From ‘everyday fixes’, party management and communications to long-term plans for care and pensions, the PM’s six key acts so far

Andy Burnham arrived in Downing Street promising to transform the way Britain works, restore hope and bring an end to years of political division. One hundred days later, the prime minister has announced a series of measures aimed at making everyday life easier, he’s reopened the debate over Britain’s relationship with the EU and set out plans to overhaul public services. He has also managed to maintain an unusually visible public profile, appearing regularly on social media and even taking part in a charity edition of Channel 4’s Gogglebox. Burnham has said he’s been surprised by the public’s appetite for change, insisting his first budget on Wednesday would offer some breathing space for households and businesses.

But the early weeks of his premiership have also exposed tensions between immediate political wins and the structural changes he has promised. Here is how his first 100 days have unfolded in six key ways.

Sadiq Khan says upgrade would unlock station’s true potential and allow it to live up to its name

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Stratford International train station in east London will receive funding in next week’s budget, according to reports, putting it on track to live up to its name and become a hub for cross-Channel services.

London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has been making a case to ministers for funding to upgrade the station to allow it to start running international rail services.

Transport hub will offer through trains between Leeds and Manchester with ‘turn-up-and-go’ service

A new railway station will be built in Bradford to “transform how people travel across the north”, the government has announced.

The station will be at the heart of the Northern Powerhouse Rail (NPR) scheme, built on the current Bradford Interchange site but allowing through trains between Leeds and Manchester.

Passengers urged to ‘share the carriage, not the noise’ as guidance sets out £100 penalties for nuisance behaviour

Andy Burnham has announced a crackdown on “headphone dodgers” who play loud music on public transport, as he extends his promise to give voters “breathing space” in the confines of a train carriage.

The prime minister will unveil a campaign against nuisance behaviour on public transport on Monday, alongside guidance allowing local transport authorities to levy fines of up to £100 for non-compliance.

With fares high and passenger numbers low, plans for a third runway could bring the train’s future into question

If Heathrow finally builds its third runway, Londoners can expect hundreds more planes flying overhead each day. But greater congestion on the ground will be a problem too. Under Heathrow’s £33bn expansion plan, 100,000-200,000 more passengers would eventually be travelling to or from the airport each day.

The most eye-catching problem has been moving part of the UK’s busiest motorway, the M25, to make space for a new 2.2-mile (3.5km) runway. A thornier one may be getting motorists out of their cars, and finding more sustainable ways for the extra passengers – and thousands of staff – to travel to and from Heathrow.

Despite guidance keeping mobile phones out of England’s schools, cheaper travel may only be available via an app

Schoolchildren who do not own smartphones face paying hundreds of pounds extra in annual bus fares as cheaper travel passes are digitised.

Critics argue that by only making discounts available through an app, operators are undermining government guidance to keep mobile phones out of schools.

Operator that runs services between London Marylebone and Birmingham is sixth to be nationalised since 2025

Chiltern Railways has become the latest train operator to enter public ownership as the government closes in on its ambition to renationalise all major passenger rail services.

The operator, which runs commuter rail services on the Chiltern mainline between London Marylebone and Birmingham, on Sunday became the sixth to be nationalised under Labour, with the remaining four to follow by the end of 2027.

‘Commonsense change’ looks to end current confusion and put ‘passengers first, not shareholders’ when services are disrupted

Rail passengers whose trains are cancelled will have the immediate right to travel on other operators’ services to finish their journey without further charge, ministers have announced.

The “commonsense change” will take effect from Sunday 20 September, ending the confusion in Britain where many pre-booked tickets are not valid on other firms’ trains.

Blaze causes electricity supply failure and disruption of services to airport and Reading

Hundreds of passengers were evacuated from a train, and services to Heathrow airport were cancelled, after a fire near tracks in the London Paddington area caused major disruptions to London’s rail network.

The fire caused an electricity supply failure which left all lines between Paddington and the airport blocked, National Rail said on Saturday afternoon.

Drivers concerned that bus operator’s offer to retrofit cabs on 730 buses will not be complete by next summer

London bus drivers have resumed strike action over having to work in high temperatures, amid fears that proposed improvements to air conditioning will not be complete by next summer.

About 1,500 members of the Unite union working across north London and Essex are taking part in the four-day strike from Tuesday to Friday, after industrial action earlier this month. Further stoppages are planned for the coming weeks.

Although mobiles blared in public are nothing new, this crop of headphone-dodging irritants are truly maddening. It’s time to take them on

‘Interesting cities can’t be quiet”, runs one of grime DJ and music industry thinker Elijah’s epigrams – and in its essential spirit, he is right. Silent, tidy, prim cities should be treated with suspicion. Any such atmosphere denotes that something has gone wrong at a macro level: either you’ve wound up in an authoritarian regime or, worse, Switzerland.

But not all urban sounds are created equal, and some are more unwelcome than others. Take the tide of (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) reels crashing on the shores of our collective attention on public transport, thanks to the astonishing number of grown adults who think it’s OK to surf the slopwave without headphones.

Dan Hancox is a writer and editor covering music, politics and cities. His latest book is Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World

This evening service from London to Crewe is hot, sweaty and heaving with people, many having to stand or sit in the gangways

The 5.46pm train from London Euston to Crewe is the low point of Nikhil Patel’s week. “I’ve never gotten a seat. I always stand up even when I get here early,” says the 22-year-old, struggling to keep his balance while the gangway underneath sways from side to side.

Painfully for Patel, who is commuting back and forth to the capital for a computer science internship, it’s the first leg of a three-hour journey home to Walsall. He grabs the back of a chair to remain steady but says he’s just thankful that the train has left on time – and that it’s even on the move at all.

It’s easy to lose your cool when you’re crammed into a train, bus or plane with a bunch of strangers and one of them is playing music without headphones or fighting you for the armrest. Here are the rules everyone should be following

Public transport can be a hot, noisy, cramped and stressful environment – and that’s before you add in people with pungent food, questionable hygiene and giant backpacks. Most of us know the general rules – though we don’t all follow them – about letting people off first, not putting bags on seats, where to stand on escalators and offering your seat to others. But what about the vaguer conventions? How can you avoid chatty passengers? Or manspreaders? Is it sometimes OK to put your feet on the seats? (Spoiler: it’s not.) Here, three etiquette experts show us the way to public transport propriety.

Measure to cost more than £500m, with money allocated to allow devolved nations to do the same

Single bus fares across England will be capped at £2 from January, Andy Burnham has announced, as he continues a cost of living blitz in his first week as prime minister.

The nationwide cap is currently set at £3 until the end of March 2027, although some areas – including London and Greater Manchester, where Burnham set a £2 limit as mayor – have lower top rates for single tickets.

Drivers in West Midlands say buses ‘unbearable’ during heatwaves, raising employee and passenger safety fears

Bus drivers in the West Midlands have spoken out about the “horrendous” working conditions they have experienced during heatwaves, which led to 40C temperatures in their cabs.

The UK was hit by high temperatures and dry weather in three successive heatwaves, with temperatures topping 37C last month when the country recorded its hottest ever June day. Last week, the Met Office warned climate extremes were becoming the “new ‘normal’ for the UK”.

Thalha Jubair, 20, and Owen Flowers, 19, sentenced to five and a half years each for cyber-attack that cost Transport for London £39m

The data of millions of commuters was stolen, Londoners were left out of pocket and 27,000 Transport for London staff were forced to reset their passwords.

Over four days in 2024 a pair of teenage hackers had London’s transport network at their mercy. Thalha Jubair and Owen Flowers had burrowed into the heart of Transport for London’s IT systems and held the “keys to the kingdom”.

The collision was catastrophic. Jane Ouartsi suffered a fractured collarbone, two spinal fractures, a broken femur that took three operations to fix, and she had to learn to walk again like a baby. Why has no one taken responsibility for her life-changing injuries?

As Jane Ouartsi walked across a pedestrianised square in central London, on a Friday evening in early August three years ago, she linked arms with her partner, Dave Mathias, and told him how much she had enjoyed the afternoon they had spent together, eating pizza in Soho and visiting an art installation. It was the last time she can remember feeling properly happy and relaxed.

“We were walking quite slowly, talking about the art. It’s hard to remember exactly, but I think I was saying what a lovely lunch, and then all of a sudden there was a horrific impact,” she says. “I felt my spine and body split and I thought my life was over.”

Mousehole in Cornwall once had a butcher, post office and general store. Now it doesn’t even have an ATM – and one of its crucial bus services has been cut. Can residents save this vital resource?

It’s early April and the sun is shining over Mousehole, Cornwall, as an older couple trudge up the hill to their nearest bus stop before sinking into two of the plastic chairs that have been lined up on the side of the road. Until recently, buses would come right to the centre of the fishing village, the couple are soon explaining to a pair of Australian tourists also waiting for the bus. But when the bus route was taken over by the Go-Ahead transport group in February, the small, ice-cream-van-like buses that had been used by the previous bus company, First Bus, were swapped for full-size buses – some of them double deckers – that wouldn’t be safe to drive through Mousehole’s narrow streets. So the route, which has been taking passengers down to the harbour since the 1920s, was cut short, and now ends at the edge of the village.

You don’t have to spend long in Mousehole, described as “the loveliest village in England” by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, to learn of residents’ dismay over this change. “Save Our Stop” flyers have been stuck in the windows of houses and businesses, while a banner adorns the railing next to where the old stop used to be, inviting passersby to sign the petition to have it reinstated and “make Mousehole accessible to all again” – a petition that now has more than 5,000 signatures.

Scotland’s busiest station to run reduced trains timetable after estimated 953,000 passenger journeys affected so far

Scotland’s busiest station, Glasgow Central, will partially reopen its main concourse on Wednesday, including for cross-border services, after a fire gutted the Victorian building next to it.

There will be a reduced timetable, including a scaled-down service to London Euston, and passengers are asked to check journeys before travelling.