Whether or not the promised land is reached via renationalisation, the man set to be next prime minister is clear what he wants transport to leave behind.

“You go from deregulation to regaining public control, it’s just unbelievable what becomes possible,” said Andy Burnham, reflecting on the bus system he transformed in Manchester. “It’s mind-blowing that deregulation was ever, ever brought in – public interest went out the window and people were cut off.”

Greater Manchester’s buses may have been an egregious example. But the road taken by Burnham as mayor could now be followed nationwide.

The railway is rapidly returning to state ownership, with most passenger train services joining Network Rail under a new Great British Railways (GBR) by the end of 2027.

Meanwhile, the move to public control of buses via franchising is being rolled out across much of the north: pioneered by Burnham under mayoral rights since extended by Labour government to all councils nationwide.

The yellow Bee Network pin, prominently affixed to Burnham’s lapel on Monday at his first speech as PM-in-waiting, is as proud a service medal as any metro mayor can muster.

“We put the bee on the side of the buses to denote that public control. And now we’re acting visibly, tangibly in the interests of our residents,” he told the Guardian in an interview shortly before the Makerfield byelection was called.

If his political philosophy of “Manchesterism” has changed anything to date, it is this: an essential service reshaped to deliver under elected local officials for the common good. And a simple tenet that helps connects Burnham to northern voters – if it’s good enough for London, it’s good enough for us.

The Bee Network, combining Greater Manchester’s newly franchised bus routes with the Metrolink tram system and eventually urban rail services, has consciously, stubbornly emulated a system only seen in the UK under Transport for London.

Burnham, like Sadiq Khan again in the capital, has staked a lot on keeping bus fares low – instigating a £2 single bus fare before and after the government did so nationwide, and providing free or discounted travel for young people in further education.

Mancunians have also benefited similarly from fare capping, “hopper” fares – a single fare if using more than one bus in an hour – contactless payments and night buses, all of which have helped drive up patronage by 24% over three years to 178m bus journeys in 2026.

TfL’s patronage is enough to cover the cost of operations without large public subsidy – fares pulling in £5.5bn, road charges £1.6bn and business rates £2.2bn – but it still relies on central government grants for capital investment, and its buses are cross-subsidised by Tube income.

Transport for Greater Manchester can only get so far. Fare revenue has continued to rise but funds only half the operation, £88m coming from trams and £269m from buses in 2025-26 – slightly less than the combined local and central government funding of £376m.

Buying back bus depots that once belonged to the city “stuck in my throat”, said Burnham, part of transition costs of £135m before launch in 2023. However, he said re-regulated services cost one-third less per kilometre under the Bee Network than the old regime, a “wild west” of buses plying Manchester’s streets but only cherrypicking the lucrative routes. Councils had to pay private companies to run some services and to cover discounted travel for old and young.

“They had you over a barrel,” Burnham said. “I had to pay in the old world for every time a 16-year-old or 70-year-old used that bus pass – they got that fee. Now we’re just forgoing revenue.”

For all the symbolism, the Bee Network still outsources the running of the buses to the big bus firms of old. They now do so with the obligation to run the services that Manchester dictates, with unified branding and fares.

“It has cost quite a lot in subsidy, but it could have gone wrong and it’s gone right,” said Prof Tony Travers, a local government expert at London School of Economics. “It’s a good system. When I go to Manchester now I use the tram, in the way I’d use the Métro in Paris – and that’s not true elsewhere in Britain. It’s made significant strides in creating the kind of integrated transport other European cities have.”

One step that remained barred by the Tories when Burnham opted for franchising was the ability to set up a fully publicly owned, municipal bus company, since enabled by Labour legislation last year.

Rail renationalisation goes further – but it was never far away. After the brief, disastrous Railtrack tenure at the start of privatisation in the 1990s, state-owned Network Rail has run the tracks since 2002. Problems with the franchising system saw a series of contracts axed from Virgin Trains East Coast to Northern, before Covid collapsed them all.

That meant numerous train operations were publicly owned, and the rest tightly controlled by the Department for Transport, long before Labour came to power with a promise to renationalise. The rest will follow next year, including totemic brands such as Avanti West Coast, whose intercity operations will be ever more intensely scrutinised with a No 10 split between London and the north.

In the core aims of replacing a broken franchising system, bringing the management of the track and trains together, and overhauling ticketing and fares, GBR has been a cross-party pursuit.

It remains a work in progress. The rail minister Lord Peter Hendy, speaking to the Guardian a year after Labour’s first planned GBR renationalisation of South Western, said higher revenue could best be achieved through more local accountability for the whole railway, after a system where different players were incentivised to dodge responsibility and cost.

“If you’ve got a contract for something, the way to make money out of it is to read it carefully and find what makes you the most money, but on the railway that’s not the same as satisfying a customer,” he said.

South Western now operates with track and train under a single managing director. Hendy, a former London transport commissioner, said he wants the people in post to be able to report up any issues and money needed and simply say, “‘We’ll go off and fix it.’ And that hasn’t happened to the railway for more than 30 years.”

Whether or not control of all public transport remains TfL-style franchising or fuller renationalisation, services are likely to require significant spending to match the vision Burnham has laid out, Travers said. “Places like Leeds, Birmingham and Bristol need enormous investment to get up to Manchester standards. He explicitly mentioned rural areas, too – and it’s enormously expensive to get them anywhere near where urban services are.”

Travers noted that so much of Burnham’s reputation “is tied into the buses and Bee Network that it’s going to be harder for him to not deliver in this sphere of policy than any other”.

Burnham though, is well aware. He said: “I’ve been in politics a long time and I’ve never known anything as impactful as the Bee Network. And it makes me wonder, why did Westminster just ignore buses for all those years? Because this is something that is on every street. People see the change and they feel it.”