Writing in the Guardian, Prime Minister Andy Burnham has released his latest plan for driving down the cost of living crisis. While the things he’s proposing aren’t objectionable, they are yet another example of tinkering around the edges.

Too many people feel like modern life is designed to catch them out.

It should be just as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to start it. And if something is advertised as half price, it should actually be half price.

So I’m taking action.

We’re taking every opportunity…

— Andy Burnham (@andyburnham) August 10, 2026

Burnham reflects on modern life

Burnham’s piece opens as follows:

It’s remarkable how much of modern life can seem designed to wear us down. Every “sale” seems to come with an asterisk. Consumer contracts often find a way of costing more than you expected. And too many companies want you to sign up in seconds, but then make it feel impossible to leave. It’s exhausting.

They might not be the issues that keep you up at night. But they’re often the reason you go to bed ticked off. Westminster has got used to telling people that these everyday hassles are just part of life. The response has too often been a shrug of the shoulders or just calling it bad luck.

I don’t think that’s right. Because these everyday hassles affect millions of people. And they add up. Every single one is an unnecessary cost. And when the cost of living continues to weigh heavily on so many people’s lives, we need to be pulling every single lever we can to help ease that.

Burnham continues to make the same point for successive paragraphs, suggesting they didn’t have much meat on this bone.

The ‘cost-saving’ measures proposed

Our new prime minister isn’t wrong that these things are annoying, and he highlights the following issues specifically:

First, we are putting an end to phoney bargains. We are taking on poor practices that make people’s lives harder. If something is advertised as half price, it should actually be half price. We will make sure that when families snatch a deal, they can be confident they’re actually saving. That’s the least they deserve when budgets are so tight.

Second, we are making it as easy to leave a subscription as it is to join, and businesses won’t be able to renew a subscription without notifying you. New rules will come into force in January 2027, in time for when people often start new subscriptions, or cancel the ones they have, for the year ahead.

While the first is nice, it won’t necessarily save you any money. If companies can’t lie about how big a saving is, they will presumably just be honest about the percentage of the discount rather than knocking more money off.

The second is great for the many people who forget to cancel subscriptions. Given that there are numerous apps which cater to this audience, that’s presumably a decent number of people.

Every little helps?

Obviously these ideas won’t produce big savings, but Burnham argues his government will ‘pull every single lever we can’ to ease the cost of living crisis (also known as the ‘cost of greed’ crisis). According to him, this will all have a cumulative effect:

These are just a couple of our everyday fixes. There will be more to come over the next few months and bigger plans to make life easier and fairer for people over the longer term.

Each everyday fix will be designed to put a bit more money back into people’s pockets, to make daily life a little fairer and to give people a bit more hope that politics really can work for them again.

So on the one hand, Burnham is doing many little things which could save us small amounts of money in the future. On the other, he’s doing a number of big things which will make us much, much poorer in the long run. This latter category of decisions includes:

• Supporting Trump’s disastrous war in Iran (which is going to drive extreme inflation later this year).
• Failing to renationalise utilities despite overwhelming public support for doing so (especially as many of these failed businesses could be brought back in house at no cost owing to their many outstanding debts).
• Ignoring the climate crisis which is going to make Britain poorer at best and uninhabitable at worst.

Easy wins

It seems likely that Burnham’s latest proposals will resonate with voters. Honestly, it says a lot about the state of recent governments that he has so many easy wins to choose from. His ideas won’t make a meaningful difference, though, and sooner or later voters are going to realise that.

Featured image via Christopher Furlong/ Getty Images

By Willem Moore

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