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Andy Burnham has become the leader of the U.K.’s Labour party, paving the way for him to take over as Prime Minister following Keir Starmer’s resignation last month.
Burnham, sporting a suit and red tie, was greeted
with thunderous applause after being announced as the new Labour leader at a special leadership conference on Friday. “What a moment,” Burnham said as he took the podium. “What backing you’ve given me.”
He continued: “This is a proud moment you have given me and my family today, and an emotional one. But it is one for which I am ready. I am ready — ready to lead and to build on the foundation laid by one person more than any other.”
Burnham then thanked Starmer, saying that under his leadership “we went from our worst defeat to one of the best victories in our history. Keir put Labour back in a position to change people’s lives, and that is what we have been doing these last two years.”
The formal handover at 10 Downing Street is expected on Monday, capping a five-week run from Burnham’s return to Parliament via a by-election win to his installation as the country’s seventh prime minister in a decade.
Burnham has long treated the creative sector not as an afterthought but as a primary economic engine and a tool for social mobility. From his tenure running the national culture brief under Prime Minister Gordon Brown to his nine years anchoring Greater Manchester, he has consistently folded entertainment and grassroots arts into his core policy agenda.
During his 2008–2009 run as U.K. Culture Secretary, Burnham focused on building future audiences for the live sector, backing “A Night Less Ordinary,” a £2.5 million ($3.3 million) Arts Council England initiative that offered 618,000 free theater tickets to people under 26. That push toward democratizing access carried through to his mayoralty, where he used devolved powers to position Greater Manchester as a rival to London’s cultural gravity — in 2009, while still Culture Secretary, he had already created the “U.K. City of Culture” concept, inspired by Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture in 2008.
As mayor, Burnham’s most visible legacy became Factory International, the organization behind the biennial Manchester International Festival and the £240 million ($322 million) Aviva Studios venue. But he also built out a wider funding architecture: the region’s GMCA Culture Fund has channeled millions to a broad portfolio of organizations, with an explicit strategy of decentralizing money away from Manchester’s city center to creative hubs across all 10 boroughs — backed by his “Town of Culture” accolade, an annual award designed to boost local night-time economies and drive regeneration in towns from Bury to Oldham.
When the pandemic threatened to wipe out the region’s live entertainment ecosystem, Burnham’s administration moved to survival mode in 2020 with emergency funding and commissions for displaced freelancers, before formalizing a wider cultural recovery strategy, “Plan, Protect, Restore, Heal, Grow,” in 2021. Throughout his mayoralty, Burnham tied financial backing to social impact, pushing subsidized organizations to open career pathways for working-class youth.
For the screen sector specifically, Burnham enters office having offered few policy specifics on film, television or streaming, focusing his leadership campaign instead on devolution, social housing and living standards. He has pledged to pursue “the biggest rebalancing of power our country has seen” and floated a “No. 10 North” operation to coordinate that devolution agenda government-wide.
Burnham’s government inherits a Department for Culture, Media and Sport most recently led by Lisa Nandy, whose tenure included an £85 million ($114 million) capital funding package for cultural venues. Whether Nandy retains the post under Burnham has not yet been confirmed, though the two are considered political allies.
