The case for metro mayors

Author: Dermot Finch
Date: 14/09/2009
Publication: Real Reform Now: Why Progressives Should Embrace Democratic Renewal and How We Get There

Our biggest cities need directly elected mayors, with real tax and spend powers. ‘Metro mayors' would re-engage millions of voters, and provide more effective leadership for our most important economies outside London.

We all know why constitutional reform is back in vogue in Westminster. But the need for electoral reform goes beyond the expenses scandal, and should not end in parliament. We need to shake up local government, too. Big city, metropolitan mayors should be an essential part of that.

The Tories have already committed to 12 big city mayors outside London. Labour should go further. The next Labour manifesto should include a commitment to strong metro mayors in our biggest conurbations like Greater Manchester and Birmingham. Not just figureheads, but leaders with real financial clout over transport, housing and skills. And not just ward councillors indirectly elected by their party group to run a council, but leaders with a direct mandate from voters across a number of councils that share the same metropolitan area.

Metro mayors would be a tricky step for Labour. The party would have to bury the idea of elected regional government, and switch to elected metropolitan government instead. It would also have to face down its dwindling number of incumbent councillors, most of whom hate the idea of elected mayors.

But metro mayors would be a bold and winning step, too. They would provide a clear answer to the unresolved question of English devolution, a refreshing (and directly accountable) alternative to quangoland, and a magnet for new political talent. Crucially, they would get things done - like the congestion charge in London. And in this increasingly global economy, metro mayors would give our biggest cities the outward-looking face they need to succeed.

No longer the party of local government

Labour was the party of local government in 1997, but now its local base is at rock bottom and the Tories are the dominant party.

Labour has just 4,700 councillors across Great Britain - less than half the Tories' 10,100 and not many more than the LibDems' tally of 4,400. In England, half of all councillors are Conservatives, Labour controls just one-third of metropolitan boroughs, and the LibDems run a growing number of major cities - including Bristol, Cambridge, Hull, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield and York.

It is very difficult for parties with a depleted local base to win general elections. That is why the Conservatives have spent the last decade building up theirs. If Labour is to continue as a national force, it needs to rethink and rejuvenate its presence at city-level, and offer a radical new alternative plan for devolution in England.

Labour and devolution

Let's look at Labour's track record on devolution so far. Tony Blair got off to a good start, overseeing a long-overdue transfer of power to Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London. But he left the rest of England relatively shortchanged. Blair talked about English devolution only intermittently, and meantime kept on pulling those central government levers. He didn't realise that a network of powerful city mayors could have helped him deliver.

The English regions rejected John Prescott's lukewarm version of devolved government in 2004, and have ended up in limbo since then - run by unelected regional development agencies and half-baked regional assemblies. The revival and renewal of cities under Labour was a real achievement, but happened in spite of their relative impotence on the political stage.

Public service agreements and regional development agencies might look sensible in isolation. But taken together with all the other targets and quangos, they made the party seem increasingly top-down and remote. The ascendancy of targetry and quangoland ultimately undermined democratic local government and sidelined local people.

At the city level, Labour engaged in a half-hearted and very incremental programme of devolution, laced with technocratic and technical language. The legacy of the last decade is not pretty: a string of impenetrable acronyms - LAAs, LSPs, LABGI; an anonymous programme of decentralisation called the sub-national review; a parent-child relationship between central and local government; and a growing chasm between ministerial rhetoric and local reality.

Some within the party - notably David Miliband, James Purnell and Hazel Blears - pushed for more urgent action on devolution. But none of them got very far. The rest of the party was impervious to the case for more radical devolution, and got distracted by a slightly tedious internal debate about postcode lotteries and localism.

Brown is something of a reluctant and belated advocate of devolution. He talks about it in grandiose terms, as part of his wider (and so far elusive) constitutional reform plan. But his words lack conviction and follow-through.

As a result, ministers' talk of devolution has not been matched by action. White papers come and go, and still the balance of power between central and local government remains pretty much the same - with the majority of the money spent by local government ringfenced into centrally-dictated pots. This deficit of political and financial power at the city level has led to falling turnouts across the board. More and more local voters have responded by staying at home.

Labour has woken up to this only recently. Miliband - a big fan of mayors - conceded in his recent John Smith Memorial Lecture that devolution under Labour has been too modest: ‘Some powers have been devolved (to local government), but the shift in balance of power from Whitehall to town hall has not yet happened.'

By failing to connect with the devolution agenda, Labour has opened up an opportunity for the other parties. It is the Tories who now present themselves as the great devolvers, having presided over the emasculation of local government and breakup of the mets in the 1980s. And it is the LibDems who now run a disproportionate number of our biggest cities outside London.

Mayors: Labour v Tories

Labour has flirted with mayors over the past decade. The Blair government did the right thing in 2000, installing the mayor of London. But since then, we've had a curious and underwhelming batch of small-scale mayors with no real powers, in random places like Hartlepool and Lewisham.

The momentum for mayors within Labour has stalled. Miliband's support was echoed by Ruth Kelly and Blears, but they are both off-stage now. Labour's own mayors in Doncaster and Stoke have hardly been an advert for effectiveness and probity. And since Ken lost to Boris, many within the party have started to regret the whole mayoral experiment.

By contrast, the Tories have now become big fans of elected mayors. In the party's Control Shift green paper earlier this year, David Cameron promised to introduce elected mayors in England's 12 biggest cities outside London - including Birmingham, Manchester and Wakefield.

If it wins the next election, the Conservatives will hold a series of mayoral referendums on the same day - with a clear intent to install elected mayors in those 12 cities during its first term. That's a much clearer position than Labour - but not necessarily the right one.

The Tory mayoral plan only applies to the 12 local authorities of Birmingham, Manchester, Wakefield and so on. That would result in the rather odd situation of Manchester having its own mayor, but the other nine local authorities in Greater Manchester continuing as they are now. The Tory plan is also virtually silent on the powers that would be available to a new city mayor.

Labour could go further than the Tories, by supporting metro mayors with real financial powers. That means a mayor for Greater Manchester, not just Manchester city council, with control over transport, housing and skills funding.

Case for metro mayors

If mayors are good enough for London, why can't Greater Manchester and Greater Birmingham have their own elected mayor too?

The political case for mayors is stronger than ever, following the expenses crisis. Powerful, directly elected metro mayors would help to re-engage local voters with the political process.

Mayors tend to attract higher turnouts - 45% of Londoners voted in last year's mayoral election, compared to just 25% turnout in Knowsley and Moss Side council elections. The 2008 London mayoral race also commanded a great deal of public interest, with more public debates and media coverage than elsewhere.

Local government is proud of its direct accountability and connections to real people and places. But turnout at local elections is pretty dire, at around 30%, and the average age of a local councillor is 58. As Britain gets more diverse, its council chambers are stuck in a time warp. Most councils tend to be dominated by white, middle-aged men.

Levels of interest and participation in local government are both directly proportionate to its power and influence. Low turnout and ageing councillors are a direct result of the limited powers currently available to local councils.

Councils would attract higher turnout, more diverse candidates and a higher calibre of councillor if they had more real powers - to raise and lower business taxes, and to spend transport and training budgets. And metro mayors would attract the best candidates, because they would represent not just a council ward but an entire metropolitan area.

The economic case for metro mayors is pretty strong. The recession is having a different impact in different cities. Birmingham is being hit much harder than Bristol, and Liverpool's recession is different to the downturn in Leeds. Each city needs its own powerful leader - armed with real financial powers - to tackle the recession locally.

The recession is impacting across council boundaries, and the global economy is making political lines on the map increasingly irrelevant. Now more than ever, individual councils across each of our biggest cities need to collaborate and present a united front. Metro mayors in Greater Manchester and Greater Birmingham would do just that. They would advocate on behalf of an entire functional economic area, not just a small part of it.

Critically, metro mayors would help unlock the financial powers that cities need to invest in transport, housing and skills. The lesson from London is clear. The direct mandate and additional accountability of a metro mayor increases pressure on Whitehall to devolve funding and new powers. While the governance of our other cities is fragmented between individual councils, the devolution of financial powers from Whitehall will always be incremental and faltering.

I made these points at a Progress rally for electoral reform in June. The RSA's Matthew Taylor was there, too, and has since called on Labour to embrace elected mayors. Writing in the Guardian, he said:

‘If government is serious about giving local leaders the scope to make tough choices, it should commit to create mayors in all England's largest cities. As Ken and Boris have shown, the personal mandate of a mayor makes a step change to local leaders' visibility, legitimacy and capacity to stand up to the centre.'

Why not?

So if metro mayors are such a great idea, why hasn't Labour gone for them already? Three reasons are usually trotted out:

• Reason 1: mayors would add another unwelcome layer of bureaucracy

• Reason 2: mayors would be maverick personalities, rather than ‘proper' politicians

• Reason 3: mayors are often associated with corruption, personal scandal and financial irregularities

All three reasons are now looking a bit tired.

Mayors would actually add a useful democratic, strategic layer to city governance - much better than the unelected layers of quangocracy that have proliferated in recent years.

Maverick personalities and proper politicians are not mutually exclusive. London has been run by two mavericks since 2000, and most people now agree the London mayoralty is a good idea.

Mayors do not have a monopoly on scandal and corruption, as MPs have demonstrated recently.

How to achieve metro mayors

Labour should go for metro mayors in its next manifesto. Three basic steps are needed:

• Commit to mayors in principle, as the best governance model for our biggest cities outside London - visible, directly accountable and able to take tough decisions.

• Prioritise the next wave of mayors in the four biggest and most coherent metropolitan areas outside London - Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Leeds city-region and Greater Birmingham.

• Give these metro mayors real financial powers, including direct control over housing, transport and skills funding - and the ability to raise revenues locally, including the whole of the business rate.

A bold step like this would help to re-engage millions of voters, and give our biggest cities outside London the powers they need to succeed. It would take English devolution to the next stage, and more than match the Tories' proposals. Another decade of incremental, piecemeal devolution is not an option.

If Labour wants to hold onto power, it will have to give some away.

This is a chapter from Progress's pamphlet on democratic renewal

www.progressonline.org.uk