Draft South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (Election of Mayor and Transfer of Police and Crime Commissioner Functions) Order 2024

Miriam Cates Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2024 General Committees

[Miriam Cates (Penistone and Stocksbridge) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I want to speak briefly in opposition to this order. Although it is tempting to speak about individual Mayors and PCCs involved—all of us will have different opinions on their effectiveness or otherwise—I want to stick to the roles that are involved and whether it is appropriate to extend the role of Mayor to include that of police and crime commissioner.

I support devolution in principle, but I feel strongly that the current model of combined mayoral authorities does not really work, because I believe that the Mayors have insufficient accountability, in the sense that they have significant spending powers but, without having tax-raising responsibilities, they do not have to account for their spending to the electorate. Mayors can go to Whitehall—as we have all experienced—and demand more money and complain to their electorate if they do not have enough money, without facing the consequences of having to raise taxes if they want to spend more money and facing the electorate. Of course, that is what we have to do in central Government. It is what local authorities have to do in our regions. If we want to spend more money, we will have to raise taxes and we will have to be accountable to our electorate for that.

Unfortunately, the Mayors just do not have that level of accountability. They have become, sometimes, just middlemen. They are able to blame Whitehall when they do not get enough money and blame Whitehall when they do not spend the money effectively; and there is a disincentive to be wise with the money they do have. Unfortunately, there is a temptation, which is a natural part of human nature, to use the role to build a personal profile and accumulate power, without the cost of that accountability with the finances.

[Alexander Stafford]

My hon. Friend is making a very apposite point about the waste of money. For instance, in my constituency in South Yorkshire, the Mayor wants to put a bike lane between Maltby and Rotherham town centre, at a cost of £12.2 million. The people of Maltby do not want that. It is going to cause absolute chaos and it is a waste of money. Does my hon. Friend agree with me that it is one of many examples in South Yorkshire of how money is being wasted against the will of the people?

[Miriam Cates]

I do, and as fellow South Yorkshire MPs, we see the current obsession with the franchising model for buses, which at the end of the day will not actually deliver more money for buses—it is just a different model of delivering—yet huge amounts of money are being wasted on consultants pursuing the idea, with no accountability to the public for the money that is spent.

Then to add to the powers of a position—I am not commenting on a particular individual here—that I believe already has insufficient accountability, by increasing those powers and adding on the role of police and crime commissioner, is unwise, for all the reasons I have given. We all know that, in reality, all that will happen is that the Mayor will have to delegate the powers of police and crime commissioner to an unelected official, who may be very competent and very experienced but has even less accountability to the public than the directly elected Mayor or even the police and crime commissioner, who at least is directly elected.

My hon. Friends the Members for Rother Valley (Alexander Stafford) and for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) have referred to the consultation. I completely agree with the Minister. It was a very tiny number of people who responded, but I am afraid that that is indicative of how highly people value these roles. I believe that the turnout for the last mayoral election in South Yorkshire, in 2022, was just 24% and the turnout for the police and crime commissioner was just 19%. These roles do not have high accountability with the public. People just do not see the point of these roles. That is why I oppose giving the current Mayor more powers to become the police and crime commissioner as well.

I will end by saying that this is a very important moment, politically, to have impartial policing. We are seeing on the streets of many of our cities how important it is for the police to be impartial. There is greater reason than ever to maintain some sort of separation of powers within and between political leaders, so I have to oppose this order today. I do not think it will work out well for South Yorkshire and I do think it throws light on the issues that we have with our devolution model in general.