Britain’s mayors need more teeth to succeed in creating jobs and wealth
On Thursday, seven English city regions will vote in the metro mayoral elections, including West Yorkshire for the first time.
These are showcase elections with candidates setting out their bold visions and plans for the future of the cities.
Mayors play a critical role in our cities. They are able to use hard and soft powers to make local change and put metropolitan hubs on the global map.
But what’s less clear is how this current government plans to shape the role of mayors as well as the wider topic of devolution.
We still have one of the most centralised political structures in the OECD. So it is no surprise that our economy is unbalanced too.
The success of our cities and their contribution to the UK economy relies on a number of factors.
It is about our mayors’ leadership, our educational institutions, the public and voluntary sector and the support of our communities and businesses. Government has powerful groups at its disposal to help deliver its ambitions to level up, but it needs to reinvigorate how it thinks about metropolitan areas.
Local businesses, communities and their leaders know how to leverage the assets of a particular area to create jobs, increase productivity and make places better to live in. But the leadership is not equiped with the tools to do so. The powers available to mayors in our cities are a good start, but to make it a success, control of the public purse strings needs to be moved into the regions in order to facilitate better decision making.
This will mean there are more public-sponsored projects based on a particular area, rather than individual schemes cherry-picked by the government which sow divisions as cities and towns bid against each other for the pot of of money.
Downing Street has committed huge additional investment into science and innovation to bring us up to OECD averages. This amounts to billions of pounds. Without taking a single penny from London and the South East it could make a major impact on the North and Midlands.
By one estimate, as many as 100,000 jobs could be created in Greater Manchester, adding £7bn to the local economy, just by using the cities’ fair share of additional funding.
Last year, research from Nesta identified that regions outside of the UK’s so-called Golden Triangle – Cambridge, Oxford and London – missed out on public sector R&D funding to the tune of £4bn every year. The knock-on effect of this prevents a further £8bn in additional funding from the private sector.
We know that innovation works as an ecosystem and that by joining the pieces – world class research, brilliant manufacturing expertise, entrepreneurial businesses, investment in skilling up local people – we can create jobs and increase our output.
What is particularly exciting is the opportunity to bring this innovation and entrepreneurial dynamism into all our towns and high streets.
It is this approach to cities that will bring true levelling up. Investing in places and the people in them not just projects picked in a remote Whitehall.
Mayors may or may not be politically fashionable within government. But bringing decision-making about funding closer to local communities will enable them to use their rich mix of expertise, ideas and ambition. This will allow all of the UK to truly reap more benefit and level up: something we all want to see.