Moving desks does not move power.
The political commentariat is currently swooning over Andy Burnham’s announcement of a "No 10 North" in Manchester. It is being heralded as a historic shift, a structural rebalancing of the United Kingdom, and a victory for the regions.
It is none of those things. It is PR masquerading as policy.
Westminster loves a geographic distraction. For decades, the standard response to regional economic stagnation has been to pack up a few hundred civil servants, put them on an Avanti West Coast train, and declare that the North-South divide is healing. We saw it with the BBC moving to Salford. We saw it with the Treasury setting up an outpost in Darlington. Now, we are seeing it with a symbolic Prime Ministerial office in Greater Manchester.
If shifting office chairs could cure regional productivity gaps, the UK economy would be the most balanced in the world. Instead, the productivity gap between London and the rest of the UK remains a stubborn chasm.
The fundamental flaw in the "No 10 North" logic is that it mistakes proximity for power. Having a branch office of the Cabinet Office in Manchester does nothing to alter the structural mechanics of British governance. The British state is one of the most hyper-centralized entities in the developed world. True power in the UK does not live in No 10; it lives in the Treasury. And the Treasury dictates terms based on fiscal structures, not regional postcodes.
The Illusion of Devolution
Devolution in the UK is broken because it is administrative, not fiscal. Metro mayors like Andy Burnham have been given the responsibility to manage public transport systems, local policing, and regional housing strategies. What they have not been given is the power to raise their own revenues or dictate their own economic destinies.
When a regional leader celebrates a new Whitehall outpost opening in their city, they are celebrating their own dependency. They are cheering for the fact that the colonial master has decided to build a regional governor’s mansion rather than granting independence.
Consider the reality of how public spending works in the UK. The Treasury utilizes a framework known as the Green Book to evaluate public investment. For decades, this framework has favored projects that deliver the highest absolute economic return. Because London possesses a massive, pre-existing concentration of high-value industries and infrastructure, the formulas naturally dictate that investment should flow back into the capital.
Putting a civil servant in a Manchester office building does not rewrite the Green Book. It does not alter the mathematical formulas that starve northern infrastructure. It simply means the person rubber-stamping the underfunding is drinking a coffee near Piccadilly Station instead of Whitehall.
Imagine a scenario where a major infrastructure project in the North requires funding. Under the current setup, local authorities must still draft a business case, submit it to central government departments, and wait for approval from a Treasury official who answers to a Chancellor sitting in London. The existence of a "No 10 North" does not remove a single layer of that bureaucratic hierarchy. It adds one.
The Civil Service Outpost Myth
Let us look at the actual track record of moving government functions out of London.
The Office for National Statistics has been based in Newport, Wales, for decades. Has Newport transformed into a global financial powerhouse? Has it closed the productivity gap with Cardiff, let alone London? No. The local economy received a modest bump from secure civil service salaries, but the structural economic profile of the region remained fundamentally unchanged.
The same applies to the Treasury’s economic campus in Darlington. It was praised as a radical move. In practice, senior decision-making remains firmly entrenched in London. The officials who sit in Darlington are overwhelmingly mid-level analysts and operational staff. The ministers making the final calls are still walking the corridors of Westminster.
When you fragment a government department across multiple geographic sites, you do not democratize policy. You insulate the leadership. The ambitious, upwardly mobile civil servants quickly realize that to be promoted, they need to be where the ministers are. The regional offices become holding pens for delivery-focused personnel, while the policy-making core remains in the capital.
This is the hidden cost of geographic tokenism. It creates an optical illusion of progress while cementing the status quo. It allows central government to point to a map and say, "Look, we care about you," while continuing to centralize financial control.
What True Devolution Looks Like
If regional leaders wanted to disrupt the system, they would stop begging for Whitehall scraps and start demanding structural financial autonomy.
True regional power is not defined by who has an office in your city. It is defined by who controls the tax base.
In Germany, the federal states (Länder) retain a massive portion of the income tax, corporate tax, and VAT raised within their borders. They do not have to beg Berlin for permission to build a new railway line or fund a research institute. They have the financial muscle to do it themselves. The result is a highly balanced economy where Munich, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Stuttgart all compete as global economic centers.
In the United States, individual states set their own tax policies, manage their own infrastructure budgets, and issue bonds to fund major capital projects.
Compare that to the UK. A metro mayor in the North of England controls a budget that is almost entirely composed of ring-fenced grants from central government. If they want to change the business rates to attract a specific industry, they need permission. If they want to introduce a local tourist tax, they face years of legislative stalling from Westminster.
The obsession with "No 10 North" avoids this conversation entirely. It focuses the public's attention on geographic optics rather than economic mechanics. It is far easier for a politician to cut a ribbon on a new office building than it is to dismantle the Treasury’s monopoly on British tax revenue.
The Flawed Premise of Regional Representation
The argument for "No 10 North" rests on the idea that having central government staff in the region will lead to better policy because those staff will "understand" the local context.
This premise is deeply flawed. Civil servants do not generate policy based on their personal geography; they generate policy based on the institutional incentives of their departments. A Department for Transport official sitting in Manchester is still bound by the same budgetary constraints, the same ministerial directives, and the same political cycles as their colleague in London.
Furthermore, the idea that a single office in Manchester represents "the North" is an insult to the complexity of the regional economy. The economic needs of Manchester are completely different from those of Hull, Newcastle, Sheffield, or rural Cumbria. By centralizing the northern presence of the state in a single, shiny office in one specific metropolitan center, the government is simply replicating the London-centric model on a regional scale.
Manchester becomes the new metropole, draining talent and attention from the surrounding towns and cities. The smaller northern towns get bypassed twice: once by London, and then again by the newly empowered regional hub.
Stop Demanding Offices, Demand the Balance Sheet
The path forward requires a total rejection of symbolic regionalism. Regional leaders need to change the terms of the debate completely.
First, stop celebrating the relocation of government departments. It is a metric of failure, not success. Every time a department moves, it signals that the region is dependent on public sector employment rather than private sector growth to sustain itself.
Second, demand the total devolution of specific tax streams. Metro mayors should have full control over the property taxes, business rates, and a portion of the income tax generated within their regions. Until a local leader can set tax rates to compete globally, they are not a leader; they are an administrator.
Third, dismantle the Green Book system. The evaluation metrics for infrastructure spending must be legally modified to weigh regional rebalancing equally against absolute financial return. Without this mathematical shift, no amount of regional offices will ever result in a fair distribution of national capital expenditure.
The "No 10 North" initiative is a masterful piece of political theater. It satisfies the media’s desire for a narrative of progress, it gives local politicians a high-profile win to parade in front of voters, and it allows central government to pretend it is addressing structural inequality without giving up an ounce of real power.
It is time to see through the theater. Real economic power is not a desk in Manchester. It is a line on the national balance sheet that you control completely. Until that happens, everything else is just administrative window dressing.
