With the advent of more and more heatwaves, climate pressures could make devolved government a necessity rather than a choice
By
Andy Burnham wants to move power north. But in the end, it may be the weather, not political will, that forces Westminster to share the stage.
That is the uncomfortable message from this summer’s extreme heat in London. As temperatures caused public transport to slow and turned meeting rooms into ovens, one of the season’s most revealing cancellations came at the London School of Economics: an event on governing extreme heat was called off because the hall itself was too hot to host the audience safely. The capital, a city that still imagines itself as temperate, discovered that its infrastructure can be knocked out by a few days of brutal heat. With heatwaves now more regularly lasting weeks, not days, the impact on the city and the capital’s ability to govern the country is under increasing strain.
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Burnham’s project begins somewhere different. As former mayor of Greater Manchester, he has spent years arguing that power in Britain is too tightly knotted around London, leaving regions with responsibilities but not the resources or autonomy to match. His rhetoric is about ‘rewiring’ the country so that decisions are taken closer to the communities they affect.
In that story, moving power north is an act of deliberate reform: changing institutions, devolving budgets, creating a ‘Number 10 North’ in Manchester as a second centre of government.
While Burnham talks about choice, the climate is already narrowing the options. London’s claim to centrality rests not only on law and tradition, but on its ability to host the everyday choreography of national life. Parliamentary debates, departmental briefings, think tank launches, lobbyist receptions, academic conferences: all depend on rooms that are bearable, trains that run, walkable streets. In a city built for wet winters rather than stifling summers, that assumption now fails with growing regularity.
The recent heatwave showed what that failure looks like. Temperatures climbed well into the thirties, warnings were issued, schools sent pupils home, rails buckled, and older buildings without modern cooling became stifling. The cancelled extreme heat event at LSE was not a freak incident, but part of a wider pattern of meetings moved online, programmes cut short and gatherings abandoned. When organisers conclude they cannot guarantee attendees’ safety in central London venues, they start to ask whether the capital is still the obvious place to convene.
Political clout
For decades, if you wanted to influence national decisions, you went to London: to committee rooms, offices, conference suites and hotel bars within walking distance of Westminster. That density made being in the capital almost a requirement for serious involvement in policy. If, over the next decade, extreme heat turns a quarter of the year into unreliable months for mass indoor gatherings, the costs of insisting that ‘everything happens in London’ will grow. Insurance, public health advice and institutional risk management will push organisers towards cooler times of year or cooler cities.
Making the move
At first glance, moving a summer conference from Holborn to Manchester looks like a simple technical adjustment. Yet when large meetings relocate, power quietly travels with them. The academics, officials and campaigners who spend two days in Manchester, Leeds or Newcastle are not doing the same rounds of London corridors and Westminster bars. They are forging different networks, in different streets, with different actors. Influence begins to accumulate in new places, simply because important conversations now happen there.
This is where Burnham’s project and the climate crisis intersect. He wants to pull power north as a matter of design, with explicit institutional changes and a rebalanced distribution of authority. The atmosphere, warmed by decades of emissions, is doing its own work regardless of what any manifesto says. Climate becomes an uninvited ally: indifferent to political argument but quietly reinforcing the case for not conducting all national business in one overheating metropolis.
The irony is sharp. The same system that has struggled to decarbonise fast enough now finds itself pushed around by the consequences of that failure. An event about extreme heat, cancelled because of extreme heat, offers a neat image of climate impacts bouncing back into the machinery designed to discuss them. If such incidents remain occasional, London can treat them as embarrassing blips. If they become routine, the choice will be stark: pour money into cooling and retrofitting the capital’s core buildings and transport, or accept that some of the work of politics will have to be done elsewhere.
A northern prime ministerial office would not only signal respect for regional voices; it would give the government a functional base in a city where civic buildings are, on average, easier to keep cool and where extreme heat may be marginally less intense. A cabinet that spends the hottest weeks of the year operating from Manchester because central London is simply too uncomfortable or too risky would be enacting Burnham’s vision for reasons driven as much by the thermometer as by ideology.
None of this guarantees a deep redistribution of power. Responses could be cosmetic: a handful of relocated conferences, a scattering of summer photo ops in northern cities, a satellite office that hosts occasional awaydays while real authority stays locked in Whitehall. Climate-driven adjustments can easily be absorbed as logistical fixes rather than catalysts for structural change.
Yet practical routines have a way of hardening into political facts. If ministers grow used to hosting serious meetings in Manchester in July, that habit may form even when the weather is mild. If officials, campaigners and journalists know that certain months will see key announcements and summits in northern venues, they will make those journeys as a matter of course.
The awkward truth for London is that this movement may be driven less by constitutional reform than by days when it is simply too hot to carry on as normal. The real question is whether the coming movement of politics will be guided by intention, a planned rebalancing of institutions and investment, or by the weather, forcing change on a system that thought it could stay put.
