New Model Mayors Democracy, Devolution and Direction Nick Hope and Nirmalee Wanduragala www.nlgn.org.uk New Local Government Network (NLGN) is an independent think tank that seeks to transform public services, revitalise local political leadership and empower local communities. NLGN is publishing this report as part of its programme of research and innovative policy projects, which we hope will be of use to policy makers and practitioners. The views expressed are however those of the authors and not necessarily those of NLGN. © NLGN January 2010 All rights reserved Published by NLGN Prepared by NLGN First floor, New City Court, 20 St. Thomas Street, London SE1 9RS Tel 020 7357 0051 . Email [email protected] . www.nlgn.org.uk New Model Mayors Contents 3 Contents Acknowledgements 4 Introduction 5 1 The case for directly elected mayors 8 2 Reinvigorating democracy through open mayoral primaries 21 3 Devolution and greater incentives for mayoral leadership 33 Conclusion 53 4 New Model Mayors Acknowledgements Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the elected mayors and chief executives who provided their comments and insights on an earlier draft of this report that went out for consultation. We are grateful to those in the NLGN team who provided constructive feedback and support throughout the writing of this pamphlet. We would also like to like to extend particular thanks to Belinda Moreau-Jones for her intellectual input and research support. The views expressed, however, are those of the authors and any errors or omissions are, of course, our own. New Model Mayors Introduction 5 Introduction The New Local Government Network has been a strong proponent of directly elected mayors for over a decade. There are many reasons for NLGN’s strong advocacy of the mayoral model of governance, but primarily it is rooted in a belief that directly elected mayors have huge potential to improve civic engagement, achieve devolution of power from Whitehall and allow strong and democratic local leadership. Once the mayoral option was formally introduced in the 2000 Local Government Act, NLGN began supporting and advising local mayoral campaigns and tracking local developments. After the election of the first eleven mayors in May and October 2002 our focus turned to working with the mayors to understand and disseminate the lessons of the model in practice. With directly elected mayors in place, NLGN established the Mayoral Forum to offer practical support to this group and this forum has been meeting regularly ever since. But, the story of the mayoral agenda has been one of slow and stunted progress. The prohibitively high threshold for a petition to trigger a mayoral referendum, alongside institutional interests and resistance, or outright hostility from local political parties, have all proved major obstacles. Although the mayoral agenda has stalled, we believe the case for mayors is compelling and has become even more so in recent years. There is a growing recognition across the main political parties of the need for greater localism and a more place-focused approach to policy. Elected mayors, with their unique local mandate and clear lines of accountability could hold the key to the devolution of powers from central government to communities. As a directly elected leader for an area, mayors are exceptionally well placed to orchestrate and co-ordinate strong multi-agency partnerships to deliver services more effectively. This has always been important, and such networks are well established in many areas, but as our understanding of the complex interdependencies between policy themes, and the interconnectedness of many challenges, increases so will the need for strong leadership. 6 New Model Mayors Introduction Strong local leadership and vision is also needed to take bold decisions and citizens need to be better engaged in choices about what can be realistically delivered, particularly with constraints on public spending likely in the coming years. Elected mayors are well placed to execute this function, and their high visibility and public profile can help capture the attention of the media and citizens. In an increasingly competitive and globalized world, mayors can play a strong advocacy role for their locality to a range of audiences nationally and internationally. We therefore welcome the recent consultation by the Government into the option of directly elected mayors for city-regions and the announcement from the Conservative Party that they will legislate to hold mayoral referendums in England’s twelve largest cities. However, we are disappointed that the Government consulted on ways to make it easier for people to demand that their local leaders move to establishing a directly elected mayor through a referendum, but dropped these proposals from their legislative programme. Though challenging, the mayoral agenda needs to be driven forward at a greater pace and we urge renewed urgency from the Government. The need to accelerate, or perhaps more accurately kick-start, the mayoral agenda is more pressing than ever. We hope that this pamphlet will prove to be a further useful contribution from NLGN to the mayoral agenda and that it will help to advance the case for directed elected mayors as a key way of overcoming many of the challenges our communities face. Our proposals centre around two key elements. Firstly, the need to heighten further the democratic advantage of the mayoral mandate as distinct from conventional approaches, principally through the addition of primaries. We argue that a more rigorous candidate selection process to select mayoral candidates will serve to improve civic engagement, increase participation, empower communities, open-up politics and revive interest in our democratic institutions. Secondly, we argue that the singular and clear democratic mandate of an elected mayor should see the use of the mayoral model as a vehicle to deliver a fundamental devolutionary shift in powers from Whitehall to localities. We recommend additional powers and tools for all elected mayors, and suggest that more thought should be given to understanding the different New Model Mayors Introduction 7 role that local authority and city-region mayors can play. Therefore, we argue that all mayors should receive new powers from the centre and also that additional powers should be devolved to city-region mayors. We propose a new devolutionary model: a ‘gold’ tier for local authority mayors and a ‘platinum’ tier for city-region mayors. Such a model would not only incentivise individual councils to adopt the mayoral model, but promote the more difficult path of pooling sovereignty and creating cross-local authority city-region mayors where appropriate. Unless there are genuinely significant devolutionary incentives, we suspect that the inertia engrained in the existing political structures will prevent further change from occurring voluntarily. 8 New Model Mayors The case for directly elected mayors 1 The case for directly elected mayors Decentralisation and devolution Despite huge improvements in the performance of local government in England over the past decade, too often Ministers are hesitant to grant freedoms, flexibilities and powers to councils. Politicians, journalists and civil servants in the ‘Westminster Bubble’ are frequently and unduly critical of local authorities and overly sceptical of their capabilities. The self-perpetuating model of enormous pressure from the national London-based media, demanding instant responses from the centre, and Ministers who are desperate to feed this media machine with new policy initiatives, are major obstacles to decentralisation and devolution. However, the need for a more place-based approach to policy is growing ever-stronger. Social and economic change is being felt in different ways and in different localities. Top-down national policy from Whitehall departments cannot hope to adequately capture this variation, nor can it provide the holistic cross-cutting approach needed to tackle increasingly complex and inter-related challenges. The economic downturn has not played out in a uniform way across England making the need for a more responsive and localised approach all the more salient and important. Despite having one of the most centralised political and administrative systems in the industrialised world, and a growing recognition amongst politicians in Westminster that they need to “let go”, wrenching power from Whitehall is not proving an easy task. Although progress has been made, too often the devolutionary rhetoric of politicians has not been matched by action. NLGN has recommended a number of reforms to help ensure that the balance of power between the centre and localities is shifted and decision- making takes place at the right spatial level, such as through the introduction of a new “duty to devolve”.1 We believe that mayors are another mechanism that should be utilised to achieve a radically more decentralised approach. 1 NLGN (2009), ‘Challenging Perspectives: Improving Whitehall’s Spatial Awareness’ New Model Mayors The case for directly elected mayors 9 Mayors, with their local mandate, are well placed to be granted wide-ranging delegated powers to help transform the way communities and citizens are served. They provide clear lines of accountability, demarcated responsibility, and effective leadership so that it is clear to everyone “where the buck stops”. Ministers can be confident that they will not to be held responsible by the electorate or the media for the particular actions of an administration in a locality. To claim that a council leader cannot be superior to an elected mayor would be simplistic. Elected mayors can be good and bad, just as leaders can be good and bad. Nor are we are saying that the mayoral model is a panacea to all the challenges areas face. But we do contend that mayoral governance has a number of attributes that combine and form a virtuous circle, which should not be overlooked. Partnership working and integrating policy With a unique mandate, derived from their direct election across a locality, mayors can be better placed to lead an area rather than just the council.