Barring a challenge before nominations close on 16 July, Andy Burnham will be Prime Minister by 20 July. No politician of his seniority has done more for credit unions.
As Mayor of Greater Manchester he launched the Sound Pound loan with GMCA backing — the first credit union product in the UK built specifically as a cost-of-living response. His 2024 manifesto pledged to let residents spread the cost of an annual Bee Network pass through weekly, interest-free repayments via their local credit union. In June 2025 he stood behind five Soundpound credit unions as they became the first in the country to offer green home loans aligned with the Green Home Finance Principles. He launched the Greater Manchester Co-operative Commission in 2019 with the stated ambition of making his city-region the most co-operative in the UK, and his leadership pitch two weeks ago was delivered at the People’s History Museum, wrapped in the language of Rochdale and mutual endeavour.
Whilst the sector might be celebrating, I think it should be paying very close attention to the shape of that support — because there’s a pattern in it, and the pattern is a ceiling.
The enabler’s box
Look at every Burnham credit union intervention and ask what role the credit union is playing. Sound Pound: a safe alternative to loan sharks for people in financial difficulty. The Bee Network pledge: a repayment mechanism so people who can’t pay upfront aren’t penalised for it. Green loans: a trusted local channel for distributing retrofit finance in service of GMCA’s 2038 carbon-neutral mission.
In each case the credit union is an enabler — a delivery mechanism for a policy objective that sits somewhere else. Distribution plumbing for social policy. And to be clear: this is genuine support, deployed with more imagination than any national government has managed. Embedding credit unions in transport and retrofit is smarter than grant funding, because it builds them into infrastructure people actually use.
But it also quietly defines what a credit union is: an institution for the financially squeezed, activated when mainstream finance fails someone. That framing is politically safe — credit unions as a social safety valve threaten nobody. It is also a constraint. If your role is to catch people the market drops, your addressable market is, by definition, the people the market drops. That is not a growth strategy. It’s a containment strategy with warm words attached.
Here’s the uncomfortable question for the sector as Burnham’s “Manchesterism” prepares to scale nationally: has he identified the role credit unions are best placed to play — or the role that is safest for him to give them?
The best-kept secret is an oxymoron
But has the sector climbed into the box willingly? The phrase you hear constantly — including from credit union leaders in the Sound Pound coverage itself — is that credit unions are “this country’s best-kept secret”.
It sounds humble. It’s actually a confession. “Best-kept secret” implies the product is fine and the world has simply failed to notice — that the growth problem is an awareness problem. Fifty years of sector history says otherwise. If awareness were the constraint, decades of ministerial visits, awareness weeks and mayoral photo calls would have fixed it.
So we have a strange symmetry. Burnham sees credit unions as infrastructure for the struggling. Credit unions see themselves as undiscovered. Neither party is holding the vision that would actually get the sector to critical appeal: a modern, full-service, technology-enabled community financial institution that a person on a median income would choose — not be referred to.
That gap is the opportunity, and the risk. The opportunity: the next Prime Minister already believes in the sector, already deploys it creatively, and already thinks in ten-year missions. The risk: he scales the GM model nationally with the box intact, and credit unions get locked in — warmly praised, publicly backed, and permanently positioned as the ambulance at the bottom of the financial services cliff.
The reset
Which is why the sector’s ask over the coming weeks shouldn’t be money, and it shouldn’t be warm words. It should be a redefinition. Before Manchesterism becomes national policy, the sector needs to come together — one voice, one stance — so that it is exactly clear to Burnham what a credit union is, and what it’s capable of becoming.
The case is easier to make than it used to be, because the constraint that made the enabler role rational is dissolving. Credit unions were confined to simple products and referred members not because of their values but because of their operating model: manual decisioning, legacy systems, processes built for a branch queue. When people, process and technology are aligned — real-time affordability decisioning, open banking data instead of payslips, payments that settle instantly, onboarding measured in minutes — a credit union can compete for the member the high street bank takes for granted, while keeping the member-owned economics that make it worth choosing.
We’re seeing this up close in Greater Manchester itself. Working with GMB Credit Union, we’ve been building a member acquisition journey designed around a simple principle: meet a prospective member as a person with a goal — join and save, or join and borrow — not as a referral with a problem. The early lesson is clear: when the joining experience matches what people expect from any modern financial app, the “secret” stops needing to be kept. With the foundations in place, now is the time to scale.
Eleven days
Burnham has said credit unions transform lives. He’s right. But transformation at the margins is not the same as critical appeal, and a Prime Minister who genuinely believes in mutual finance deserves a sector confident enough to tell him his model is incomplete.
So if I had five minutes with him before 20 July, I wouldn’t bring a wishlist. I’d ask him two questions. What do you see as the role of credit unions going forward? And from everything you’ve seen working alongside the sector — if one thing had to change for credit unions to reach critical appeal, what would it be?
Then I’d tell him my answer: stop deploying credit unions as a safety net, and start backing them as challengers. The box was never the destination. With people, process and technology finally aligned, the sector is ready to serve not just those the market fails, but everyone who believes finance should belong to its members. The next decade of mutual finance starts now — and it starts with the sector deciding it’s done being a secret.
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