Are the Conservatives planning to inject Andy Burnham with political steroids? That could be the result of one of the plans being mulled by Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who has been trying to work out how to make levelling up something that works and lasts.
Greater Manchester Tories will spit tacks about the mayoral position created by their own party
As I reported in the Observer yesterday, Hunt wants to change the current model of areas bidding endlessly for small pots of money here and there to one where the power is decentralised from Whitehall to local elected representatives. The ideal people to do this, of course, would be elected mayors, given that the whole point of setting up these new layers of government was to empower local areas to take their own decisions.
There are, though, some political problems with this approach which any Greater Manchester Tory would be very quick to point out. They will spit tacks about the mayoral position created by their own party when George Osborne was the Chancellor. Back in 2014, Osborne was on the brink of announcing the Greater Manchester Mayor plan alongside his Northern Powerhouse policy. He was warned there and then by 1922 Committee chair and Altrincham MP Graham Brady that it would only benefit Labour and would set up an unaccountable political powerbase, too.
Eight years later, Andy Burnham’s political success in the role is testament to that. As warned, there is no real structure for scrutiny around him though, unlike the London Assembly which holds the Mayor of London to account. Conservatives in the area now complain that transport, health and housing have not improved at all under Burnham’s watch, but they have precious little opportunity to point this out formally.
Mind you, you could make the same argument about transport, health and housing nationally under the Conservatives in central government. But the logic behind making levelling up something mayors are responsible for delivering is that it is then baked into the system in a way that another government would find harder to remove or ignore.
Labour’s basic position on levelling up is that the government isn’t doing it very well, if at all. But the party isn’t opposed to the concept. Handing levelling up powers to local government would be a way of ensuring it had to sign up to the delivery model, too. This is because a more powerful Andy Burnham would be a problem for a Labour government that wanted to take his new powers and money away.
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