Burnham’s No 10 North experiment, unveiled in the weeks since he became prime minister on 20 July 2026, is the most ambitious attempt to break Treasury dominance since Harold Wilson tried exactly the same thing sixty years ago. The precedent is not encouraging.
A ghost from 1964: what the DEA actually did
Wilson created the Department for Economic Affairs after inheriting a £400 million balance of payments deficit, convinced the Treasury’s ingrained caution was strangling long-term growth. The DEA’s National Plan, published in September 1965, was genuinely ambitious: it targeted a 25 per cent increase in national income between 1964 and 1970, implying an annual growth rate of 3.8 per cent, agreed with the National Economic Development Council.
By July 1966, sterling pressure had blown the plan off course. George Brown, Wilson’s temperamental secretary of state for economic affairs, lasted two years before moving on. The DEA was wound up by 1969, its powers duly sucked back into the Treasury it had been designed to check.
What the snippet of history that Burnham cited glosses over is the institutional friction that doomed the project from the start. According to School History’s account of the Wilson governments, Chancellor James Callaghan was irritated from the outset that Wilson had carved a separate ministry out of what Callaghan regarded as his terrain. The DEA never had the Treasury’s control over public spending, and without that lever, a growth plan is largely declaratory.
That same structural problem haunts No 10 North today.
Burnham’s No 10 North and the Treasury’s unbroken grip
In his 29 June 2026 launch speech, Burnham called No 10 North the ‘nerve centre of a rewired Britain’, promising, among other things, the biggest council house building programme ‘since the post-war period’, according to Time. The rhetoric is large. The resources, by Whitehall veterans’ own account, are modest.
The argument for the unit rests on devolution. CNBC has described the UK as ‘the developed world’s most centralised economy’, a diagnosis Burnham’s entire prospectus is built around correcting. His theory is that empowering metro mayors and coordinating housing, planning, and skills policy from a single Manchester base will unlock growth that fragmented Whitehall departments cannot.
The counterargument is blunt. Former Conservative chief secretary David Gauke puts it plainly: ‘The Treasury is always going to be the most important department.’ A Treasury source insists No 10 North’s remit is explicitly ‘local growth’ and devolution, not a takeover of macro-economic strategy. The Treasury has lent a small number of staff to the new unit while its second permanent secretary, Beth Russell, has been working closely with the Manchester team. That is co-operation, but it is hardly a transfer of power.
Jonathan Portes, professor at King’s College London and a former senior government economist, identifies the question that will define whether the experiment succeeds or quietly expires: ‘What happens when No 10 wants to do something, and Treasury says no, or says, “yes, we’ll pay lip service to this but don’t expect any spending to go along with it”? That has been the historic response of the Treasury when No 10 has got more powerful.’
Louise Haigh, the cabinet ally overseeing No 10 North, has been candid about the problem. In her piece titled ‘A new fiscal framework to renew Britain’, published in the Renewal journal on 12 May 2026, she wrote that the Treasury, ‘faced with the dual mandate of maintaining fiscal control and supporting economic growth, the institution defaults toward caution, prioritising near-term debt dynamics over longer-term economic outcomes’. That is a fair diagnosis. Whether No 10 North, with a day a week of prime ministerial attention according to Gauke’s assessment, is the cure is a different question.
Sanjay Raja, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, offers a more sanguine reading. Chancellor John Healey was instrumental in building regional development agencies during the Blair-Brown era, and his joint enthusiasm for devolution with Burnham means, Raja argues, that this is ‘one of the more merged tag teams in No 10 and No 11 that we have seen’. Perhaps. But regional development agencies were themselves scrapped in 2010, their growth ambitions outrun by fiscal consolidation.
The House of Lords Library’s briefing on the government’s legislative agenda captures how much Burnham is staking on structural reform rather than immediate fiscal firepower. That may be the right long-term bet. But Wilson’s DEA was also the right long-term bet, on paper, until the bond market and a hostile chancellor decided otherwise. The question now is whether a critical budget, arriving soon, forces exactly that kind of reckoning before No 10 North has had time to prove its worth.
