The year 2024 is set to be seismic UK for politics. In May, a wave of new regional mayors were voted into office across England, representing more than 24 million citizens. Together, they could provide a powerful counterbalance to Westminster's stranglehold in setting the collective direction of England's social and economic progress.
All the polls point towards a new national government emerging in July, with the incumbents proclaiming their promise of ‘change' from the rooftops of every school, business and hard-hat wearing establishment in the country.
What can our national leaders learn about change from their regional counterparts? The evidence we see, through our work at the Centre for Thriving Places, is a growing number of local and regional leaders showing themselves to be courageous trailblazers. I believe they have the power to lead the way towards the radical and lasting change our society and our planet so desperately need.
Across the UK, but particularly across England, regional mayors are stuck between two worlds.
he clear directive from central government is to focus on increasing inward investment, to grow a region's productivity to contribute to the growth of national GDP. That destination is set, and that medicine prescribed, regardless of how much GDP growth is generated through low-paid jobs and wealth-extracting developments.
By contrast, those same local leaders are grappling with the needs of the real world they can see on every street, in every hospital, school and community centre around them.
This story demands very different kinds of economic interventions: supporting people who are far from the labour market into good jobs; raising wages in the ‘everyday economy' of care, health, retail and hospitality; investing in childcare, public transport, community spaces and reducing carbon equitably.
Regional mayors and the combined authorities they lead are shaking off the trickledown, laissez faire approach that has dominated local and national economic development.
They are intervening more strongly in local economies to shape them and ensure wealth is distributed evenly. They are measuring progress beyond GVA growth and working systemically on social, environmental and economic problems and they are supporting stronger community connections and citizen agency.
West Yorkshire Combined Authority (WYCA) is currently developing its new economic strategy, focused on policies that are inclusive and distributional by design.
previous local economic strategies would go hard on innovation and job creation and see inclusivity as a nice-to-have add-on, the WYCA is working with local partners on policies and programmes focused first and foremost on the wellbeing of people living in the region.
This work will support better childcare and link the region's creative economy assets more deeply with the aspirations of people living there. It particularly targets those in deprived areas and creates accelerator programmes for entrepreneurs that are not usually represented.
Mayors are moving away from GVA growth as the main measure of progress and developing more wide-ranging ways to understand and track local progress, measuring growth in the things that matter – better health, good jobs and cleaner air.
The West Midlands Combined Authority has created an Inclusive Growth Doughnut, focusing all local investment around the same set of social and environmental ‘fundamentals', which meet the needs and aspirations of citizens while also being regenerative of the environment.
Based on the sustainable development goals, the fundamentals include growing an ‘inclusive economy' and health and wellbeing.
The new North East Combined Authority is supporting stronger citizen agency and voice in communities that have for decades been at the mercy of local change, rather than helping to shape it. Its Community Partnerships Fund is devoting £4.5m to support activities that build social capital, strengthen the voluntary, community and social enterprise sector and support communities to have a stronger say in local decisions.
There is so much for central government to learn about the way, for example, health is a cross-cutting theme within most devolved regions, accelerated by the introduction of cross-sector Integrated Care Systems (ICSs).
The health-in-everything approach tackles our most entrenched local challenges by understanding the wider social, economic and environmental determinants of health and the interconnections between poor health and bad housing, low incomes and pollution.
Westminster could reflect on how regions are redefining productivity in terms of our capacity to convert pounds spent into better outcomes for people and planet. This shift is transforming regional economic plans and could do the same for an incoming national government.
If national leaders catch up with their local and regional counterparts, by focusing on what matters and joining up government silos to deliver it, this could transform our ambition for growth.
Liz Zeidler is the chief executive of not-for-profit consultancy Centre for Thriving Places
X – @thriving_places
