Adonis: ‘Birmingham needs a mayor to avert a crisis’

FORMER Government minister Lord Adonis this week ignited the debate over elected mayors for Birmingham when he told an audience the city needed desperately to raise its leadership game.

Delivering the annual lecture for the Lunar Society, Lord Adonis said three radical initiatives were vital for the city’s future: an elected mayor, high speed rail and academy schools.

He said: “The big picture for Birmingham looks to me to be bleak unless there is big change. Not more incremental change, but radical transformation under strong, purposeful civic leadership.”

The city was facing a crisis , he said, underperforming in skills, employment and health, and desperately needed change in order to prosper. He said: “Birmingham has very low productivity and it is excessively dependent on public sector jobs.”

The Labour peer, director of think tank the Institute for Government, has been appointed by communities secretary Eric Pickles to tour the country drumming up support for elected mayors. Referenda will be held in 2012 in England’s core cities, when citizens will be asked if they want elected mayors to run local councils. If the result is a ‘yes’ vote, Birmingham could have an elected mayor in power by 2013.

The former transport minister avoided directly criticising current council leader Mike Whitby, but said: “The city needs to raise its game significantly in terms of leadership, performance and strategy.  I don’t put this down to individuals so much as to the system, in particular the failure to follow London a decade ago in creating a Mayor able to provide stronger leadership.

“Birmingham, is the largest single-tier local authority in Europe with a £4bn annual budget. Birmingham with a mayor could have the best of both worlds: an authority which, because of its size and reach, is the de facto strategic leader for the region, able to significantly influence what it does not control – including transport, policing and economic development – while also possessing the advantage of direct responsibility for key public services, notably schooling, which are critical to the city’s future prosperity.”

• To read more of Lord Adonis’s comments on elected mayors, click here.

And making the case for HS2 , Adonis said the scheme’s importance lay in the fact that it would make Birmingham central to the whole UK rail network, with its improved links to the North being as important a benefit as the improved connectivity with London.

He said: “HS2 completely redraws this inter-city rail map.  Instead of being at the end of an inter-city branch line, Birmingham International becomes both the first stop on HS2 going north to everywhere; it is also the junction for the routes which then diverge north-west to Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow, and north-east to the East Midlands, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle and Edinburgh.  Britain’s second city becomes – for the first time – a national rail hub.”

But the former transport minister had harsh words for Birmingham bus and rail operator National Express and Centro, the West Midlands body with strategic responsibility for transport in the West Midlands.

He said: “Bus usership in London has doubled in the last 25 years; in the West Midlands it has slumped by a third; yet last year National Express, who run most of your buses, recorded a £160m profit while fares rose in the city by up to 9.5 pc as bus usership fell still further.  If Centro has a credible plan to tackle this, I haven’t noticed.”