Why Labour should back directly elected mayors

By Siôn Simon / @sionsimon

In the UK, elected Mayors were a Labour idea. It was the first Blair government which introduced them. In the rest of the world, they are just common sense. Almost every major city in the world directly elects its leader.

Which is not surprising. One would have thought it uncontroversial that our metropolitan citizens should be able directly to elect a named individual whom they can also hold directly accountable for failure. Council leaders are not so elected and not so accountable. The current Conservative leader of Birmingham city council was chosen in a closed meeting by 30-odd Conservative councillors in 2004. Not by the people of Birmingham, few of whom have ever heard of him. Nor had they any direct means to get rid of him if they did.

Recent research has shown name recognition of local authority leaders to be around 10-20%. In cities with elected mayors, it is more like 70-80%. It is a pre-requisite of real accountability that people know who you are. They can hold you directly to your promises. From which there is nowhere to hide when things go wrong. Those who say “it’s too much power in the hands of one person” are seeing it through the wrong end of the telescope. It’s about putting power back into the hands of the people by giving them a direct say.

It is because recognition levels are so different that the Parliamentary analogy also falls. Some defenders of the status quo note that Prime Ministers aren’t directly elected either. The difference is that virtually everybody who casts a general election vote knows the main leadership candidates for whom they are indirectly voting. But in a local government election, 90% of people don’t.

And, of course, it is not actually the “leader” who runs the council. The council is really run by the chief executive. An important provision of the Localism Bill (which has completed its Commons stages and had its second reading in the Lords last week) is for elected Mayors also to assume the powers of the chief executive. This is crucial. If Mayors are to be democratically chosen and held properly accountable, they must also have the organisational means to deliver the transformational change of which cities like Birmingham are in desperate need. It is little wonder that with the administrative infrastructure in the hands of unelected and unaccountable officials, city government has become so unresponsive.

Good Mayors will not hoard power at the centre, as bad councils have done. They will push it out to communities. It would scarcely be possibly to centralise government more stalinistically than Birmingham city council does. Theirs is a cagey, defensive control-freakery which would prefer that nobody does anything than that somebody else do something good. Successful mayors, though, push power out from the centre to citizens and to the third and private sectors, supporting and enabling them to do for themselves what they want to get done. Look at what Chiamparino did in partnership with the Torino Internazionale (Italian). It works.

Alongside beefed-up scrutiny, community leadership also offers an enhanced role for the city councillor in the age of the Mayor. Councillors who see the Mayoral system as a threat to their own position are missing the point. It is a massive opportunity for them too.

Accountability, responsiveness, real devolution – these are Labour ideas and we should be owning them. Next year we will have confirmatory referendums in England’s eleven largest non-London cities. The following year those cities which vote yes will elect their first Mayors.

Labour should be on the front foot in these elections. We did well in the cities in the elections just gone, and we will do even better over the next couple of years. We have a golden opportunity to elect Labour Mayors in the big cities who will be bigger figures making more of an impact than council leaders ever can. Ed Miliband should seize and own this issue now. A phalanx of Labour Mayors re-energising local parties and re-connecting with big city communities would be useful at his flank on the long march to 2015.

Siôn Simon is running to be the first directly elected Mayor of Birmingham.