Labour has just revived Northern Powerhouse Rail, and it’s arguably all down to one man. A fierce advocate for the region’s transport network — he once described not extending HS2 to Manchester as a “monument to the British mentality” — Andy Burnham is a walking, talking example of how much elected mayors can achieve: if they’re brave and charismatic enough to challenge the Whitehall consensus anyway.
Now compare Burnham to Richard Parker. Politicos are still unsure what even drove him from the spreadsheet anonymity of a career in accountancy to mayoralty of the West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA) a year ago. Certainly, Parker’s pitch for the job didn’t stray far from vague lines on family ties to the region — and being unable to stand by while the Midlands rotted. Boilerplate stuff, topped off with pledges written in a say-nothing Starmerese so diligent they may have come straight from the Labour leader’s playbook.
Parker’s lacklustre style is even more striking given his peers. I don’t mean Burnham here, or indeed Sadiq Khan. Even in the West Midlands itself, there’s Parker’s predecessor Sir Andy Street, who elegantly dovetailed the region’s fortunes with his own personal brand. Mr Commonwealth Games. Mr HS2. Whatever you want to call him, Street was the Midlands for locals and outsiders alike.
Parker’s failure to follow suit is especially remarkable given there’s so much he could plausibly build a political personality around. In a largely deindustrialised region, housing inequality, transport woes, and low-paying jobs are all urgent problems to be solved. Then there’s the Birmingham bin strike. It may be the responsibility of the local council, but with 26,000 tonnes of stinking rubbish left uncollected, it’s hard not to see the dispute as the ultimate symbol of Midlands failure. Parker’s electoral victory at least paid lip service to these issues, promising to boost regional skills, explore high street rejuvenation and, given top billing, take buses back into public control. But the wide popularity of these ideas hasn’t protected him from criticism.
For one, bus franchising isn’t projected until 2027 at the earliest. A retiring figure, albeit one well-liked by colleagues, Parker doesn’t seem to lead much on policy, only getting excited about housing — a hangover, I’m told, from his exposure to the issue during his accounting years. He’s happy to outsource the blue-sky thinking the mayoral role is known for to less political policy leads. There’s a joke that if you want to know what Parker really thinks, you should ask Rachel Reeves, to whom he lent a holiday home and donated £12,000 in cash the year before he became mayor.
This closeness to the Treasury runs exactly contrary to the expanding mayoral model’s devolutionary principles. It also comes with risks, not least when the Westminster party’s poll numbers are in the basement. According to YouGov, after all, only 60% of Labour voters in 2024 plan to stay loyal next time. More than that, the latest polling has Reform UK on 30% nationwide, a far cry from the 5.8% the party won in last year’s West Midlands mayoral election. No less striking, May’s local elections saw Farage’s juggernaut pick up two mayoralties, with Labour pushed extremely hard by insurgent mayoral candidates in former Labour heartlands like North Tyneside. In such a landscape, it remains to be seen whether Parker can win in 2028; some insiders already whisper he may not stand at all.
It’s not just Reform that poses a threat to Parker either: his old rival Street retains plenty of popularity right across the Midlands. Many feel his 2024 loss was a repudiation of Tory rule rather than a personal slight, especially given Street himself is famous for his issues-first style. More than that, he lost to Parker by just 0.15% last year. Defeat, then, but one far less resounding than what his party suffered nationally. I know many across the Midlands, both to the Left and Right of Street, who admire his region-first approach. But as the former mayor is busy burnishing his centrist credentials — telling a recent interviewer that he’ll fight for a “moderate, inclusive conservatism” — Reform’s rise could yet stymie the careers of Parker and Street both.
Quite aside from that looming light-blue wave, meanwhile, Street’s tenure was far from perfect. For one thing, HS2 was a nightmare. It’s too early to know if this latest iteration of the Northern Powerhouse could belatedly link London and Birmingham to Manchester, but Street himself certainly failed, and that was despite the help of Burnham further north. For its part, Street’s cross-city rail project was also hit by waves of delays. In contrast, and to give Parker his due, the current mayor has attached his name to a mega-bucks tram project which might finally give him a political identity worth the name. Linking up a proposed “Sports Quarter” in Birmingham with the airport and NEC events space is an unqualified good, especially when the network will travel through some of the city’s poorest areas.
But the region has been burnt by doomed development projects before. Forget HS2: though it rarely makes headlines south of Warwickshire, a long-in-the-offing gigafactory, meant to be built on the site of Coventry Airport, has faced epic struggles too.
For years, people across the Midlands were promised that the huge battery-making facility, designed specifically to power electric vehicles, would secure 6,000 jobs and £2.5 billion in investment. As far back as 2017, Street told the Conservative Party conference that the future growth of the West Midlands would emerge from its car-making past. “It’s a modern industrial strategy,” he said. You could almost see the gigafactory materialise as he spoke.
As it is, nothing much has happened, though those close to Street celebrate his ability to pull in private sector support for his embattled region. Perhaps — Street is certainly an enthusiastic booster for his patch — but apparent interest from Jaguar Land Rover and the Tata Group never went anywhere. Instead, a local manufacturer called Volklec, backed by funds from the Chinese battery sector, turned up instead. Yet even then, a £1 billion investment plan falls far short of Street’s grand words. All the while, the gigafactory itself is nowhere to be found, its promise of prosperity lost among the Warwickshire hedgerows.
In a sense, of course, these challenges aren’t the fault of Parker or Street. For if regional mayors occasionally show the strength of personality to make a difference, the fact is that they are never in complete control of their destinies. After all, even under boosted devolution deals, mayors rely on private partnership for success, a model that pits areas against each other. Tata, for instance, took investment that might have come to the West Midlands to Somerset instead.
A reliance on private cash also emphasises risible public support. For the long-signalled gigafactory, the WMCA has only offered £23 million to the project. Whitehall might stump up another £65 million, but that’s not much either. “We hardly have the carrots to tempt investors with,” says one WMCA insider, a fair point when funding for projects comes from tightly controlled government pots. It’s impossible, here, not to mention the “Treasury Brain” adherence to environmental legislation and London-centric development logic — which together make it tough for post-industrial sites in the West Midlands and elsewhere to get off the ground.
In other words, then, for the mayoralties to really turbocharge their regions they first need to escape the clutches of Westminster. “Devolution is about driving economic growth, not societal or welfare change,” says Ben Brittain, a former advisor to Street. “You run the risk of low-energy over-promoted accountants or a chair of a council subcommittee as the region’s leader, which does a disservice to citizens of that region.”
At this point, it’s tempting to return to Parker. Even people less close to Street than Brittain miss his ambassadorial energy and soft skills: knowing when to bollock, reward, charm, or simply put in the hours to get things done. Of course, it would be unfair not to mention that every local and combined authority still battles austerity, which persists even under the Labour government in Westminster. “There must be a strong relationship between mayoral teams, No. 10 and No. 11, which can unblock a lot,” says Brittain. “But there is no formal structure for that.”
Here, Parker might point to his relationship with Reeves as crucial to unlocking funds for his gleaming new tram project. But those same links, insiders worry, could be exactly what undercuts regional confidence and, potentially, renewal on the West Midlands’ own terms. Parker, after all, is Reeves’ man. And for a country like England, with its hyper-centralised political culture, it’s equally concerning that Labour may now plan to make its mayors more accountable to the party. What would this mean for Parker, who might need to take on Downing Street if his tramline goes the way of HS2? Then there’s the gigafactory which, as it stands, remains an underused airport. Hardly something to build a political brand around.
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Author: Dan Cave
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