Isabel Hardman

Andy Burnham repeatedly claims that he can fund defence using savings from the welfare budget – just not the ‘crude cuts’ that the Tories want him to make. But today his own adviser on youth unemployment has rather undermined that: Alan Milburn has confirmed to the Financial Times that the plans he has for Neets will cost more money upfront and take time to produce savings. ‘Honestly, in order to fix this, if we’re going to get to anywhere near the [Neet] levels of Holland or even Belgium, that that is not going to happen in two or three years,’ he said. He added: ‘If we’re going to put in more support for young people… of course we’re going to have to invest behind that’.

There are a lot of things we know about NHS maternity: that it’s in crisis, that there are a lot of reports confirming that it is in crisis, that there are even more recommendations from those reports on how to end that crisis, and that despite all that, very little has yet changed on maternity wards. The topic came up again at Prime Minister’s Questions today, with Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey asking for a second week running about a troubled maternity unit. Last week, it was North Devon’s maternity ward, which remains closed. This week, he asked about Musgrove Park in Taunton, which Baroness Amos recently described as ‘the most challenging maternity estate in the country, including leaking roofs, poles propping up a ceiling and dangerous room temperatures’.

A few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for a Labour frontbencher to use a statement about the kind of unrest seen in Dover and Portsmouth over the weekend to talk about the ‘valid concerns’ that people have about immigration. That the Policing Minister Sarah Jones did that today shows how far the debate has moved: Labour knows that it cannot lump everyone who is angry about the scale of illegal immigration into the same ‘racist’ bucket. She made clear in the first few minutes of her statement to MPs this afternoon that ‘there can be no excuse for threatening behaviour or serious disruption’, and that ‘this government condemns the intimidating and thuggish behaviour shown by some of the protesters this weekend’.

Can Andy Burnham really delay setting out how he will raise defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2030 until next year’s spending review? The first hostile Labour question that he received at his first Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday came from Tan Dhesi, the Labour MP who chairs the defence select committee. Dhesi’s argument was that ‘vibes alone just will not be enough’ and that the Prime Minister was ‘kicking the can down the road’ by ‘waiting for a fiscal event in a future year’. It is, though, not one being made by a critical mass of Labour MPs, and that is presumably why Burnham feels more comfortable with a bit of can-kicking.

Victims will start receiving letters from today informing them that they will be affected by the early release of prisoners, after Andy Burnham confirmed that those convicted of manslaughter will be exempt from the scheme. The Prime Minister had been responding largely to the outcry over the potential release of two of the killers of PC Andrew Harper. While those two men should remain behind bars, Burnham’s solution has left the prisons system in an even more precarious position. This is always the risk when politicians make policy because of an emotional reaction: they can end up skewing the system in a way that has quite profound consequences elsewhere. In this case, though, there are profound consequences whether prisoners are released early or kept inside.

Is Andy Burnham running a ‘circuit breaker’ government from the one led by Keir Starmer, or is it a ‘continuity’ administration? Chancellor John Healey seems to think it’s the latter, telling Sky News that: ‘This Labour government has been a government of change for the last two years. We now step that up with Andy Burnham as leader. We’re a continuity of a Labour government with a change of leader, looking to see growth in every postcode, give people just a little bit of breathing space, whether they’re in households or businesses, but above all to see growth, hope and some future for all parts of this country.’ What does that word salad really mean?

We are starting to see a pattern in the announcements that Andy Burnham has made over his first few weeks as Prime Minister. He makes a promise that’s full of belief and righteousness, and then has to follow that up with a policy where the detail contains an admission that he hadn’t fully thought this one through.  Most notably, we’ve had the ‘end rough sleeping' pledge, which, on contact with reality, turned into a plan for everyone to get a ‘route out of rough sleeping by Christmas’. This week, we saw the difference between Burnham's argument that new affordable housing funding should be 'dedicated to council housing', and the reality.

Are mental health centres in libraries, banks and high street locations really going to make much of a difference? Health Secretary Yvette Cooper has unveiled the new facilities today with a £343 million funding package and a claim that this is ‘the biggest redesign of mental health services in a generation’. In any other healthcare setting, that would be a pretty bold claim to make, but instead it just underlines how little work there has been on making mental health services work within the wider NHS.

Andy Burnham is apparently enjoying his first taste of unpopularity as prime minister, in the form of the furore over the early release of domestic abusers and the killers of PC Andrew Harper. The Prime Minister made his frustration at the limitations of his situation clear yesterday with a lengthy post on X where he said he wanted to go further in restricting eligibility for early release, but couldn’t. In reality, though, this is a very mild taste for Burnham of the difficulties he will really face: more of a whiff of unpopularity rather than anything that will linger in the mouth.