Cities have it all to play for. But will elected mayors give power to the people?

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/may/20/cities-mayors-power-people-george-osborne-devolution

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“A revolution in the way we govern England is on its way,” announced George Osborne last week. The chancellor used his first speech of the new government to promise devolution to cities, but with one crucial condition – they must elect a mayor. Greater Manchester is to be the blueprint, as part of Osborne’s plan to create a “northern powerhouse” to rival the economic prowess of London. It will elect a mayor in 2017. And of course, the capital will also be gearing up for its mayoral election next May. Already, candidates for the next mayor have started to come forward with visions of what London should look like. But a group of citizens have got their own ideas – and they want them in the manifestos.

Related: George Osborne offers devolution route to cities with elected mayor

The campaign has already begun, with today the deadline for applications to become Labour’s mayoral candidate. As we went to press, Diane Abbott, Tessa Jowell, Christian Wolmar, David Lammy and Sadiq Khan had declared. Policing and crime commissioner Stephen Greenhalgh has announced he will bid for the Conservative nomination, while the other parties have yet to begin their nominations process. But disappointment and a perceived lack of ambition shown by outgoing mayor Boris Johnson and his predecessor, Ken Livingstone, has led to the creation of a grassroots effort to get the ideas of Londoners on to the manifestos of the new round of candidates.

Since November 2013, more than 1,000 people have been part of Changing London, a project to crowdsource ideas for London’s next mayor. Entirely coordinated by volunteers, the idea first occurred to David Robinson, an east Londoner and founder of charity Community Links, in the summer of 2013. A lifelong community worker and Labour party member, he became frustrated by speculation about candidates for the post. “This seemed to me to be far too early to be talking about who, when we should have been be talking about what,” he says. “The ‘world’s most competitive city’ is not an aspiration with which many can identify.”

Robinson and policy researcher Will Horwitz, who collaborated on the project, invited Londoners to create a vision for the capital. They encouraged contributors to bring solutions, not problems, and to leave behind ideas that required a heavy cash injection.

The home of the project was an online blog, where any Londoner was invited to submit an idea. Social media was crucial for finding contributors, as well as coverage in the press and “old-fashioned word of mouth.” Robinson and Horwitz gathered the ideas together last summer into a series of “London papers”, debated at a number of consultation events and published as a book on Monday. Robinson and Horwitz believe that both Johnson and Livingstone have missed an opportunity. They don’t say the mayors lacked ideas; indeed they point to Boris Johnson’s Vision 2020 as “expansive and comprehensive.”

“We found plenty to support but we still have a fundamental problem with Vision 2020. We didn’t think of it.” Central to the project is Robinson’s belief that policy should be developed from the ground up – that if the policy-making process starts with citizens, rather than politicians, it can better reflect their experiences and draw in “the passion and creativity of people who are otherwise quite docile in the democratic process”.

“Manifestos are largely dreamt up behind closed doors with the occasional consultation event.” says Horwitz. “We wanted to start with a blank sheet and see where it leads.” Yet Robinson is clear that Changing London is neither a policy document nor a manifesto. Run entirely by volunteers on minimal resources, he says that although they would like to see similar projects run elsewhere, it does require more sophisticated research in order to be truly representative.

Changing London has produced not one vision, but five. Each has a different focus – children, neighbourhoods, inequality, democracy and health – and is packed with ideas. Some are predictable: there are calls for stronger unions, measures to cap high pay and safer cycling routes. But others surface that you would be hard-pressed to find in any political manifesto or thinktank report.

One such idea is for “play streets”, closed off for children. It was submitted by hospice worker Sally Muylders and comes from her own memories of playing out as a child: “For us it was fresh air, friends, games. For our parents it was a community, an excuse to chat, a sense of shared responsibility. Now children don’t play in the streets and that sense of community is often gone.”

Muylders points to Amsterdam, where children ran a successful campaign for a permanent play street and to those in Bristol and Hackney in east London. Other contributors called for ideas that prioritise the needs of children and make London “the best place in the world to grow up”. They call for advertising to be banned near schools, for the return of the Child Trust Fund and for “a cultural guarantee”: a list of experiences with the capital’s arts scene, from seeing a play to writing with an author, that all children would have to complete as part of their schooling.

A group of 30 children aged six to 11 from schools in Newham participated in a focus group. Most struggled to point to London on a map of the UK, but they had ideas – from improving the provision of sweet shops to increasing public transport. “Why can’t London be more like Sunderland?” asked another contributor, lamenting the rising social isolation in the capital.

Robinson is passionate that the project is not just a catalogue of ideas but is about the process as much as the product. “People who have experience of an issue are best placed to advise on how it might best be resolved. We need to draw that wisdom into the policy-making process – not just in London, but all across the UK,” says Robinson.

Much of Changing London has been inspired by mayors around the world. These include Calgary’s Naheed Nenshi, a Muslim born to South African immigrants, who was elected mayor of one of Canada’s largest and most conservative cities in 2010– despite being at only 8% in the polls six weeks before the election.

Nenshi’s promise was to deliver “politics in full sentences”, to involve voters involved in complex discussions and empower them to create their own ideas for change. During his campaign, supporters hosted Nenshi at coffee parties in their homes to discuss detailed ideas. Once he assumed office, he launched three things for Calgary, inviting citizens to create three ideas for their community. It went viral and three years later he was re-elected with three-quarters of the popular vote.

Many other mayors have taken an outward-looking approach to their role. San Antonio’s former mayor Julian Castro asked voters to contribute ideas at large-scale events before setting up a charity to help them be realised. Bogota’s former mayor Antanas Mockus asked citizens to pay a 10% voluntary tax and 63,000 obliged. Oklahoma’s overweight mayor Mick Cornett took his diet public, asking the city’s residents to join him on a weight loss campaign to lose a collective one million pounds. In Paris, mayor Anne Hidalgo gave citizens the opportunity to vote on how €20m for 2014-15 – 5% of the city’s investment budget – was spent; they could choose from pop-up swimming pools to mobile rubbish collection points.

But does an outward-facing mayor make for a more effective way of running a city? Osborne believes so. His plan – to be laid out in full in the Queen’s speech next week – is to devolve powers for local transport, housing, skills and healthcare to groups of cities, starting with Greater Manchester in 2017. In return, local authorities must be prepared to work together as combined authorities and act under an elected, executive mayor.

In the UK, the mayoral model was established in 2000 with London’s first election and the Local Government Act, which empowered all councils to switch to the new model. There are now 17 directly elected mayors, all in England. But in a series of referendums in 2012, voters in nine cities (Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham, Sheffield, Wakefield, Coventry, Leeds and Bradford) rejected the model, while Bristol and Salford voted for it. “England has ended up with one of the most centralised governments in the world,” says Wyn Grant in the Warwick 2012 commission on elected mayors and city leadership .“That seems to have demobilised the electorate in many localities and one of the underlying thrusts of the localism agenda is to reinvigorate the local body politic by giving power to the elected mayors.”

However, the system can be unpopular with city councillors, such as the leader of Plymouth council, Tudor Evans, who argues that the local council often has a better understanding of local needs and that “there is no word about city or county regions.”

Related: The Guardian view on elected mayors | editorial

Others fear that smaller cities and towns will be swallowed up by bigger cities and that Osborne’s plans leaves little opportunity for rural regions that would struggle to come up with an elected mayor that had legitimacy. But, says researcher Clare Holt, “if elected mayors are going to be the future, cities are a good place to start,” pointing out that in Manchester, the mayor represents greater Manchester, not just the city.

George Ferguson, the mayor of Bristol – another city that Changing London draws inspiration from – says that the model has been “transformational” for Bristol and has led to greater community engagement. “It has much more authority because the mayor is elected by citizens across the city rather than appointed by the council. It doesn’t mean that everybody loves me – I’m probably Marmite, but at least people associate change with me.”

According to a report by the universities of Bristol and the West of England, in 2012, 24% of people said the city had visible leadership. By 2014 the figure rose to 69%. Among civic leaders in the community, voluntary and business sectors, it soared to 97%.

Critics suggest that the system affords mayors too much power and encourages egocentric candidates – in Birmingham, the no campaign was called “Vote no to a power freak”. Jenny Jones, the Green candidate for London mayor in 2012, remarked at a hustings for that election that the room was “full of testosterone”. Of the 17 areas that currently have elected mayors, only four are women. Lutfur Rahman, the former mayor of Tower Hamlets, was recently found guilty of multiple corruption charges.

In 2013, a Lord Ashcroft poll showed that Boris Johnson is the most recognisable politician in the country after the prime minister. Tom Gash, from the Institute for Government, says: “In areas where there is likely to be single party dominance you have real questions about whether you have mayors who are likely to be elected over and over again and don’t need to be that accountable”.

Now the book has been published, Robinson wants to get Changing London’s ideas on to the candidates’ agendas. Most of the Labour candidates have seen the book and will discuss the ideas at a series of public events this summer.

The objective, says Robinson, is to raise citizens’ expectations. “They don’t think the post is particularly relevant to their lives. This reflects the limited and unimaginative way in which the powers of the mayoralty have been applied so far. We are trying to persuade both voters and wannabe mayors that there is potential to want more and do more.”