Burnham can devolve the money. He cannot devolve the leadership.

A contact, John, asked me today what I made of Andy Burnham's speech. I did not sit in the room at the People's History Museum. I listened to it. But I spend my working life placing the people who actually have to deliver schemes like the ones he described, so I have a view, and it is not quite the one you will read in the political coverage.

Manchester is the proof of concept

Start with the part that deserves genuine credit. Greater Manchester is the example everyone reaches for, and rightly so. A region that went looking for redevelopment and found it. A settled mayoralty with a mandate, a real pipeline behind it, and construction sitting at the centre as both the beneficiary and the engine. The Good Growth Fund, Victoria North and its 15,000 homes, the innovation clusters around the old university estate. That is not a slide deck. It is cranes, programmes and jobs. Whatever you make of the politics, the model worked here.

What he asked the country to imagine

Today he asked us to picture it everywhere. "Westminster is broken." A "No 10 North". Power and money pushed out of Whitehall and into the regions. Mayors given control of social housing. Public procurement reformed to buy British and to carry real social value. Parity between academic and technical education. Welfare reformed so the system is fairer and work is always the better option. As a pitch to our industry, there is a lot to like.

Question one: does it travel?

Manchester had advantages that are easy to forget. A decade's head start. Scale. Anchor institutions. A tier-one presence already on the ground. The South West, the North East and a dozen other places carry a different inheritance, manufacturing decline and an education system that has not served them for a generation. Devolving a budget does not, on its own, conjure a delivery pipeline.

The opportunity for construction is real: steadier mayor-controlled demand for social housing, a genuine case for modern methods and modular at volume, regeneration and cluster work across labs, commercial space and infrastructure. But opportunity and capacity are not the same thing. A framework only builds homes if there is a contractor with the leadership and the labour to pick it up.

Question two: where are the leaders?

Money devolves overnight. Leadership capability does not. Spread delivery across ten regions at once and you do not divide the demand for senior people, you multiply it. We already compete hard over a thin layer of programme directors, commercial leads and operations directors who can run work at this scale. Ask every region to deliver at the same time and that scarcity becomes the binding constraint, not funding, not ambition, not planning. You either grow leaders inside each region or you keep flying them up from London on packages that swallow the margin, which rather defeats the point of moving power north in the first place.

The fragmentation problem underneath

There is a risk beneath all of this that national contractors will recognise straight away. Ten mayors and ten procurement regimes is harder to plan against than one Whitehall pipeline. Add a buy-British cost premium and the maths on some schemes gets tighter, not easier. None of this is a reason not to do it. It is a reason to be honest about the operational reality before the ribbon-cutting.

Question three: skills and welfare are one pipeline

This is the part I care about most, because it joins two things we usually treat as separate. Skills and welfare are not two problems. They are one pipeline viewed from each end.

Construction remains one of the few industries that can take a person with no qualifications and no track record and move them, in a few years, to a skilled trade or a site management career on a real wage. That is one of the most powerful answers to welfare reform anyone has put on the table, and it barely gets a mention. A fairer system is not only about tightening the safety net. It is about building a credible ladder from welfare into work, and our industry is that ladder. Apprenticeships and social-value procurement are how you lay the rungs.

But the lead times are brutal. An apprentice you take on this autumn is productive years from now, and the delivery is needed today. Social value written into a contract only changes anything if firms treat it as core strategy rather than bid garnish. The contractors who win the next decade will be the ones who decided, this year, to partner properly with further education colleges, to build early careers into their operating model, and to position for devolved frameworks before they are tendered rather than after.

Where I land

Optimistic, and clear-eyed. The vision is right. The North has been under-served for a long time, and the instinct to push capability and decision-making closer to where the work happens is the correct one. The risk is that we devolve ambition without devolving capability, and end up with the money in the regions but the leaders, and the skilled people, still concentrated in the same few places they always were.

Over to you

That is the gap I watch every day, so I am genuinely interested in what others are seeing.

If you are in the South West, the North East, the Midlands, anywhere that is not Greater Manchester, can the model actually travel to your patch, or does it only work where the foundations already exist?

Does your region have the leadership bench to deliver if the money lands tomorrow, or would you be importing it?

And is welfare-to-work through construction a serious plan, or a comforting line that falls apart on apprenticeship lead times?

I would rather hear the view from your part of the country than guess at it.

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