In England and across the world, mayors have wildly disparate powers. So how do they stack up? Lucy Kenningham explains
In 1990, Michael Heseltine came back from a trip to Japan absolutely buzzing. It wasn’t the architecture or the sushi. Mayors, he enthused. The UK could do with its own crop of those. John Major was keen, but it was a devolution-inspired New Labour that took the idea and ran with it. Along with rolling out legislatures in Scotland and Wales, Tony Blair’s government created the position of London mayor in 2000.
They would have gone further, creating mayors across the country, but for a humiliating defeat. In the 2004 devolution referendum, a staggering 78 per cent of residents voted against devolving powers to the North East. John Prescott, a doughty champion of the devolution project, was particularly put out. If this result seems odd to you, perhaps that’s a sign of now near-universal support for regional devolution has become.
It’s a testament to the success of the mayoral model. “Since 2000, London’s three mayors have shown themselves to be able advocates for the capital, leaders at times of crisis, and promoters of projects and policies that would have been impossible in the 1990s,” says the Centre for London think tank (think of Cycle Superhighways and the Oyster Card). What’s more, “their powers have been extended to affordable housing programmes, more comprehensive planning powers, and stronger police oversight.”
London was pulling ahead in the 2000s, in part, people said, due to its devolved powers. To narrow the gap between the capital and the rest of the country, Heseltine published a paper arguing for more metro mayors in 2012. David Cameron was pro, deeming directly elected mayors “accountable”. In 2017, Greater Manchester, Liverpool City, Tees Valley, the West of England and the West Midlands got their own mayors. Almost every year since then, we’ve created more. For the first time, people across England are going to the polls to choose 13 mayors.
Yet ithey will all have different levels of power. That is because when a mayoral post is dreamed up, a negotiation ensues over........