Sadiq Khan has been nominated to join the House of Lords (Alamy)

4 min read28 min

As Starmer prepares to leave No 10, Downing Street has published a list of political peerages, including the soon-to-be-former Prime Minister’s ally Christina McAnea – the former general secretary of Unison, who will become a Labour peer. 

Chris Wormald, the former cabinet secretary and head of the civil service, will become a crossbench peer. 

Other notable figures nominated by the Labour Party include former MP and Economic Secretary to the Treasury Kitty Ussher and the former chief executive of the Food Standards Agency Tim J Smith.

Among those nominated by the Liberal Democrats include chief economist at Nesta and visiting professor at the London School of Economics Dr Tim Leunig, and Dave McCobb – Liberal Democrat director of field campaigns and former Hull City Councillor.

Co-Founder of Carphone Warehouse and sponsor and chair of the David Ross Education Trust David Ross will become a Conservative peer.

The 26 new peers to enter the House of Lords

Nominations from the Leader of the Labour Party:

Alison Garnham – Chief Executive, Child Poverty Action Group.

Alison Lowe OBE – Deputy Mayor for Policing and Crime in West Yorkshire.

Barbara Mills KC – Chair of the Bar Council of England and Wales (2025), family law barrister and Joint Head of Chambers at 4PB.

Cathy Ashley OBE – Chief Executive of Family Rights Group and former Chair of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Christina McAnea – Former General Secretary of UNISON.

June Sarpong OBE – Broadcaster, charity campaigner and social equity advocate.

The Rt Hon Ken Macintosh DL – Former Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament.

Kitty Ussher – British economist, former Member of Parliament for Burnley and former Economic Secretary to the Treasury.

Marcus Davey CBE – Former CEO and Artistic Director of the Roundhouse.

Martin McTague OBE – National Chair of the Federation of Small Businesses.

Nick Stace OBE – Chief Global Impact Officer at Howden Group.

Parvais Jabbar MBE – Human rights expert, co-founder and Co-Executive Director of The Death Penalty Project.

Roberto Neri – CEO of The Ivors Academy and a Director of UK Music.

The Rt Hon Sir Sadiq Khan – Mayor of London and former Member of Parliament for Tooting.

Saul Lehrfreund MBE – Human rights expert, co-founder and Co-Executive Director of The Death Penalty Project.

Tim J Smith CBE – Former Chief Executive of the Food Standards Agency.

Nominations from the Leader of the Liberal Democrat Party:

Dave McCobb – Liberal Democrat Director of Field Campaigns. Former Hull City Councillor of 22 years.

Hannah Kitching – Chair of the Yorkshire Liberal Democrats and Town Mayor of Penistone. Former NHS physiotherapist and Barnsley councillor.

Julia Aglionby – Executive Director of the Foundation for Common Land. Agricultural valuer and former Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate.

Mark Petterson – Director of Warwick Energy Limited. Pioneer of UK offshore wind and long-standing adviser to the Liberal Democrats.

Dr Tim Leunig – Chief Economist at Nesta and Visiting Professor at LSE. Former senior civil servant and economic adviser.

Nominations from the Leader of the Conservatives:

David Ross – Entrepreneur and Philanthropist. Co-Founder of Carphone Warehouse, Sponsor and Chair of David Ross Education Trust, Founder of the Nevill Holt Festival and former Chair of the National Portrait Gallery.

General Sir Patrick Sanders KCB CBE DSO – Lately Chief of the General Staff, British Army.

Professor Swaran Singh – Professor of Social and Community Psychiatry, University of Warwick; Consultant Psychiatrist, Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust and former Equality and Human Rights Commissioner.

Nominations for Crossbench Peerages:

The Rt Hon Sir Brian Leveson – Investigatory Powers Commissioner. Former President of the Queen’s Bench Division and Lord Justice of Appeal. Former Chair of the Sentencing Council and Chair of the Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practices and Ethics of the Press.

Sir Chris Wormald KCB – Former Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Civil Service.

(Peter Byrne / PA Images / Alamy)

6 min read11 min

In his seemingly constant flights from summit to summit, Starmer was branded ‘never here Keir’ by critics who accused him of spending too much time abroad. His allies insisted he was restoring the UK’s standing internationally by forging closer relationships across the globe.

Olivia O’Sullivan, director of the UK in the World Programme at Chatham House, told PoliticsHome that foreign trips have become essential for heads of government in an increasingly unstable world.

“There’s sometimes a bit of an idea that Starmer made foreign policy a priority, because he was away a lot. If you look at it, he didn’t travel loads more than a lot of other prime ministers, and it wasn’t exactly a choice as such,” she said.

“We are just in an era when international issues are really pressing. There are multiple conflicts. [US President Donald] Trump himself is very volatile and tends to favour leader-to-leader encounters and relationships.”

On taking office and after appointing his cabinet on Monday, Burnham is expected to make the traditional series of phone calls to world leaders. This will likely include his first exchange with Trump, who last month told reporters that all he knew of Burnham was that he was the “mayor of a town” and that he is “extremely liberal”.

On his first day alone, Starmer called Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden, Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the EU’s Ursula von der Leyen, Ireland’s Simon Harris, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, Poland’s Donald Tusk and Canada’s Justin Trudeau. Calls with France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Olaf Scholz were only made on his second day, along with India’s Narendra Modi, Japan’s Fumio Mishida and Australia’s Anthony Albanese.

Starmer went on to meet many of them only a few days later at a Nato summit in Washington DC, but Burnham arrives in Downing Street too late for this year’s summit.

As such, his first major international conference is likely to instead be at the United Nations General Assembly in late September. If he attends as expected, this will mark his first in-person encounter with several of the UK’s most important allies.  

“It may be an opportunity to meet Zelenskyy if they haven’t found an opportunity before, and I expect Burnham will want to continue underlining the UK’s support for Ukraine,” O’Sullivan said, adding that it may also be his first meeting with Trump.

“There are some obvious questions around the tariff pacts and investment agreements [with the US] that Starmer was able to secure during his time as Prime Minister.

“Some aspects of those have been suspended or put on ice – it’s difficult to maintain long-term agreements with the Trump administration. So it’s possible Burnham will want to talk about that, but an awful lot is just being eclipsed by the US-Iran conflict.”

A UK-EU summit scheduled for 22 July 2026 was postponed following the news of Starmer’s departure, with a new date yet to be set. PoliticsHome understands however that it will take place in the early autumn.

“That will tell us a lot about how the Burnham government wants to take forward that relationship,” O’Sullivan said. “They [the EU] will be really keen to see the UK bring some clarity about where it wants to go…

“Not just [on] individual programmes and initiatives, but ‘Where are we going together on a joint approach to defence? What do you want from the trade and mobility initiatives that we’ve been discussing for more than a year now?’”

Discussions over how the UK can work more closely with Europe on defence comes after the EU last year established its Security Action for Europe (Safe) loan guarantee scheme.

“We’ve wanted to join it, a lot of European countries have wanted us to join it as well,” said Thomas Nurcombe, research manager at the Coalition for Global Prosperity.

“The barrier has been the level of financial commitment that Britain puts in – with one particular country setting quite a high bar for us to achieve, when other European countries want it to be lower, because they want us to be involved.”

Talks over whether the UK would join Safe collapsed last year after France pushed the EU Commission to demand more than €6bn in entry fees from the UK. The price tag was later slashed to €2bn, but no agreement was reached.

A proposed EU-UK youth mobility deal, which would allow 18 to 30-year-olds to live and work in each other’s countries, will also be up for discussion. The UK’s attempts to cap entrants from the EU at 50,000 per year have been derided as a “non-starter” by EU diplomats and will be a key issue for Burnham to unpick.

1-4 November will then mark the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Antigua and Barbuda. Thankfully for Burnham, the Caribbean nation is rather easier to reach than the last CHOGM summit in Samoa, which required Starmer to take a 27 hour flight via Canada, California and Hawaii – accompanied by journalists.

Later in November, the Cop31 UN Climate Change Conference beckons at Antalya in Turkey. Burnham will face a level of expectation to attend, as British PMs have gone every year since the UK hosted the Cop26 summit in Glasgow in 2021.

“It will be really interesting to see if he goes to Cop,” said O’Sullivan. “I expect he will, and I expect he will continue to make climate a priority, but he might slightly reframe the way in which he does that.

“We know he cares a lot about industrial strategy, regional investment – it may be that he weaves in those themes and priorities around his approach to climate.”

If Burnham does attend Cop, he may have to fly directly to or from the European Political Community summit in Ireland, which takes place right in the middle of Cop on 12 November.

As Christmas nears, Burnham will finally go to Miami for the G20 conference on 14-15 December. O’Sullivan said that having Trump as the event’s host may make for a “slimmed-down” and “unusual” meeting, given his administration’s scepticism towards multi-lateral summits.

The conference will set some of the context for 2027’s G20 meeting, which will be hosted by Burnham in the UK.  

“It will be interesting to see if there are any themes and approaches from how the US does it that the UK wants to pick up,” O’Sullivan said, “or if the UK chooses to be a bit more focused on getting back on track after a Trump-hosted G20. A lot depends how things unfold in Miami.”

8 min read12 min

Andy Burnham inherits a raft of government-backed projects, from a controversial third runway at Heathrow to the massively expensive High Speed 2 rail line, and an ambitious programme of new towns as part of a pledge to build 1.5 million homes before the next election.

As Labour MPs are only too aware, the Makerfield MP’s promise to put “good growth in every postcode” presents an opportunity to change direction on each of those schemes, particularly as he seeks to draw a contrast with his predecessor, Keir Starmer.

On High Speed 2, Burnham has been clear he wants to reverse Rishi Sunak’s decision to axe the line’s ‘northern leg’ to Manchester – though precisely what combination of levers he would pull to pay for it remains unclear.

Ahead of his election in Makerfield, Burnham told the i Paper there is a “cleverer way” of funding the route north of Birmingham, drawing on his experience as the minister who signed off on the funding for London’s Elizabeth line. According to a 2024 report commissioned by Burnham, that could involve money raised from business rates.

“A portion of the net-increase in business rates that is directly attributable to the project (i.e. which would not have been ‘generated’ if the project was not delivered) could be ringfenced over time, and used to repay upfront financing to support the capital works,” said the report, overseen by former HS2 Ltd chairman Sir David Higgins and the engineering consultants Arup.

Henri Murison, chief executive of the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, which contributed to the report, points out that the most expensive parts of the route have already been allocated funding.

“The most expensive bit, which is Manchester Piccadilly underground station through to Manchester Airport, has just been re-branded as part of Northern Powerhouse Rail,” he says.

“So, when we talk about HS2, the thing you’ve got to remember is that the most expensive bit at the bottom and top is still being built. It’s just the relatively cheap bit in the middle that we’re not doing.”

Given that extending the line north of Birmingham would generate a significant increase in passengers, Murison argues that future fare income could be key in helping to pay for the full route.

Burnham has also talked about land value capture as a way of raising funds for it, which Murison believes has been a missed opportunity in the project’s first phase.

“Planning permissions have gone sky-high in Birmingham, the same thing’s happened at Old Oak Common [in west London], but all that uplift in the value of land around the stations and the depots on the route of phase one has been given away by the UK government – and I think that’s scandalous.”

The stage has only been set for restoring the route, he adds, as the land has been carefully safeguarded against attempts to sell it.

“Fundamentally, between the then-chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Andy Burnham, Andy Street, a load of us in the private sector, we have managed to avoid the government and the country doing something really stupid, which was making decisions it couldn’t reconsider…

“That is the real victory. The fact that Andy is one of the people who has been on that side of the debate is obviously a huge help to us when trying to finish the job.”

When it comes to Labour’s housing mission, Burnham inherits a programme of new towns which remains at a relatively early stage. Between March and May this year, ministers consulted on seven proposed sites, with the outcome of that exercise yet to be published.

Sir Michael Lyons, who chaired the taskforce which recommended a shortlist of 12 locations from which the seven have been drawn, is encouraged by what Burnham has said on housing so far.

“Everything that he says points to a further concentration on the housing shortfall in this country and a proper role for government and the public sector in making sure that we move faster towards homes for all,” Lyons tells The House.

“We’ve got a massive task there, years of work ahead of us. It’s not helped by setting targets which you can’t meet. Frankly, the 1.5 [million homes] figure was hope against experience.”

While he acknowledges that the target has prompted “a lot of action” in difficult circumstances, he believes the next PM should replace it with a new 10-year goal, stretching beyond the current Parliament and focused on ensuring authorities meet local quotas.

Burnham’s boosterism, Lyons argues, will itself have a positive impact on confidence in the housebuilding sector.

“We have managed to avoid the government and the country doing something really stupid”

“I do think it makes a difference if the country’s led by somebody who emphasises that you can do things, rather than that ‘it’s all complicated’. That is not to be underestimated, in releasing energy, in releasing innovation and basically building a coalition of people willing to find ways of progressing things faster.”

He also believes Burnham will bring new ways of thinking about funding major developments.

“There’s quite a lot of people talking about the fact that while we are severely limited in terms of public expenditure, that does not necessarily go for long-term investment and that there is scope for government to do more in that area.

“I think we will see Burnham coming forward with sound proposals for patient capital to be invested in housing and infrastructure – I’m fully expecting that.”

While Burnham has promised to devolve new decision making powers to local communities, Lyons warns that this cannot mean allowing councils to “pull up the drawbridge” on new homes.

One of the seven new towns consulted on is at Crews Hill and Chase Park on the northern edge of London. But there, Enfield council’s new Conservative administration has “formally withdrawn” support for the scheme, saying it “reflects the democratic will of the residents we have been chosen to represent”.

As far as Lyons is concerned, Burnham’s government should firmly push back against such resistance, arguing that housing should be viewed through the same prism as defence.

“Defence is an issue of national interest,” he says. “We don’t start debating with local communities whether they want a submarine base on their doorstep. You can’t run the country that way.”

During his taskforce’s work identifying sites, Lyons says that in some cases, he saw “people opposing development in the most offensive terms, really, about keeping out others”.

He adds: “For many more people, it’s about not wanting their quality of life to be damaged by development.

“I think the answer to that is investment in economic and social infrastructure – so that your doctor’s surgery isn’t all of a sudden flooded, your local schools do have enough places to accommodate the homes being built. But this isn’t beyond us, actually. These are things that can be planned for.”

Perhaps most fascinating will be the approach Burnham takes on Heathrow expansion. The scheme, touted by Chancellor Rachel Reeves as a critical growth project, continues to divide Labour MPs, particularly in London, where mayor Sir Sadiq Khan is opposed on environmental grounds.

MPs trying to prevent a third runway are reassured by comments made by Burnham following Reeves’ announcement about the scheme in January 2025, when he told Times Radio that expansion “diverts infrastructure investment away from the North and traps it in London and the South East”.

Burnham called it “a model for an ever-overheating UK economy, rather than a more balanced, levelled-up economy, which is what we would argue for”.

One London Labour MP tells The House those comments “have not passed us by” and that Burnham’s ascendency brings “an opportunity for a change of conversation” about the project.

“It doesn’t make economic sense – it’s just a financially unviable scheme. I cannot see how it can meet our climate targets, but also I think it would be much better for regional growth [not to build it],” they say.

“If there’s going to be growth in air transport, it’s better to share that out with the regional airports, and I hope to get a good hearing on that from Andy.”

Another London Labour MP argues that if Heathrow expands: “Manchester Airport loses out, currently Birmingham Airport loses out even more and therefore the hinterlands, the economies of those regions around those airports… I wouldn’t put any money on runway three getting any further.”

But Steve Race, the Exeter MP who co-convenes the Labour Growth Group, believes the next PM should press ahead with the work started by Reeves.

“As long as we can do it within our carbon budget, as long as we’re forcing airlines and airports to get to [improved] sustainability as quickly as they possibly can, then I think connectivity, trade and infrastructure development is absolutely key to this economy,” he says.

One well-connected source says that as much as Khan and Burnham “don’t particularly get on” with one another, the new PM will not want to “go to war” with London’s mayor “unnecessarily about something he doesn’t really care about”.

But Burnham, they add, may still “take a more economically minded view of this than people might first assume”.

One option would be to back the rival expansion proposal by the hotel tycoon Surinder Arora. Unlike the airport’s own proposal, Arora’s plan would avoid the M25 motorway needing to be tunnelled under Heathrow, as it would mean building a shorter third runway on the airport’s existing footprint.

 “That would be a compromise,” says the source. “Andy is pretty into compromises.”