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By the time you read this, you may know whether it is Ken Livingstone or Boris Johnson who has been elected as mayor of London. The mayoral race hit the headlines in a way that few non-Westminster elections do. The credentials of both main candidates were thoroughly tested – as should happen in all good elections – even if their competing visions for the future of London were not as prominent as one would have liked. I have no inside track into the mind of the Government, but I am in no doubt that sooner or later, more super mayors are on their way. The arguments are mounting for our great city-regions to adopt a mayoral model. At the heart of the argument is the economic relationship between cities and their suburbs. Two overseas examples, recently highlighted by The Economist magazine, illustrate the argument. Compare London with Paris. On almost all measures – financial, inward investment, living standards, architectural, cultural, openness and ethnic diversity – London is significantly ahead of Paris. The mayor's bus strategy has helped London close the gap in terms of having a 21st century transport infrastructure – although modernisation of the Tube network remains ‘work in progress'. Even on the vexed issue of housing, where many Londoners find it hard to climb on to the property ladder, things are worse in the French capital, with recent street demonstrations about empty housing. Part of the explanation for the differential performance lies in the Big Bang financial revolution and the success of the Square Mile, but another part relates to how each city is run. The mayor of London is responsible for a population of 7.4m and has a budget of more than £10bn. The mayor has had the power to develop city-wide economic, housing and planning strategies, and to set targets for the boroughs to deliver. He has been able to raise money for the Olympics across outer as well as inner London, tackle child poverty across the capital, and develop integrated train and ticketing arrangements which extend right into the suburbs. In contrast to London, Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, runs a city of just 2.3 million people. The Paris mayor does not govern the banlieues, and has to negotiate with the three departments encircling inner Paris, where another three million or so people live. He has no mandate to tackle some of the deep-seated city-wide problems all big conurbations have. Not surprisingly, there is now talk of creating a Paris Metropole – equivalent to the GLA area. In the US, some cities have already taken radical action along these lines. Louisville, in Kentucky, for example, was a classic declining industrial city. But in 2003, it merged with its suburban ‘county' hinterland to form Louisville Metro, run by a mayor. Since then, the new city has been undergoing a renaissance that has benefited city and county alike – they recognised they had a ‘shared economic fate'. Indianapolis and Nashville have combined in a similar way. An essay in the latest edition of IPPR's journal explains how American mayors are able to exploit this bigger merged mandate. US mayors are, ‘the ‘chief economic development tsars of their city', possessing a range of fiscal, planning and financing powers, which enable them to set a framework for the physical landscape, industrial development and residential patterns of their city'. These are exactly the powers the London mayor has, and which other sub-regions lack, as a recent review published by the Department for Communities and Local Government identified. It described how local authority local economic strategies often pay insufficient attention to the wider city or sub-regional context of their economy. There is little attempt to resolve urban-rural tensions within sub-regions. And sub-regional structures are weak – a point reflected in how difficult it is proving to get multi-area agreements up and running. The lessons for local government from all this are twofold. First, the current boundary reviews must result in more authorities which reflect the wider travel-to-work area. In those parts of the country that have been designated as growth areas, the boundaries need to reflect the future rather than the current shape of the local economy. Second, civic and business leaders in Bristol, East and West Midlands, Manchester, Merseyside, Tyneside, West and South Yorkshire should start now to lobby the Government to create super mayors to lead their city-regions. Some of them will be resistant to change, but if they are far sighted and committed to the future prosperity of their area, it has to be the way forward. Robert Hill is a former adviser to prime minister, Tony Blair, and now works as an independent consultant on public policy issues

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WHITEHALL

A tale of two city mayors

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