East Midlands needs an elected mayor, says Street

The East Midlands should push for a metro mayor – that was the message from one high profile speaker at Wednesday’s Invest Midlands online conference.

Andy Street, who was recently re-elected as the mayor of the West Midlands for a second term, extolled the virtues of a having a single person to lobby Government on behalf of a wider region.

Speaking to TheBusinessDesk.com’s Midlands editor Sam Metcalf during a Q&A session at Invest Midlands, Street said the metro mayor model means that one person can make things happen.

He added: “I do believe this model is right and the East Midlands is slightly disadvantaged by not having joined the areas that have a mayor.”

Street said that jobs were his main priority for his second term, which will last four years.

He added: ““he level of benefits claimants has doubled over the last year.

“In the 1980s that became endemic and it stuck.

“So the real issue now is making sure that that does not become endemic. So that means rapid work to get people back into work in the sectors they have been shed from, things like hospitality.

“It means, of course, getting the big wins like HS2, like the Commonwealth Games, to employ the people they said they were going to employ.”

He said he believed his success in the polls was down to a realistic first term, and he attributed his win to a practical plan for his coming tenure: “It was ambitious, but practical.

“People judged how I had gone about the job the previous four years, and all of that had found some favour.”