Prime Minister Andy Burnham has rallied his new Cabinet at their first meeting at No10 this afternoon, cautioning against repeating the Parliamentary Labour Party’s earlier mistakes of division under Sir Keir Starmer.
The newly appointed Cabinet in No10 for the first time this afternoon to discuss a way forward on policy, and spoke of being a “cost-of-living government”.
Sat opposite his new Chancellor John Healey, and beside Cabinet Secretary Dame Antonia Romeo and Education Secretary Lucy Powell, Mr Burnham urged his colleagues to look into what their department could do to ease cost-of-living pressures, “big and small”.
“What can we do just to take that little bit of pressure off people’s shoulders, just to give them that little extra sense that help is coming so that they can have that bit of hope that things are getting better”, he added.
“And that’s the mission that we’ve got to set ourselves together.”
The Prime Minister said the two points on the agenda for the gathering were the “mission purpose of this Government and standards”.
He said: “The two are linked because we will only deliver for people and make hope feel real for people if we are pulling ourselves together in the same direction and we have a really positive working relationship, a sense of one team.”
He said he had spoken to Cabinet Secretary Dame Antonia Romeo, who was sitting beside him, about wanting to “set the tone at the top in relation to our relationship with our colleagues in the Civil Service,” and “making that feel like it’s a one-team approach, respecting each other”.
It comes as Laour infighting has already emerged, as former chief secretary to the prime minister Darren Jones publicly hit out at the Mr Burnham’s first policy announcement to reduce energy bill VAT costs by scrapping the controversial Digital ID programme, which Mr Jones said was unfunded to begin with.
In response to concerns over funding, Mr Burnham vowed to always “show how we’re going to pay” for policies at this afternoon’s meeting, telling his Cabinet “we will seek to do more” with plans to be set out “over the coming days”.
“But always we will show how we are going to pay for it, what we are reprioritising. That will be a theme that we will always come back to.”
He added that they’ve “got to be prepared to reprioritise” spending, and that will include some “difficult decisions” – and added he will also have Chancellor John Healey “looking over my shoulder” on that.
Healey told ministers they will all need to “look harder at our own budgets”, and that his priorities will be “growth” and “national security”.
