IT Essentials: The King in the North

Should UK tech bend the knee to Burnham?

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The Stockport regeneration has been one of Andy Burnham’s key successes as mayor, but can he scale that to the national level?

If you thought a Labour government meant the adults were back at the table, think again.

When Keir Starmer was elected Prime Minister in 2024, celebrations were joyful – change is here! - but also muted – what does he actually stand for?

It’s a question that, two years on, still doesn’t have a solid answer; a major reason behind his loss of support among both the public and his own MPs, forcing him to announce his resignation this week.

The controversies helped. The debacle of winter fuel payments, the U-turns, the ongoing Mandelson scandal and of course the poorly received Online Safety Act all contributed to the downfall of a PM who had looked set to bring the grownups back to Downing Street.

The Labour party itself – as hellbent on ideological purity as ever – has been its own worst enemy, especially confronted with Starmer’s have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too centrism that failed to satisfy voters on the right or the left.

So when Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, who sits proudly left of Starmer, appeared as a potential leadership candidate, the party was quick to rally behind him.

At the time of writing it’s still unclear if Burnham will run for leadership unopposed or if he’ll face some token resistance, but he certainly has the momentum.

For UK tech, a future under PM Burnham is muddy. Starmer and his cabinet put a great focus on the sector: £6 billion in AI investment (plus Growth Zones, sovereign AI moves and free AI training for the general public); the National Data Library; the Cybersecurity & Resilience Bill; progress on the digitalisation of public services; and a firm stance when dealing with the US government and tech firms.

These are all wins for the tech sector; and while Burnham might not be anti-capitalist, he is more in favour of state intervention than previous leaders. He has previously called for tighter regulation of AI and Big Tech, as well as more public control over areas like transport and water.

Centrism is clearly out; the public wants change, and Burnham might be the man to deliver it. But running a country is very different to leading a city (Manchester notably lacks aircraft carriers, for example). And while Burnham’s policies of intervention and deregulation have been successful at a local level, can the country afford it nationally?

One of Starmer’s key outgoing policies was a proposed ban on social media for under-16s. Penny and I dug into that, along with the US government’s (spiteful?) restrictions on Anthropic and the latest tech IPOs, in a special news-led episode of Ctrl Alt Lead. This is something we’re experimenting with, and we’d love your feedback on the format.

The succession of prime ministers – seven in 16 years – has been part of the UK’s failure to develop a coherent technology strategy, which stakeholders discussed at an OpenUK roundtable earlier this month, John Leonard reports.

Talking of strategies, Meta’s on sustainability has been a surprising bright spot, with the company ranking highly for both the transparency and ambition of its environmental reporting. Check out the final instalment of our 2026 sustainability research now.

And we have continued coverage from Google’s Cloud Summit London, where customers from firms like Rightmove, Kingfisher, THG Ingenuity and Deloitte spoke about how they’re controlling AI costs while scaling agentic AI into production.