Decisions affecting North Staffordshire should be taken by OUR leaders – not by Michael Gove...
TODAY sees Chancellor Rishi Sunak deliver his Budget and the Spending Review, and given what has been made public so far it will be interesting to see how it pans out for North Staffordshire.
The real big noise came at the weekend when it was leaked that billions of pounds would be made available to a number of city regions around the country towards transport infrastructure. ‘Levelling up in action’ went the spin, as Metro Mayors including Andy Burnham and Andy Street rubbed their hands with glee at their forthcoming windfall.
At the same time as the various city regions were celebrating this Whitehall-consented largesse, Stokeon-trent City Council was consulting on how best to spend £600,000 on the introduction of active travel measures. While welcomed, the difference between our city region and others couldn’t be starker.
Our public transport challenges and woes are well-known. Getting around North Staffordshire is a nightmare at times, and our system effectively shuts down between 5 and 7pm each day. Yet all we can command appears to be a few quid towards cycle lanes and preparing a business case to reopen Meir Station. This patently isn’t levelling up if it is to have any meaning.
So why is North Staffordshire seemingly being treated differently to other major urban areas? The reason is most likely local governance arrangements. Areas like Greater Manchester and the West Midlands have Combined Authorities and directly elected Metro Mayors. North Staffordshire doesn’t. As think tank Centre for Towns has put it: “Be a city region or be left out. That’s the message from Whitehall”.
This is a governance model that has formed a key element to the Tory approach to devolution since George Osborne began to talk about building a Northern Powerhouse a decade or so ago, and these Combined Authorities have benefited from increased local powers and, crucially, funding towards the physical projects that get politicians hot under their hivis collars. However, at the same time local authorities have seen their own positions and finances continually eroded.
There has been some debate as to whether North Staffordshire should push for Combined Authority status, but such debate generally comes with a health warning. Calls for a North Staffordshire-wide authority are often resisted, while Stoke-on-trent has previously adopted and then rejected a directly elected mayor.
But as things stand right now, North Staffordshire may not be the best fit with the current iteration of the Combined Authority/metro Mayor model in that we are too small. North Staffordshire has a population of c485,000 people, while the current smallest Combined Authority areas are Tees Valley (667,500), North of Tyne (809,000), and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough (852,500).
However, there is a Levelling Up White Paper in the pipeline which will inevitably deal with local government reorganisation, and Michael Gove – Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities – has stated that he wants to encourage and enable strong local leadership, which may hint at a more flexible approach, while it should be noted that the North East Combined Authority does not have a directly elected Metro Mayor.
And so, when the time comes, we should fight our own corner and demand the right to determine the governance model that works for North Staffordshire. We should not have to acquiesce to a particular model dictated centrally in order to be treated properly and fairly. When it comes to policy and associated decisions affecting North Staffordshire, I want them to be made in North Staffordshire by local leaders, not by Michael Gove. And I’m pretty sure that if our local politicians wanted to pick a fight with the Government around how North Staffordshire is being treated, I’m fairly sure that most here would stand behind them. Put simply: let us decide how to level up.
Back to the Budget and Spending Review, while it is highly unlikely that North Staffordshire will see any of the real big bucks, it is likely that Stoke-on-trent City Council will get a decision on the recent £73.5 million Levelling Up Fund bid. I genuinely hope it’s a success, but I won’t be hoodwinked by any spin suggesting that this is ‘levelling up in action’.
We should demand better because we deserve better, and it is about time that we got it. The electorate is watching.