No more summer sunshine for Burnham as the real work begins

After spending his first six weeks as UK prime minister on a summer “listening tour” of Britain, all while pushing policy ideas, pulling pints and guitar-strumming moody Smiths tunes, Andy Burnham’s Downing Street tenure begins in earnest on Tuesday.The bank holiday Monday (in England and Wales) was the last day of Westminster’s summer recess. Now, following the break, the UK’s parliament returns. With it comes a list of crunch issues for Burnham – new leader, familiar problems for this Labour government.The new prime minister spent the weekend finalising ways to get ahead of his first big domestic test: tweaking Labour’s plans to release prisoners early from Britain’s overcrowded jails while dampening criticism for freeing some of its most reviled criminals.Burnham is expected to appear on the UK government’s front bench for the first time in 16 years as the House of Commons scrutinises a proposed solution.READ MOREFrom the first day it took office two years ago under Burnham’s ousted predecessor, Keir Starmer, Labour warned that it had inherited a prisons system close to collapse. Thousands of prisoners were given early release in the first weeks of Starmer’s premiership in July 2024. His authority was severely damaged by television images of freed inmates in hoodies popping champagne corks in prison car parks.Yet with England and Wales’s prisons still operating at an unsustainable 97 per cent of total capacity and well beyond 100 per cent of usable space, the UK government says it had little choice.Plans were made last year, before Burnham’s arrival to exclude rapists and child sex offenders from the early release plan – murderers were never to be included.Andrew Harper was a Berkshire police officer who was killed in 2019 when he was dragged along by the getaway car of three teenage burglars, who were convicted of manslaughter. Under Labour’s plan, they would have qualified for early release.Following a public campaign by the police officer’s family, Burnham effectively ordered his new justice secretary, Alex Norris, to find a way of keeping Harper’s killers in jail without gutting the plan to free up space.[ Downing Street scrambles to calm row over Burnham’s ‘off the table’ Irish unity poll remarksOpens in new window ]On Sunday the UK prime minister announced that all those convicted of unlawful killing, as well as grooming offences, would be excluded from the plan. Norris will formally announce the details in the House of Commons on Tuesday afternoon.Wednesday brings Burnham’s first outing at prime minister’s questions, the weekly set-piece in parliament where Tory leader Kemi Badenoch had been increasingly getting the better of Starmer before he quit.Burnham will also host his first world leader at Downing Street this week, when French president Emmanuel Macron visits in advance of the unveiling of the Bayeux Tapestry in Britain for the first time in 1,000 years.What might feel nearly as long as that for Burnham, however, will be the next eight weeks of speculation in the run-up to his administration’s critical first budget.This will be a period during which the new prime minister and his chancellor, John Healey, may find it increasingly difficult to square the circle of their lofty promises to the electorate – no income tax, VAT or national insurance tax hikes, yet lots of fresh spending – with the fiscal realities that hobbled Starmer.Where Burnham looks perhaps the most vulnerable is on the issue of defence spending.[ What does Andy Burnham taking over as British PM mean for Northern Ireland?Opens in new window ]Healey helped to end Starmer’s premiership by quitting because the government would not lay out firmer plans for boosting military spending to 3 per cent of GDP, in preparation for a possible war with Russia.Now as chancellor it is he who must explain why, this time, it is his new boss Burnham’s administration facing down demands to borrow to spend big.Burnham may be the new face in Downing Street, but as the weeks ahead will make clearer, many of Britain’s problems remain the same.