Mayoral muddle

Wake-up call over devolution

SIX ENGLISH regions will today discover the identity of their first directly-elected mayor. They include the West Midlands, where the battle between the Conservatives and Labour sets the tone of next month’s general election, as well as Greater Manchester, Liverpool City and the Tees Valley closer to home.

The one area missing from this list is Yorkshire (with the honourable exception of Doncaster which has had its own elected mayor since 2002), and this despite exhaustive efforts by local, regional and national leaders to reach some form of consensus on the best devolution deal of all for an area that compares more than favourably to Scotland in terms of both size and stature.

This newspaper has previously argued that it’s important to get the right leadership structure in place from the outset and that time does need to be spent formulating a blueprint which maximises Yorkshire’s future economic potential. Given that voters don’t want more tiers of government – they desire more effective governance – no deal is still preferable to an ill-conceived plan that amounts to little more than a series of glorified ‘talking shops’ which achieve little and lack accountability.

That said, it is a source of frustration that this region’s devolution debate is mired in deadlock two years after rival regions decided to seize the moment and make the most of the policy-making powers made available to them. At some stage, Yorkshire will need to determine its future direction – perhaps yesterday’s elections will prove to be the wake-up call that this area’s influential leaders, including Northern Powerhouse Minister Andrew Percy, do now require.