneath it - that the places should be trusted to run their own affairs.
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👩🎓 Further Reading
The clever clogs at our universities, government departments, and other clever people have published the following excellent research. Where you are unable to access the research, email the author – they may give you a copy of the research paper for free.
Fiscal centralization versus decentralization of transport infrastructure operation and maintenance
TL:DR - This paper builds a stochastic evolutionary game model of central and local government behaviour and tests it on China’s transport sector. It finds that a centralised system struggles to motivate two local governments at once, whereas a decentralised approach can incentivise both under the right conditions.
TL:DR - A paper that examines how the system responded to the pandemic and what that reveals about its capacity for deeper change. It works through the UK’s devolution and policy divergence between its constituent nations, and asks whether devolved structures actually enable the radical shifts that climate and other goals demand.
TL:DR - This article in maps England’s asymmetric decentralisation and identifies a ‘devolution periphery’, mostly in the east and west, that lags in both economic and governance capacity. It states that the places most in need of devolved delivery, including transport delivery, are often the least equipped to do it, which is exactly why leapfrogging is so hard.
TL:DR - This paper compares public transport governance in the Copenhagen region and the West Midlands, with the English case focused on buses given how little influence the regional level has over rail. It finds the passenger transport authority acting as the core ‘meta-governor’ in both, and is a strong read for understanding what a combined authority actually has to do to make a fragmented bus network behave like one system.
Regulatory regimes: national and comparative regulation of public transport
TL:DR - A paper that revisits the idea of a ‘regulatory cycle’ in which bus markets swing between deregulation and public control. It is the most useful academic framing for Greater Manchester’s franchising, placing the Bee Network not as a one-off but as the latest turn of a long international cycle, and asking what institutional designs actually sustain good outcomes once the swing back to public control has happened.
😀 Positive News
Plenty of good news on transport and devolution lately, much of it the slow, institution-building sort this blog keeps banging on about. Here are a few from the last few months that caught my eye.
Goodbye to the original Tyne and Wear Metro trains
Nexus confirmed on 2 June 2026 that the original 1980 Metro fleet would make its final guaranteed passenger runs in the week beginning 22 June, completing the £362 million replacement with 46 new Stadler-built trains. After 46 years and roughly 1.7 billion journeys, North East Mayor Kim McGuinness framed the switch-over as a milestone for the publicly owned Metro, with a Washington extension, new signalling and further station upgrades to follow. A quietly significant moment for a devolved network finally seeing a generational fleet renewal through to completion.
Transport for Wales launches contactless pay-as-you-go rail in the north east
In May 2026 the Welsh Government-owned Transport for Wales switched on contactless tap-in, tap-out ticketing at 15 stations across North East Wales and the borders, automatically calculating the best-value fare and removing the need to buy in advance. It is a modest change with an outsized convenience benefit, and it lands alongside a wider run of good news for the operator, which has posted record passenger numbers and its most improved reliability in years as new trains and the South Wales Metro electrification bed in.
Every Greater Manchester borough to get Bee Network night buses
On 18 March 2026, Mayor Andy Burnham announced 36 service changes for 2026/27 that extend Bee Network night buses to every Greater Manchester borough, with Oldham, Stockport, Tameside and Trafford gaining overnight services for the first time, plus an order for 55 electric Wrightbus vehicles. TfGM expects around 740,000 residents to benefit, with the £2 single and £5 day fare caps held to the end of 2026.
Tram approval powers to be handed down to West Yorkshire’s mayor
In May 2026 the Chancellor announced that the Department for Transport would consult on devolving Transport and Works Act Order powers, letting West Yorkshire Mayor Tracy Brabin sign off her own mass transit scheme rather than wait on Whitehall, potentially shaving up to a year off the long-delayed Leeds tram timetable. A national mass transit taskforce was announced alongside it.
💻 Hard Work
The highlight of last week was definitely last Friday, where along with Meg Drinkall and Katie Foulkes, I went to see the venue for this year’s Mobility Camp. We usually choose a good venue, but this one is utterly spectacular. Just check out the pictures. Katie also gave us a tour of the fantastic Grey to Green scheme.
Travelling back afterwards was not so good. As many of you likely know, on that day two East Midlands Trains services collided just to the south of Bedford - barely a few miles from my home - and as of the time of writing the driver of one of the trains was tragically killed and nine people are critically injured in hospital. In that context, my two hour detour to Milton Keynes Central is nothing.
The rest of the week has been a mix of meetings, chasing people, and trying to beat the heat. I have to present some findings from a data collection exercise next week, so that has been taking up a lot of time and a lot of brain space.
🎶 Musical Finale
You are stuck for choice when it comes to music from Manchester. I could so easily have chosen tracks from the likes of the Happy Mondays, Joy Division, The Smiths, The Courteneers, and Oasis. But as there is a World Cup on, I had to go with the best World Cup anthem ever made by New Order. Now if you will excuse me, I have to watch a video of David Platt’s volley against Belgium on repeat.
🪧 Notices
This section is intended to notify you of important things that may or may not annoy you, depending on your view of the world. But these are things I feel it is worthwhile pointing out.
Regarding Artificial Intelligence. For my newsletter, I use AI like a research assistant. I get the AI (in my case Claude Opus 4.8) to find for me well-cited and evidenced research in the subject matter, focussed on academic journals with a high impact factor. I follow this up with my own research, and I check each source myself. Where I have the time to, I contact domain experts or seek out their published works to validate the findings. The words written here are my own, spelling mistakes and all.
Regarding my expertise. I am a transport planner, so my realm is public policy, how people and things move, and their impacts. While I research everything in a manner I consider robust, there may be some instances where my lack of domain expertise fails me. That’s on me, but that’s all part of learning. I always encourage any reader to do their own research on the subject matter.
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Love the deep dive into Manchester's successful public transport incrementalism. Needs to be a must read for other UK cities.