What Does Burnham's Appointment Mean for an Intergenerational Britain?

Andy Burnham's appointment as Prime Minister on the 20th July is in many ways a familiar story: Britain's seventh leader in a decade, arriving via an internal party process rather than a general election, promising to be different from what came before. Admittedly, as an organisation with close ties to Manchester and familiarity with Burnham's work, his appointment is in many ways an exciting prospect - but across the political spectrum it could still be easy to read it as more of the same churn. Against this backdrop of uncertainty, and the potential for an exciting new political agenda, it's worth considering what Burnham's appointment means for an intergenerational Britain.

In his first seven days as Prime Minister, Burnham capped bus fares back at £2, cut business rates for pubs and other hospitality venues, opened No. 10 North, a satellite of government based in Manchester, and made ending rough sleeping one of his first priorities, backed by £340 million. These are not framed as policies about social connection, but they function as them. Buses and pubs are two of the last places where people of different ages still meet without anyone designing it that way. A grandmother and a teenager share a bus route long before they share a service or a survey. A pub or music venue is often one of the last shared public spaces left on a high street once the library, post office and community centre have gone. Keep them affordable and open, and connection survives by accident. But how do we build more intention into connection?

The rough sleeping pledge deserves particular attention. His Housing First work in Greater Manchester reflected a simple principle: that stable housing creates the conditions for health, relationships and belonging to flourish. Speaking at the International Longevity Centre UK's Future of Ageing conference in 2025, Burnham argued that age-friendly places must also be housing-first places, pointing to developments designed to work for younger and older residents alike. It's an approach that aligns closely with our own experience - when people have somewhere secure to live, it becomes far easier to build the connections that strengthen communities across generations. Extended nationally, this £340 million commitment has the potential to do more than reduce rough sleeping; it could become a genuine model for how housing policy builds connected communities from the ground up.

Devolution is another area worth watching closely. Burnham has pledged "the biggest devolution of power in England in modern times," building on the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026, which already established a statutory framework for Strategic Authorities and a Community Right to Buy. This is territory where Intergenerational England has direct experience: our own work supporting devolution in Greater Manchester has argued that power shifted to a local level only works for communities if it is designed around relationships between generations, not simply handed down as a smaller version of the same silos. Devolution is, in principle, one of the more promising levers for intergenerational policy, because housing, transport and skills - the issues that most visibly connect a place's younger and older residents - sit at exactly the level being devolved. As of 21 July, the specific new powers beyond the existing Act haven't been detailed. But handled well, this is precisely the kind of opportunity IE exists to point toward: devolution designed with generations in mind is a genuine chance to build connected, community-led places that neither Westminster nor local government has consistently delivered - and one this government now has the tools to try.

Social care is where Burnham's history runs deepest, and where the opportunity for meaningful intergenerational policy may be greatest. As Health Secretary in 2009, he set out proposals for a National Care Service, aiming to end what he called the "cruel lottery" of means-tested care - an ambition partly enacted, then reversed within months by the incoming coalition government. That history matters: a Prime Minister who has already fought for this once understands the stakes in a way few of his predecessors have needed to. Since becoming PM, he has signalled that social care is an area where he's willing to spend real political capital, with fresh plans for a new National Care Service expected in the days ahead. Care is also one of the clearest places where intergenerational design does real, practical good - not as an abstract fairness question, but as a working model. IE is the secretariat of the APPG on Tackling Loneliness and Connected Communities, and one of the convictions behind that work is that care doesn't have to be organised around a single generation's needs. Care settings that deliberately bring older and younger people together - as residents, volunteers, or staff - offer a different model, one where connection is designed in and care is placed around the whole community. As those plans take shape, there's a real opportunity for a National Care Service built with intergenerational connection at its centre, rather than simply better-funded silos - one of the more transformative moves this government could make.

Cost of living and the workforce look set to be the most immediate live test of this government, and an interesting one for intergenerational policy specifically. Burnham has pledged "fully costed" cost-of-living measures from 21 July - support that will be genuinely needed and, if delivered well, a real relief across the country. Sitting alongside this is Burnham's pledge to push more young people into work, a priority that lands directly in response to figures showing over a million young people are not in training or employment. At Intergenerational England, we see this as part of a much larger shift. For the first time, five generations are now working side by side in many UK workplaces, according to our own Workforce Taskforce research - a unique opportunity for social wellbeing, productivity and growth, if done properly. Organisations that embed intergenerational practice - structured mentoring, mixed-age project teams, genuine two-way skills exchange - see measurably lower rates of disengagement and stronger retention than those that leave generational mixing to chance. Getting young people into work well, not simply into work, and doing so in workplaces designed to connect rather than merely contain five generations, could be one of the more practical, near-term wins for a genuinely intergenerational Britain.

In 2024, Burnham backed our national research report, A Divided Kingdom, with a statement that has stayed with us since: "We're living in increasingly divided times, including division by age. This new report from Intergenerational England sets out a hopeful vision. We need a different way of living, where people contribute together and are valued, and it must be intergenerational." That report, drawn from a representative survey of more than 1,700 adults, found that only 17% of people regularly share spaces where generations naturally mix, while more than half believe different age groups rarely understand one another's experiences. Yet the public is remarkably clear about the benefits of connection: 81% believe intergenerational contact reduces loneliness, 76% believe it improves health and wellbeing, and 86% believe it reduces age-related stereotypes.

None of this is unprecedented. The UK's own APPG on Social Integration reached similar conclusions as far back as 2017, recommending that government fund intergenerational projects rather than running separate pots for young and old, and give intergenerational connection its own place in local government portfolios - a recommendation our own international research, Past, Present and Future Generations, found echoed well beyond the UK, a shift from intervention to infrastructure thinking. In Sweden, a 2024 law now let’s parents transfer part of their parental leave allowance to grandparents, putting into law what around a million grandparents in the UK already do unpaid: stepping back from work to provide childcare. In Portugal, the Aconchego programme in Porto has spent two decades pairing older residents living alone with students who need affordable housing, in exchange for company and light help around the home - a model that has served over 500 people simply by treating housing as something intergenerational by design, not an afterthought. None of these are grand national strategies. They're specific, working answers to the same underlying question Burnham's government now faces: whether the systems being built are designed for one generation at a time, or designed to connect them.

None of this is a verdict, whether this becomes a genuinely intergenerational government is still unwritten. As Secretariat to the APPG on Tackling Loneliness and Connected Communities, we're already working with parliamentarians on these questions, our Workforce Taskforce is doing the same with employers navigating a five-generation workplace, Our housing research works to influence how new housing commitments design with international connection at its heart – places stronger emphasis on the relationship between the built and social infrastructure. We've written directly to the Prime Minister setting out what we believe an intergenerational Britain could look like under this government.

Because that's ultimately what's at stake - a country that tackles loneliness at scale, builds communities where people aren't sorted by age, and gives people at every stage of life the conditions to thrive alongside one another, not simply near one another. This is a genuinely exciting moment for an intergenerational England- and we're ready to play our part.