Events of the past year mean the 2021 mayoral elections will be dominated by what voters think and feel about the places where they live.
What story about the future should candidates be telling in the English mayoral elections next month? It is very different to 2017. A great deal has happened since, including two General Elections, two different sets of Prime Ministers and Opposition Leaders, the UK has left the EU and a global pandemic has turned communities and local economies upside down. The economic impact is easiest to describe – the deepest and steepest recession since records began, millions of workers furloughed and millions more likely to be unemployed at the end. Billions wiped off GDP and growth forecasts and the UK Government estimating that spending on Covid measures will top £400billion in a little over a year.
So much of the political campaigning will be about our collective and individual experiences of Covid-19. Did you get support or not? Are you a frontline worker or not? Should we be paying you more if you’re a nurse? Have you or members of your family had the virus? Have you lost friends or family? Have you had the vaccine? Have you still got a job or a business?
The Government’s plans for more Mayors and/or Combined Authorities from before Christmas now feel a long time ago and their interest in devolution may be waning. Skills policy has often been at or very near the top of powers that mayors have wanted whether in Greater Manchester, Teesside, the East of England or the West Midlands. But the ‘Skills for Jobs’ white paper barely mentions Combined Authorities, Mayors or LEPs instead choosing to hand a stripped back local role to Chambers of Commerce. Now the Industrial Strategy has been abandoned too and local plans, in name at least, are also likely to disappear along with the Industrial Strategy Council and at least part of the department that drove them.
In its place we have a ‘Plan for Growth’, published alongside the Budget and led very clearly by the Treasury. There is some continuity including its emphasis on (and faith in) increased R&D funding, infrastructure and in skills. There are promises of ‘innovation’ and ‘place’ strategies in the next few months. Just as significant may be the Plan for Growth’s stated ambition for ‘every region and nation of the UK to have at least one globally competitive city, acting as hotbeds of innovation and hubs of high value activity’. These are all familiar Treasury objectives – and a return to a long-held faith in fixing the supply side over the longer term.
But most of the decisive politics in the elections may be much more immediate and much more local. The electoral map has after all shifted dramatically since 2017. There are five new Conservative MPs in Greater Manchester – in parts of Bury, Rochdale, Bolton and Wigan. In the West Midlands, the Conservatives now hold both West Bromwich seats, two out of three seats in Wolverhampton, all four in Dudley and two out of three in Walsall. The towns within city region boundaries are rather bluer than at the last set of elections and could be the places that hold the electoral balance.
According to new research from Kings College, 61% of all voters saw inequality between places as the most serious facing Britain. Of that 67% of Labour and 59% of Conservative voters from the 2019 General Election saw the gaps between places as the most serious inequality needing to be tackled ahead of wealth, ethnicity, gender, education and age. But even though the long-term answers are still likely to include the realisation of agglomeration benefits, securing R&D investment and improving skills, infrastructure and some kind of local industrial strategy at the city region level, these are all challenging subjects to get across on the doorstep or in manifestos.
In time this must also include a convincing story of how more local economies will also evolve and what jobs can be created or preserved nearby. As Otteline Leyser, the CEO of UKRI says, science and technology ‘can’t just be something that happens over there’. So, any stories about ‘graphene’, ‘gigafactories’ or ‘green industries’ must explain how they will lead to more good local jobs and help to improve public services, high streets and communities throughout their city regions.
The recent record suggests that the Conservatives ‘getting Brexit done’ in 2019 and the ‘Voting Leave’ at the EU Referendum have had more recent success appealing to voters in such places. According to Rana Raroohar writing in the FT is that the ‘problem’ in places like Bolton, Walsall, Huddersfield and Peterborough and countless places like them, is that people vote. Or as set out by the LSE academic Andres Rodriguez Pose, this leads to ‘the revenge of the places that don’t matter’.
So mayoral candidates would be wise to think very carefully about how they do – starting with the agendas set out in ‘Levelling Up’, ‘Towns’, ‘High Streets’ and ‘Community Ownership’ funds. Of course, this isn’t funding that can make up for a decade of austerity. And of course, they should be more fairly distributed to the places that need funding the most. But we would be wise not to dismiss them as unimportant or fundamentally misguided in their nature. Political and symbolic objectives are every bit as legitimate as economic strategies and in the short term they may be more effective at the ballot box. As Rodriguez Pose adds, it is often the perceived trajectory of places that matter most.
These are elections that will be dominated by what we think about the places where we live. The places where we have all spent much more of the past year than we expected. The winning campaigns will be those that reach out most effectively to all parts of city regions – and particularly to those in more distant towns and suburbs. Candidates will need to spread their attention and to come up with ideas that will improve opportunities and outcomes for everyone and everywhere. The outcomes will come down to what voters think ‘levelling up’ really means and which mayoral candidates agree with them.
Andy Westwood is Vice Dean for Social Responsibility at the University of Manchester.
This blog is published as part of an occasional series by guest experts to provide a platform for new ideas in urban policy. While they do not always reflect our views, we consider them an important contribution to the debate.
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