Can Mayors Build Bridges With the Built Environment?

Next Thursday 62 candidates vie to fill ten metro mayor posts across England. Their ability to effect change is often underestimated, sometimes even by the officeholders themselves. It shouldn’t be.

Now covering half the country by population, collectively this relatively new political tier controls something like £25bn of public spending. 

They have real power – over transport, skills provision, land acquisition and regeneration - though it’s too limited. The UK has one of the most centralised political power structures – and tax bases - around. The Levelling Up white paper– and I don’t mean to frighten you, but that tome landed just two years ago – acknowledged that only 35% of public investment was carried out by subnational levels of government in the UK, compared with almost 60% on average across the OECD.

But if their power is clipped, their influence is more significant. They can convene, curate and cajole: making the case for skills investment in the West Midlands; securing public and private sector funding for life sciences in Liverpool; standing up for the leisure economy through night tsars in Manchester and London.

Of course, all that convening, curating and cajoling demands top-tier communication skills. You might take this as a given in a metro mayor, given their political track records. Eight of the 15 previous or current metro mayors had been MPs before they were elected as mayors, and nine had been local councillors - four had been both, says the Institute for Government. Only two were neither an MP nor a councillor before being elected mayor.

But if recent experience teaches us anything, political experience is no guarantee of effective communication skills. Indeed, one of the two incumbent mayors with no prior political experience – Andy Street – is a better communicator than most, a quality that may not be enough to save his mayoralty.

Whether returned or replaced, the ten incoming mayors need to put communication at the heart of the projects. They need to act like executive chairs: they have to be results-orientated of course; but for UK plc to succeed, they need to be champions at home and abroad too.

We know Treasury-funded investment will be a challenge for the next national government; local, regional and national public-private partnerships will be critical to unlocking regeneration.

What that requires is for the built environment to get far better at dealing with national and subnational government. At the same time politicians and officials must to grow more comfortable dealing with the built environment.

Perhaps this is where metro mayors (and I’m including London’s mayor here though the postholder is not technically “metro”) can play their most critical role.

In London, Manchester and Birmingham, mayors understand the need to work with the built environment to deliver on their ambitions. Liverpool too. Candidate materials in the East Midlands suggest it’s well understood there, and perhaps in the West of England too, as that region looks to marry industrial strategy with climate action.

Whether its their first term or their third, metro mayors can bring education, locally and nationally. Too many local and national politicians treat the built environment like the enemy, usually unfairly and almost always flying in the face of pragmatism. Some in the built environment do too.

If mayors can broker relationships and help all parties understand the benefits of partnership, mutual understanding, and shared goals and rewards, we will all be the beneficiaries.

Damian Wild
ING Managing Director