Hopes Burnham's rise could boost Liverpool jobs

The rise of Merseyside-born Andy Burnham and his push for greater devolution and investment in the North is a "brilliant" opportunity to attract more government jobs to Liverpool, the region's mayor has said.

Steve Rotheram has previously described the recently-elected Makerfield MP as his "bezzie mate", with the pair having forged a close friendship through politics.

The city region's mayor told BBC Radio Merseyside he planned to lobby Burnham, widely expected to become the next prime minister, for parts of the civil service to relocate to Liverpool.

Carl Cashman, leader of the city council's Liberal Democrat group and the second largest party on the authority after Labour, said he had hopes a Burnham premiership "would be good for Liverpool".

Burnham announced plans earlier this week to base a new Downing Street team in Manchester, labelled 'No 10 North', as part of a vision to redistribute political power across England.

Rotheram said Burnham's ambition was not to spread government departments out across the country and leave nothing in London but that moving some jobs out to cities like Liverpool would be welcome.

He said as an example, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) would be a perfect fit for Liverpool, which was European Capital of Culture in 2008.

He said: "We're the cultural capital of this country. There's no doubt about it. There's nowhere quite like us for all the different bits of culture that we've got, not just music and sports".

However, he said DCMS was "possibly the department with the smallest budget and I wouldn't mind something a bit more meaty!"

Rotheram told BBC Radio Merseyside: "The whole balance of this country is wrong and it's because most of the civil servants and certainly all the politicians when they're in Parliament, they live within the M25 corridor and they see things through the prism of what's happening down there."

He said basing more civil servants outside of Westminster would mean improvements to things like transport infrastructure.

The pair have written a book together, Head North, which Rotheram said could be a blueprint for a Burnham government, and have been friends since 2008.

Cashman told the BBC: "I would hope that a mayor that hails from this part of the world would be good for Liverpool."

"I'm prepared to work with Andy Burnham to make that a reality just as the Blair government worked so well with the Lib Dem-run Liverpool Council in the early 2000s."

But he said he feared "Labour politicians in Liverpool will put party before city and allow Manchester to move further ahead of Liverpool".

"If Andy Burnham wants a place first, not party first approach then our own politicians in Liverpool must live up to that. I fear they won't."

Rotheram said that funding for two stalled Grade-A office space projects in Liverpool had been announced by Chancellor Rachel Reeves as part of a £2bn investment package which could be ideal locations for government jobs.

One is the Grade II-listed Martins Bank building on Water Street, and the other is the council-owned One Pall Mall Gardens site.

Rotheram said this level of workplace is needed to attract jobs and means the city has the facilities to be able to "argue our case".

A Cabinet Office spokesperson said:"The North West is the largest government hub outside of London, with over 67,000 civil servants working here - including more than 4,600 roles relocated to the region since March 2020."

They also added that the Manchester Digital Campus "will bring together more than 8,000 civil servants in the North West".

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