Alex Forsyth

speaker

2,054 appearances 20 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 3d ago

Alex Forsyth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 20 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 6.

Appearances

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Newscast · What’s Andy Burnham’s Plan To Move Power Out Of London? · 10 Jul 2026 podcast

But there are some people that say, and the public in some instances, like in Bristol, say, do we need this? voice-verified

You know, what does this mean for me? voice-verified

Is this a sort of another layer of bureaucracy or... voice-verified

on an already quite complicated system of local government. voice-verified

And even when we've got mayors that we should call the same thing, like the metro mayors or the regional mayors, like the Andy Burnham model, even they have different powers. voice-verified

So even what they control in area by area is different at the moment. voice-verified

So it is a real patchwork and it is quite complex. voice-verified

And part of the argument for these more high profile mayors, the regional mayors or the metro mayors, voice-verified

is that they can be seen by the public and they're visible and they can fly the flag for their region and they can be held accountable. voice-verified

But of course, given how complicated the whole system is, they really do have to be visible for the public to know who they are and then to feel able to hold them to account properly for what they do or don't do in an area. voice-verified

No, that's completely right. voice-verified

And that increasingly has become the case over recent years as demand for those services, the cost of providing those key services has gone up. voice-verified

And they are the services that councils are obliged to provide by law. voice-verified

So you get lots of people in local government at council level saying like our discretion over what we've got left in our budgets and what we can spend that on is shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. voice-verified

And there's another argument about all of this, too. voice-verified

Which is that quite often, coming back to the way that local government has been funded, you get big ideas from central government about plans to think back Boris Johnson level up the country when he was talking about addressing regional inequality and giving local areas more clout. voice-verified

The big criticism of that idea was that what local authorities were having to do was bid for pots of money from central government and sort of compete against each other for these funding pots. voice-verified

And therefore, some areas got them and some areas didn't. voice-verified

And there were some conditions in some cases on what that money could be used for. voice-verified

And all that kind of held up getting the money out of the door onto the ground and it making a real difference. voice-verified

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