Elected Mayors: More Distraction Than Attraction?

Abstract

The Government's policy of encouraging the adoption of directly elected mayors in the cities and major towns of England can hardly be judged, at least in the short term, as anything other than a failure - and particularly a failure of process. The contention of this paper is that there is an additional cost to this failure. The focus on mayors has distracted public - and to some extent local government - attention from many of the other strands of the ‘modernisation’ agenda that either already were or could have been being implemented in councils across the country before a single provincial mayor was even elected. The major part of the paper traces the development and implementation of the mayoral policy, including the 30 mayoral referendums, and culminating in the election of 11 mayors - nearly half of them Independents - in 2002. A key argument is that, by reversing their initial commitment to the piloting of a whole range of different and locally determined forms of executive local government, ministers contributed significantly to the widespread rejection of elected mayors.