Walking around the streets of modern-day Manchester, there is one feature you simply can’t ignore: the number of people sleeping rough. So severe has the homeless problem become that homelessness "camps" are now scattered around the city, comprised of clusters of makeshift tents erected under bridges and on pavements.

Meanwhile, Chelsea, London’s ultra-affluent area of southwest London, is now home to property worth a staggering £11,321 per square meter. This compares to Hartlepool in the northeast of England, where you can buy a two-bedroom house for not much more than price of a square meter in Chelsea.

One “landmark pledge” made by the UK's Conservative government during its 2015 election campaign was to close the gap between the North and South wealth divide. But instead of delivering promises of a “northern surge,” during the past 12 months the gap between the burgeoning prosperity of the South compared to the North has only widened.

In an attempt to tackle the economic inequality separating Britain's North and South, Shadow Home Secretary Andy Burnham has pledged to make Greater Manchester in the north of England a “beacon of social justice.” The Member of Parliament (MP) of Leigh, in the North West, has launched a campaign to become the Labour Party’s candidate for mayor of Greater Manchester – part of a wider bid throughout Britain to decentralize the UK by shifting greater power from Westminster to other regions and cities.

The ‘Elusive’ Northern Powerhouse

In 2014, the government announced that Greater Manchester was to get its own directly elected mayor, who will have power over policies related to housing, transporting, planning and other important social-economic issues.

Having regionally elected northern mayors is part of the so-called plan to build a Northern Powerhouse, a label given to attempt to redress the North-South economic imbalance and to attract more investment in northern cities and towns. But up to now, despite the government and Chancellor George Osborne excitedly talking up the new plan, people of the region have seen little evidence of an economic Northern Powerhouse evolving from overhyped concept into genuine reality.

In a recent speech to Labour activists in Salford, a working class suburb of Manchester, Burnham, Greater Manchester's mayoral hopeful, said “Westminster has failed the North” and vowed to dedicate himself to the task of “rebalancing our country.”

“Put bluntly, Westminster has failed the North. It has left us with an uneven share of resources, power and life chances. The London perspective on life dominates the political debate and does not do justice to the challenges that people here face,” said Burnham.

During another recent campaign speech, he laid out specifically how he plans to rebalance the country and make Greater Manchester a “beacon of social justice," and its vicinity “even greater than it is today.”

Housing

When it comes to concerns over the North-South inequality, housing couldn't be a starker example of that divide. Research by mortgage lenders Halifax shows that since 2011, house prices per square meter in London have been rising almost twice as fast as in the rest of the country.

Burnham claims he will use the housing fund granted to the mayor to return properties in Greater Manchester back to public housing stock and buy out the “absent landlords.”

Some Mancunians welcome his promise. One social housing tenant from South Manchester, whose family has been living on the same social housing estate for four generations, told Occupy.com, “It would be nice to be able to see our home as the solid base my parents and their parents before them saw it as, instead of worrying about whether we’ll be kicked out and have nowhere to live.”

Education

But it’s not just property that highlights Britain’s burgeoning North-South divide. Many children in the North have fallen behind in national education standards by the age of five. An “unfair” schooling fund is being blamed for the deepening educational gulf that has seen both primary and secondary schools in the North receive considerably less money per pupil than schools in London.

Research conducted by the Institute for Public Policy Research led the charity to warn that policymakers should distribute education funds more evenly in order the bridge the increasing North-South divide in academic achievement.

The IPPR warned that northern regions run the risk of losing up to £29 billion in productivity as the North of England “struggles to compete for the skills needed to make the Northern Powerhouse project a success.”

In his recent speech to Labour activists, Burnham touched on the issue of education in the North, calling on Manchester, “the birthplace of the industrial revolution,” to “lead a revolution in technical education.”

Whether Burnham will be able to deliver promises to turn Greater Manchester into a “beacon of social justice” if elected mayor remains to be seen, and some Mancunians are not too optimistic. He already lost the Labour leadership race to Jeremy Corbyn in 2015, as Corbyn’s core policies to enforce higher taxes on the rich, to cut down on austerity and to put caps on rent levels in private sector housing, struck a chord with a significant majority of Labour Party members.

Some think transforming Manchester will require a mayor who adheres to a more socially and politically radical new line, along the likes of Corbyn’s politics, or even Scotland’s. Many are also sceptical that having an elected mayor will change anything.

As Zoe Waterford, an administration manager from Timperley in Greater Manchester, told Occupy.com, “Just because Manchester has a democratically elected mayor is unlikely to mean London will become any less powerful or Manchester will become any more powerful or richer – whether it’s Andy Burnham wearing the chain of office or anyone else.”

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