Why collaboration could define the Burnham government

NCUB’s initial briefing described the emerging direction of the new UK Government. Here, Director of Policy, Analysis and External Affairs Rosalind Gill shares her wider reflections on what Andy Burnham’s first decisions might mean, and why the relationships beneath his headline priorities could ultimately determine their success. 

Every government has its vertical priorities: the big outcomes it wants to deliver in particular areas of national life. 

Sir Keir Starmer’s government called them missions: grow the economy, build an NHS fit for the future, make streets safer, break down barriers to opportunity and deliver clean energy. Together, they offered a relatively clear answer to the question: what is government trying to achieve? 

Andy Burnham’s priorities will be different, as we set out in our early briefing. His opening speech promised “breathing space” for households struggling with the cost of living; a new economic model bringing energy and transport back under stronger public control; and a “preventative state” investing in areas such as housing and education, while bringing down welfare spending and creating the fiscal room to meet the UK’s defence commitments. 

Those are important signals of political direction. But his speech also pointed towards a different and arguably more fundamental question. 

Not simply what does government want to deliver, but how will it enable the country to deliver it? 

That is a horizontal question. It is about the capabilities, institutions and relationships that cut across every government priority: how power and funding are distributed; whether places have the agency and capacity to develop their own strategies; how national and local institutions work together; and how government brings different parties, sectors and parts of the country behind a shared direction. 

Governments generally find vertical priorities easier to articulate. The horizontal foundations on which their success depends receive far less attention. Yet without them, even the clearest national priorities can remain just that: priorities rather than achievements. 

Burnham’s early emphasis on delivery is therefore welcome and potentially significant: a recognition that government must do more than set the destination. It must build the capacity, institutions and relationships needed to reach it. 

From DSIT to DBIST 

One place this horizontal question becomes concrete is in how government in Westminster itself is organised: which responsibilities sit together, where political authority lies and how departments work across their boundaries. 

One of the new Prime Minister’s first moves has been to abolish the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), created in 2023, and fold many of its responsibilities into an expanded Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (DBIST). 

For those who built DSIT, this will be a moment of real disappointment and uncertainty. The department developed valuable expertise, relationships and more integrated ways of working across science, technology, data, digital capability and AI. Those capabilities, and the people behind them, must not be lost in the reorganisation. 

The wider concerns are also understandable. A dedicated department gave science and technology clear political ownership and a Secretary of State able to champion them across Westminster government. The departure of Lord Vallance raises further questions about the continuity of the R&D agenda and UKRI reform. An early test will therefore be whether research and innovation retain strong, senior ministerial leadership within DBIST, rather than becoming additional responsibilities within an already sprawling portfolio. 

But there is no perfect departmental architecture. A standalone department offers focus and visibility; a larger economic department offers greater heft and proximity to business investment, industrial strategy, trade and growth. DSIT’s own remit had become broad, leaving research and innovation as a substantial, but by no means dominant, part of a relatively small department. Bringing these responsibilities into DBIST could therefore create stronger connections to the economic levers on which their impact depends. 

That is a potential advantage, not an automatic one. The new structure must retain DSIT’s expertise and its ability to coordinate R&D across government, while avoiding fresh fragmentation between DBIST, DCMS, DfE, DWP and the Cabinet Office, particularly across science, technology, AI, data and digital government. 

It is also worth asking why this was the only major departmental change Burnham chose to make. It could reflect not a downgrading of science and technology, but a deliberate attempt to put them closer to the centre of his economic model. In Greater Manchester, Burnham treated digital, AI and cyber as part of a wider reindustrialisation strategy, alongside advanced manufacturing, life sciences, creative industries and low-carbon growth. Crucially, that approach connected sectoral strengths to skills, public investment, employment and place. Folding science and innovation into DBIST may therefore signal an ambition to apply similar thinking nationally: not treating R&D and technology as discrete policy domains, but as foundations of industrial renewal and more broadly shared prosperity.  

That is necessarily speculative, but the new department’s remit, and the priority Burnham gave to creating it, make it a possibility worth watching. 

How will the economic plans fit together? 

If that is the intention, the next question is how it will connect with the economic strategy Burnham inherited. 

Under Starmer, a key vehicle for growth was the Modern Industrial Strategy. Published in 2025 under Jonathan Reynolds as Business Secretary, the strategy was itself presented as a ten-year plan: one designed to give businesses the stability and confidence to invest. It made a series of vertical choices about the sectors with the greatest potential for growth, but its success also depended on enabling conditions such as skills, finance, infrastructure, regulation, research and place. 

Reynolds was subsequently replaced by Peter Kyle but has now returned to lead the expanded DBIST. That could provide some continuity. However, Burnham has also promised a new ten-year plan for the UK, raising an obvious question about how the two will fit together. 

Will the Industrial Strategy remain the UK Government’s principal economic framework? Will it be refreshed to reflect Burnham’s priorities, or become one part of a wider national plan? 

The Industrial Strategy and its sector plans are only just moving into delivery. Businesses and universities need a government that can adapt its approach without continually restarting the clock. Long-term plans create confidence only when the institutions, investment and political commitment behind them endure. 

Fiscal constraint and long-term reform 

Whatever shape the new economic plan takes, it will operate within tight fiscal constraints. 

Burnham has recommitted his government to the existing fiscal rules, while indicating that he may use the flexibility within them to support greater public investment. His new Chancellor, John Healey, has gone further, promising to meet the rules with a “buffer against uncertainty”. 

The UK Government’s first intervention reflects that caution. VAT on domestic electricity bills will be removed from October, bus fares capped at £2 and business rates cut for some hospitality firms. Longer-term measures will wait until the Budget, be accompanied by an OBR forecast and, the government says, remain consistent with its fiscal rules. 

Whatever one makes of the measures themselves, their design is revealing: immediate relief, accompanied by an emphasis on how it will be paid for, with longer-term decisions deferred until the wider fiscal position can be assessed. 

Burnham’s promise of a ten-year plan and a more preventative state points towards a bigger shift. The argument is that government should act earlier, invest for longer and organise public institutions around preventing costly problems rather than repeatedly paying to manage their consequences. 

That will not remove the need for difficult choices. Burnham inherits high debt-interest costs, stretched public services and major commitments on defence. His promises not to increase the main taxes also significantly constrain his room for manoeuvre. 

But fiscal constraint makes the horizontal question more important, not less. When resources are tight, fragmentation becomes especially expensive. Government cannot afford the waste created by short-term funding cycles, duplicated activity or institutions pulling in different directions. Nor can it expect public spending alone to deliver its ambitions. It will need to combine national investment with the assets, expertise and capital held by businesses, universities, civic institutions and places. 

Collaboration cannot fill a funding gap. But it can determine whether scarce investment remains fragmented or becomes part of a coherent, sustained effort. 

The lever of collaboration 

Across all these areas collaboration moves from the margins of policy to the centre of the story. If it is part of the country’s productive infrastructure, then questions about incentives, funding, institutional design and leadership are not niche concerns for higher education or research policy. They are fundamental to whether the UK can deliver its national ambitions. 

Universities are among the few institutions present across the country able to connect research, skills, employers, entrepreneurs and public services. How they evolve is therefore a national economic question, not simply a sectoral one. 

That makes the relationship between DBIST, DfE and DWP particularly important. Universities are simultaneously educational institutions, major research performers, regional anchors and foundations of industrial capability. An industrial strategy cannot flourish if their financial health, research capacity and role in developing skills are treated as separate concerns or as someone else’s problem. 

At NCUB, this is making us look again at how the UK understands university-business collaboration. Much of the conversation understandably focuses on what can be counted: collaborative research, spinouts, patents and placements. Those measures matter, but collaboration often starts before any project exists. 

It starts when leaders from different sectors develop a shared understanding of a challenge and ask what success would look like. It happens when places build a collective ambition for growth, or when industry, universities and government agree where to focus their effort. 

Those conversations are harder to measure, but they shape everything that follows: which projects emerge, where investment flows and whether separate interventions add up to a coherent whole. 

Enabling this deeper collaboration requires more than occasional convening. Places need genuine agency and the capacity to use it. Funding must be sufficiently long-term and flexible to support shared strategies. Incentives should reward collective outcomes. And national government must be prepared to steward relationships, as well as set priorities. 

Burnham has promised more collaborative politics and greater power for communities. His ten-year plan should begin to show what that means in practice. 

The vertical priorities will command the headlines. But it may be the strength of the horizontal relationships beneath them that determines whether this government succeeds. 

That makes collaboration not an adjunct to Burnham’s programme, but one of its central tests, and one of the UK’s most important policy questions.