John Fenwick - Leading Local Government: The Role of Directly Elected Mayors

We wish to acknowledge the help of many people in writing this book. Numerous local authority officers and elected council members have over the years given freely of their time in sharing their views and the fruits of their experience. Former academic colleagues have contributed their ideas to our emerging view of where directly elected mayors fit into the pattern of local governance, but we hope that our thoughts will also be of interest to those involved in the challenging and sometimes thankless practical business of public service. We would like to thank those elected mayors to whom we have spoken, but of course the interpretations we make and the conclusions we draw remain our responsibility. Special thanks to Anna Railton for the illustrations in .

Professor John Fenwick

Professor Lorraine Johnston

Northumbria University

2020

The focus of this book is upon leadership and local governance, with particular attention to the ways in which directly elected executive mayors may be having a significant impact upon the leadership of local government. In the context of continuing institutional change at a local level, our discussion seeks to highlight the limitations of purely structural changes to local government systems and therefore focusses upon human agency and wider processes of political change in understanding local governance today. Our principal focus is upon the UK from which we draw upon our own research with elected mayors and other influential local actors. This is set in the context of wider European and American experience where directly elected mayors are more firmly established as parts of the system of local administration, but we find that the different political context of different countries limits the value of such comparisons. Overall, rather than simply describing the changes that have brought elected mayors to the UK, and specifically to England, we aim throughout for a critical perspective on how we are governed locally.

The discussion begins with a review of traditional local government wherein local authorities were classic examples of Weberian rational-bureaucratic systems within which rule-bound employees carried out their allocated duties in order to provide statutory services to the public. This includes some attention to how local government is organised, and how it has been reorganised, in pursuit of finding some elusive structural arrangements for local administration which would face up to the challenges of a rapidly changing society. We suggest that during the twentieth century it would largely have been impossible to envisage leaders in local government: it would literally have made no sense, for bureaucracies cannot be led. They can only be administered or managed. Local government, organised through a formal committee system of elected representatives, carried out its designated tasks as a guardian of public money and as a system of local administration. In the centralised polity of the UK, local government remained a creature of central government with no legal autonomy. Mayors have long existed in local government of course, but until the arrival of the directly elected mayor in the twenty-first century they were merely ceremonial postholders with no executive powers.

We will then move to some early examples of where local leadership began to be asserted against the grain of organisational structures, demonstrating that human agency may be effective even when the institutional context is unpromising. Joseph Chamberlain in Birmingham in the late nineteenth century and T. Dan Smith in Newcastle upon Tyne in the 1960s cast themselves as reformist local leaders with, as we shall see, a controversial idea of what such leadership entailed. This trend was manifested once again in Ken Livingstones role in the Greater London Council in the early 1980s. Such examples were exceptions to the accepted practice of how local areas are to be run and their legacy remains, to some extent, unresolved in the public mind. However, they demonstrated the possibility of assertive and effective local leadership, perhaps linked to a reinvigoration of local government itself.

We turn to an examination of the efforts of local leaders to attract funds and to promote economic development and local growth. We see this as the primary rationale of (government-inspired) attempts to create forms of local leadership that will work. Yet, the public endorsement of these forms of leadership such as that of the elected mayor is lacking. Leadership is being pursued largely for material reasons and as part of the search for resources. Democratic legitimacy is, it appears, a secondary consideration. Nonetheless, some commentators (e.g., Sweeting & Hambleton, 2017; in their evaluation of new mayoral governance in Bristol) do think that the mayor has made a difference. Much depends, we suggest, on local factors. Indeed, as we argue, the mayor may be seen locally as the solution to some specific problems of local governance.

Our discussion finally re-focusses upon our main topic of the directly elected executive mayor. This utilises our original research and the evidence thus collected. This refers primarily to England as this is the only nation of the UK to have so far introduced the office of the elected mayor.

By acting as a lightning-rod for public engagement the office of directly elected mayor has fulfilled one of the objectives of its introduction into English local government: to provide high-profile and visible political leadership. (Copus, 2006, p. 139)

We will seek to assess whether this claim is accurate. Following legislation in 2000, and after a lengthy period of institutional change in local government, it became possible for the first time for the public to directly elect an executive mayor throughout England (and in Wales, although no mayors have yet been introduced there). Inspired by the big city leaders of Europe and the United States, the introduction of the directly elected mayor was pursued with vigour by central government and enjoyed a large measure of cross-party support. The elected mayor was enthusiastically advocated by Michael (Lord) Heseltine and was taken up as an important element of New Labours reform of local political management, though party political attitudes varied much more at local level depending on perceived local political advantage. As Headlam and Hepburn (2018) noted, elected mayors were expected to reconnect voters with local politicians and also to occupy a key point within the new patterns of local governance wherein networks, co-ordination and interaction with other tiers of government were increasingly important. Here mayors are expected to act as a focal point in the network, setting goals and coordinating decision making and service delivery (Headlam & Hepburn, 2018, p. 71).