Andy Burnham goes down fighting

Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, pledged to continue his fight against the government today, after Number 10 broke off the negotiations with local leaders and suggested the area could be moved into Tier 3 without their consent.

The talks collapsed this afternoon, after housing and local government Secretary Robert Jenrick expressed his ‘disappointment that despite recognising the gravity of the situation, the mayor has been unwilling to take the action that is required to get the spread of the virus under control in Greater Manchester and reach an agreement with the government.’

Jenrick has therefore ‘advised the Prime Minister that these discussions have concluded without an agreement’.

In response, Burnham gave an impassioned speech outside the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, in which he accused the government of ‘grinding communities down through punishing negotiations’ and promised to fight for those impacted by the restrictions.

In a telling moment, Burnham emphasised that those most affected by the Tier 3 restrictions would be people who work in pubs and bookies – in short, ‘people too often forgotten by those in power’. It’s clear that the Greater Manchester mayor would like Boris Johnson to be mindful of the fact that he won the last election after these Red Wall voters lent the Conservative party their vote. Burnham attempted to frame the debate as about fairness, saying ‘it cannot be right to close someone’s place of work without full financial support.’

Boris Johnson is now expected to give a press conference this afternoon, in which he will announce that Greater Manchester will have Tier 3 restrictions imposed, which means that people in the region will not be able to socialise with anyone they do not live with, and pubs and bars which do not serve food will be closed.

The talks between Greater Manchester and the government hedged not on the restrictions being introduced, but on the size of the financial settlement available to the region to support businesses affected by the partial lockdown.

In his press conference today, Burnham revealed that the area hoped to receive £90m until the end of the financial year so that local government could top up the national furlough scheme to 80 per cent of people’s wages. He said the region had been prepared to accept a support package as low as £65m (the ‘bare minimum’), but any lower would harm those on the lowest incomes. It is not clear what financial support Greater Manchester will be given, now that the restrictions are to be imposed without the area’s consent.

Either way, the government does not leave today’s negotiations unbruised. When the Prime Minister unveiled his new Covid alert system over a week ago, it was billed as a way to simplify what had become a convoluted system of implementing competing Covid rules. Instead, the system that has replaced it has ended up being even more complicated.

If restrictions are imposed today on Greater Manchester, it will have taken Number 10 over ten days to move a single region into a different tier, and in doing so alienated scores of Tory backbenchers along the way who believed the region needed more financial support. If the situation with the virus really is a grave as the government is saying in Manchester and elsewhere, and the increased restrictions so necessary, then delays like this will become increasingly unacceptable in future.

In his speech today, Andy Burnham suggested that he was not just standing up for Greater Manchester when battling for financial support, but any other region that threatens to move into Tier 3. The government’s fear will be that other regions take Burnham's lead.

UPDATE: Boris Johnson has confirmed that Greater Manchester will move into Tier 3 on Friday and will receive £22m in financial support.