What can Prime Minister Burnham do for design?
‘When you build something with real quality at the heart of a place that lifts the standard, you raise the value of it.’
Andy Burnham said that during his keynote address for Design Council’s Design for Planet Festival 2024, back when his focus was strictly regional, as mayor of Greater Manchester. Now that he has moved from municipal leadership to 10 Downing Street, the UK finds itself with a prime minister who may offer the design industry the hope for some much-needed change.
For a sector that has long argued its economic and social value is routinely sidelined by central government, a prime minister with a proven track record of using design as a core instrument of civic identity and public service delivery represents an intriguing prospect.
‘The UK has world-leading design capability,’ notes Shamir Hale, senior policy and advocacy manager at the Design Council. ‘The opportunity for this government is to put it to work as an engine of innovation, productivity, and regional growth.’
Citing the forthcoming Design Economy 2026 report, Hale argues that design remains a ‘powerful but underused tool for delivering sustainable, inclusive growth’, acting as ‘the capability that bridges the gap from invention and ideas into products, services and systems that people can adopt, trust and benefit from’.
Yet as the administration settles into office, the design industry’s reaction is cautiously optimistic at best. Agency leaders are demanding that Burnham’s ambition translate into lasting policy rather than mere rhetoric or kludgery. Paul Drake, co-founder and executive creative director at JDO, insists Downing Street must ‘stop treating creativity as a decorative industry and start treating it as national infrastructure’.
Drake points out that Britain’s creative capital was not constructed by civil service committees, but built over decades through ‘education, music, fashion, art, subculture and creative rebellion’ from the Rolling Stones to Vivienne Westwood and Banksy. ‘Creativity doesn’t care much for county lines,’ Drake argues. ‘The real question is whether talented people, wherever they grow up, are being given the opportunity to build careers.’
Institutional scepticism feels at a peak right now, and no one wants to put all their eggs in the Manchesterism basket, for good reason. Is it possible that could change? What could Burnham’s premiership do to meet the demands of the design industry?
Procurement reform
Crown Commercial Service frameworks remain famously aloof to independent creative studios. Massive framework agreements, steep financial thresholds, and extensive tender submissions routinely favour large corporate consultancies over agile, specialist agencies.
Design leaders across London and the regions are unified in their disdain for this process, though they remain rightfully wary of tokenistic solutions.
Merit, capability, and the spectre of ‘northern washing’
The creative sector’s primary demand is not geographic charity, but a rare commodity in public life: actual meritocracy. Studio leaders across London and the North remain rightfully suspicious of political pandering that replaces rigorous design evaluation with regional tokenism.
From Manchester, Dave Palmer, founder and executive creative director at LOVE, offers a bit of local reality: ‘This is news to us here at LOVE. Arguably, we’re Manchester’s leading design agency, but there’s been no championing our cause by Andy. I doubt he’s heard of us. My view here would be the government should work with the best, not be forced into working with regional agencies because of their location. Luckily there are agencies of a national standard here, so it doesn’t have to be “northern washing”.’
This desire to be judged on quality rather than postcode is echoed across the industry. Timothy Leonard, head of strategy at Brandon, is similarly sceptical of state patronage: ‘I’m instinctively wary of a prime minister taking an interest in my industry. I don’t want to win national work because a minister told a department to look north, and I don’t want a mandated agency mix. I want to be in the room on merit.’
The issue, as London-based Wybe Magermans, director of strategy and growth at WMH&I, points out, is that Whitehall’s current buying habits conflate scale with competence: ‘A postcode is a poor proxy for talent. Government should stop buying design by the kilo. Huge frameworks, inflated turnover requirements, unpaid creative pitches and 70-page submissions favour companies with large bid teams. They don’t necessarily identify the best thinkers.’
Unbundling Whitehall and levelling the pitch
To give independent agencies outside the London holding-company axis a fighting chance, the consensus is that the administration must overhaul the structural rules of the tender process.
Leonard argues that the most impactful intervention would be to ‘unbundle thinking from delivery. The big consultancies win partly because they can do everything under one roof. Separate the thinking from the rollout, and a 40-person studio in Manchester or Leeds becomes a much more credible bidder for the part that matters most.’
John Williams, director and founder at SpaceInvader, concurs, noting that asking whether a studio has previously delivered a massive central government contract creates a self-fulfilling ‘closed loop’ that screens out fresh thinking before a creative conversation even starts.
Rebalancing public sector design also requires breaking monolithic contracts into proportionate regional and specialist lots, capping pitch rounds, and paying studios when creative concepts are requested.
As Philip Westwood, managing director of Oktra North, points out, three decades of centralised spending have seen national investment land in regional cities without local design teams seeing the project through. Breaking national frameworks into regional lots ensures public funds actually build long-term economic capability in local design ecosystems.
Crucially, this requires decentralising creative authority itself. Charlie Holman, strategy director at Founders Makers, observes that Whitehall’s recent tendency to centralise communications through units like the New Media Unit is fundamentally at odds with devolution. ‘Central government could set strategy, standards and outcomes, while more production, design and activation budgets flow to mayoral authorities and local government to commission local creators. If power is devolving, creative spend and judgement should devolve with it.’
The built environment
The administration’s recent campaign to salvage Britain’s decaying high streets by handing local councils the power to, among other things, block new vape shops, unify signage, and scrap the ‘aim to permit’ rule feels like municipal Burnhamism. It is an understandable, if somewhat moralising, political reflex. Yet, as any designer who has ever tried to fix a broken layout knows, banning the ugliest element in the room does not automatically produce a functional space.
The trouble with defensive planning controls is that prohibition is not the same as purpose. Addressing the ‘horror show that is our local high streets’, Palmer argues that the prime minister ‘can and should go further by mandating a local town signage corporate identity system where all shop fronts conform to a look, bringing visual cohesion and taste back to our streets’. Suggesting a pilot in a town like Burnley, he stresses that ‘the biggest reason for doing this is to signal a reversal of the high street’s decline, returning a sense of pride to our towns and cities’.
But restriction alone likely won’t do much. As Williams points out: ‘The proposed restrictions on further vape and betting shops may help councils address what they do not want on their high streets, but restriction alone will not give those places a new purpose.’
To reinstate a genuine sense of place, Williams proposes a novel initiative: ‘I’d introduce a mandatory “reuse first” test for publicly funded regeneration. At the business-case stage, project teams should have to assess the value already held in an existing building, including its structure, embodied carbon, location and civic role.’
Pointing to SpaceInvader’s redevelopment of the Oldham Spindles shopping centre, Williams argues that ‘whilst reuse might not be right for every building, it should be the first question asked rather than an alternative considered after demolition has effectively been decided’.
When viewed through a broader spatial lens, the built environment requires a complete overhaul of Whitehall’s fragmented approach to sustainability. Jasper Sanders, director at Jasper Sanders + Partners, states: ‘Defra’s long-delayed Circular Economy Growth Plan is a start, but it can’t sit in one department. As designers, circularity already shapes how we work in terms of retaining a building’s existing fabric rather than defaulting to demolition. That mindset needs to become genuinely cross-governmental with Defra, MHCLG and the Treasury working from one waste management strategy, not three.’
This long-term perspective could also be extended to the nation’s cultural infrastructure. Pippa Nissen, director at Nissen Richards Studio, urges Downing Street ‘to properly fund culture again – and to recognise museums, galleries and other cultural institutions as essential public infrastructure rather than something increasingly dependent on sponsorship’.
For her, an international point of reference highlights the sharp contrast: ‘In Oslo, for example, sustained public investment in new museums and cultural projects has created extraordinary places. Culture is understood as part of the life of the city, rather than an optional extra.’
In the UK, however, institutions operating on a ‘shoestring’ are trapped in wasteful exhibition cycles. Nissen concludes: ‘If the government expects publicly funded institutions to build sustainably, it also needs to give them the resources to invest in things that are well made, adaptable and capable of having a much longer life.’
Talent, optimisation, and the client problem
Expanding technical education frameworks like the Manchester Baccalaureate (MBacc) nationwide signals a welcome recognition of vocational pathways, but the pipeline for creative talent faces an immediate structural crisis at the junior level.
Leonard highlights this unspoken urgency: ‘AI is quietly removing the economic argument for hiring juniors. You no longer need a floor of studio muscle to scale and roll out an idea; you need fewer, more experienced people who really know the idea. Training up the next generation often defaults to the holding companies, which tend to be based in London. You lose regional capability and often the non-university route in at the same time.’
Joey Lee, language lead at Unfound Studio, agrees that the industry is turning into a top-heavy shallow pool: ‘Before this shallowing pool of newbies turns into a complete drought and the industry becomes an echo chamber island of past inhabitants, the government must make it a priority to incentivise and reward investments in internships.’
AI’s encroachment on junior entry points, however, points to a deeper worry in the modern design landscape, that of runaway optimisation over experimental, focused innovation. That unpredictable learning curve and individual voice are under threat of being sacrificed in favour of scaling mediocre, repeatable ideas quickly and efficiently.
‘It’s said that the camel is a horse designed by committee,’ notes Angus Hyland, partner at Pentagram. ‘When too many stakeholders each get to add their own requirements, the result satisfies everyone’s individual demands a little, but ends up incoherent, over-compromised, and is guaranteed to be not really excellent at anything!’
Whitehall isn’t immune from this cultural obsession either, with a fundamental misunderstanding of design. Civil servants routinely treat design not as upstream experimentation or problem-definition, but as a late-stage packaging exercise meant to smooth over bad policy.
The obvious solution, Magermans notes: ‘Put design before the decision. Whitehall too often develops the policy, commissions the service, and then asks designers to explain it. By then, many of the expensive mistakes are already embedded. Every major public programme should have to demonstrate proper user research, prototyping, and service-design testing before receiving final funding approval.’
Oil and water
So far, Prime Minister Burnham has demonstrated that he is a guy who at least notices design, and accordingly has offered noticeable, if small, changes for the better. He must, however, avoid the trap of offering only that.
The UK, after all, does not require a paternalistic state to manage its creative output, nor does it want regional charity masquerading as procurement reform. It needs a government that understands its own power as a client: one that breaks up bureaucratic procurement monopolies, embeds service design before drafting legislation, funds technical education, and grants regional authorities the structural autonomy to build spaces that actually reflect the people who live in them.
More than likely, this is an unreasonable ask. Translating ambition into reality means destabilising decades of administrative inertia, Treasury risk-aversion, and focus-group addiction. But unless Downing Street is willing to empower small, accountable groups to make bold creative choices, national design policy will remain stuck in the endless compromise of committee governance.
As Hyland dryly concludes: ‘Politics and good design: oil and water.’