The mayor the merrier?
Originally published in the Local Government Chronicle [22/04/2025]
As the days tick down to next week’s local elections – reduced as they are by the spate of Devolution Priority Programme caused postponements – it seems a given that all is moving apace with the devolution agenda. Six decades on from Redcliffe Maude and after all manners of chicanery along the way, finally we are being ushered into the new two-tier era of combined and strategic authorities.
However, despite the periodic proudly staged selfies of Labour mayors posing outside Downing Street, life is characterised by continual change. This state of affairs will not necessarily remain this way forever – especially with an eye to polling ahead of May and longer-term trends. And since this is the case, we should be thinking now about how relations will be managed if they do change, both upwards from the regional to national and downwards from regional to the local.
MHCLG minister Jim McMahon has gone on record as saying English metro mayors are ‘the first ministers of their regions’ and big personalities with a correspondingly big impact. So far, so good and fully in line with the Washington based Brookings Institute’s view of ‘metro mayors’ as charismatic engines of economic and social renewal. As transplanted across the Atlantic by former Obama administration housing and urban development guru Bruce Katz, this has held the line as Whitehall orthodoxy.
This indeed is a policy line that has consistently held from the days of the Cameron coalition, among which few we can also number his chancellor George Osborne’s creation the Office for Budget Responsibility as a means to keep public spending choices looking honest. Lest we forget, it was also during the Coalition years, and at Osborne’s behest, there was, with the ironic exception of Bristol, almost complete democratic rejection of mayoral models when put to referenda. And in contrast to the influence and power today’s mayors exude on the political stage today, we can compare and contrast to the weak performative devolutionary posturing that was the one-time only ‘cabinet of mayors’ photocall in Downing Street – an event that faded quicker than the Big Society. But the policy line remains consistent.
Looking upwards, and if we are to follow the thread of Labour’s constitutional thinking, we will ultimately see a quasi-federal system in the Council of the Nations and Regions. So if, as McMahon says, our mayors are ‘the first ministers of their regions’, it is worth noting in this comparison that first minsters in Scotland and Wales are not directly elected. This brings to mind Enoch Powell’s contention that, ‘power devolved is power retained’. He believed devolution would undermine parliamentary sovereignty and was incompatible with the unitary nature of the British state, arguing it was impossible for the same electorate to be represented in two legislative houses unless Britain became federal – which was unsuited to England given the absence of provinces or any strong regional feeling.
And looking below, is it fair to say that English directly elected mayors, in areas both metro and rurally retro, are uniquely democratically mandated given the constituent local authorities below them delivering services?
Indeed, amid the skirmishing taking place in the Greater Lincolnshire mayoralty, it was notable that Conservative candidate Rob Waltham sought to rubbish Reform contender, and former Conservative MP Andrea Jenkyn’s totemic desire to install a Musk-like DOGE for the area as a ‘load of rubbish’ derived from a ‘lack of understanding of local government’ and the fact that 80 per cent of council spend is devoted to adult and children’s social care.
This might be so much dust before the electoral wind but could well point to a new wave of contention between the strategic and service tiers as to whose responsibility is it anyway and how wisely local funds are being spent. Indeed, London Councils’ recently expressed wish for there to be a reset in borough/mayoral relationships and a seat around the table for the sake joint decision-making as part of a new devolution settlement for the capital, can be seen in this vein.
Where agreement can’t be reached, we must expect letters of no confidence in mayors from constituent councils, as Andy Street was subject to last year, to become the norm in a game of predictable mutual recriminations. As always, it will be worth paying attention to the shifting registers of political rhetoric. When the landscape does, as it surely will, fragment among combined authorities and unitaries of differing parties, amid ratcheting tensions with national government, just how fervent will ministers then be in lauding mayors as paragons of democratic accountability with the mandate of first ministers to get things done?
Jonathan Werran is chief executive, Localis