Will Andy Burnham Deliver for Britain’s Arts Sector?

If Andy Burnham enters Downing Street this summer, it will represent a watershed moment for Britain’s arts sector.

For the first time, Britain’s executive could be led by people whose careers have been deeply embedded in cultural institutions.

Not only would the ex-Greater Manchester mayor become the first former Culture Secretary to become Prime Minister, but he is also expected to appoint James Purnell, another former Culture Secretary who has worked in senior roles at the BBC and University of the Arts London, as his chief of staff.

Between them, the pair have spent two decades working across government, broadcasting, higher education and Britain’s cultural institutions.

For a sector accustomed to being perceived as somewhat peripheral to power, the prospect of two former culture secretaries at the centre of government will offer an opportunity for a sector often near the bottom of the political priority list. 

It does not guarantee a friendlier settlement for the arts, but it does suggest something maybe even rarer: a government whose top table might actually understand the value of culture. 

Burnham’s first opportunity to shape the government’s cultural priorities will come not only through policy, but through the people he chooses to put in charge of delivering it. The current Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy, an ally of Burnham, and whose Wigan constituency borders his own, is widely expected to be promoted in a reshuffle, which will leave a vacancy at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Stephanie Peacock, the highly-rated 39-year-old MP for Barnsley East who currently serves as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Sport, Media, Civil Society and Youth, is tipped as a contender for the post.

Burnham has long understood the symbolic power of culture. When he first ran for mayor of Greater Manchester in 2017, he leaned heavily into the mythology of the city’s music scene, namechecking bands like The Smiths, Joy Division and Oasis and regularly presenting himself as a child of the city’s 1980s and 90s cultural golden age. It was politically useful. Burnham, after all, was born in Liverpool and is a season ticket holder to Everton FC. His roots and affinities are arguably closer to Merseyside than Manchester. But his embrace of his adopted city’s musical identity helped cement his Manchester credentials and align him with its self-image: rebellious, working-class, creative.

Unlike many politicians who invoke culture rhetorically, Burnham has attempted to build it into the machinery of regional government. As mayor, Burnham oversaw one of the most visible arts infrastructure projects in Britain: Aviva Studios, the £240m home of Factory International. Opened in 2023, the vast multi-purpose venue was conceived as a flagship for contemporary art, music and performance, a statement that Manchester could rival London as an international cultural destination. Named in homage to the city’s legendary Factory Records, it has quickly become both a symbol of Burnham-era ambition and a test case for whether major cultural investment can drive wider economic and social renewal.

Manchester City Centre, Deansgate © David Dixon

That ambition has not been confined to big buildings. Burnham has repeatedly framed culture as part of the region’s wider civic infrastructure – something which connects to health, education and regeneration.

In a recent article for the Big Issue, Burnham made that philosophy explicit. “Culture is sometimes dismissed as a distraction, a ‘nice to have’,” he wrote. “But culture isn’t just about a good night out or escaping into another reality. It’s about making sense of your own reality.”

This attitude aligns with his appointment of James Purnell, a long-term ally, as his chief of staff. Burnham and Purnell shared an office in Westminster when first elected to Parliament. Since leaving frontline politics, Purnell has worked across some of Britain's top cultural and creative institutions. After serving as Culture Secretary under Gordon Brown, he held senior leadership roles at the BBC, first as Director of Strategy and later as Director of Radio and Education, where he oversaw BBC Arts, music, children's programming and the launch of BBC Sounds. He went on to become President and Vice-Chancellor of University of the Arts London before taking over as chief executive of the political consultancy firm Flint Global. Alongside his institutional roles, Purnell has also worked as a film producer, winning Best Film at the Edinburgh International Film Festival as producer of the Penny Woolcock documentary One Mile Away, which explored youth violence and gang culture in Birmingham.

Taken together, Burnham and Purnell bring an unusually deep understanding of Britain's cultural institutions to the centre of government.

Professor Abigail Gilmore, a cultural policy expert at the University of Manchester, says Burnham has been both “a visible champion of culture in all its myriad forms” and the architect of “a trailblazing strategic authority” where arts and culture are integrated into broader city systems.

“The fact that the Mayor ‘gets it’ is of immeasurable benefit,” she says. “It has contributed – in my experience – to a general confidence in working with local government shared amongst the arts, cultural and creative communities in the city-region.”

For Gilmore, the significance lies in Burnham’s embrace of devolution. Greater Manchester’s model, she argues, creates “greater opportunities for coordination between place-based policies at a local level,” a possible template she suggests for how a Burnham government might approach arts policy nationally. “The rewiring of government machinery and the decentralisation of Westminster power is something that, I hope, Andy will not lose sight of,” she says. 

Factory International © Pawel Paniczko

Gilmore warns that the arts landscape in England is patchy and urges Burnham to develop a national cultural strategic framework which integrates policy and planning for culture as foundational to every place, not just its impact to overall national GDP. “It is important to invest in local capacity to manage and attract resources to keep arts and cultural sectors buoyant, rather than relying on the relocation or touring of cultural product from elsewhere. Communities want to own and steward their culture and to gain the skills and pathways to ensure future generations can also take part.”

Maria Balshaw, who led both Manchester's Whitworth and Manchester Art Gallery before becoming the first woman to direct Tate, says Burnham’s most significant intervention has been to make culture “an integral part of the Combined Authority responsibilities”, so that “access to culture is a region-wide project, rather than cities and towns competing with each other for provision.”

Balshaw sees one immediate priority for Prime Minister Burnham: rebuilding the connection between culture and education. “He was a Minister for Culture when DCMS and the Department for Education worked closely together to ensure all children, from early years to 18, experienced arts and creativity as a core part of their educational experience,” she says. “Make this happen again, in his first year.”

Yet there have been some limitations of Burnham’s mayoralty. Not everyone believes Burnham’s cultural record has filtered down to working artists. Manchester-based artist Liz West credits him with keeping “culture visible within wider civic conversations” but warns that the benefits have been uneven.

“Visual artists in the city and smaller arts organisations still often operate in a precarious funding environment,” she says. “The ambition has always been there, but the translation into sustained, long-term support at all levels of practice is still a work in progress.”

Aviva Studios may be a success story, but can flagship institutions ever substitute for stable environments for artists to survive and thrive? West warns against “over-reliance on large-scale, high-visibility projects as proof of cultural success.” She says: “These can be important, but they shouldn’t overshadow the everyday realities of sustaining artists’ careers.”

That tension, between prestige and precarity, may define Burnham’s cultural legacy. In the Big Issue, he described creativity as essential to rebuilding confidence, agency and community. A way of “feeling connected when everything feels fragile.”  For an arts sector buffeted by instability, that may at least sound encouraging. 

Whether that philosophy translates into durable national policy is another question. But if Burnham does become Prime Minister, Britain’s creative industries will at least know this: for the first time in a long while, there will be someone in No.10 who has spent years arguing that culture is not an afterthought.