A council leader in the Tees Valley shares their frustration with centralised decision making at a British Academy roundtable: 'If you go through Darlington on the train you see a national centre for biological research. Highways England didn’t have a plan to put a road there, so the road isn’t there but I am the one that the public come to and say ‘you didn’t bother to build a road to it.’

One year ago, voters went to the polls to cast their vote for six new metro mayors as part of the Government’s devolution deal.