Ant Breach

speaker

133 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 10 Jul

Ant Breach’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

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

And a crucial kind of part of this is that the mayor was accountable for this, that if you didn't like how the buses were being run, you could blame the mayor of London, whether that was Ken Livingstone, Boris Johnson or Sadiq Khan.

So the big step that was taken in the 2010s with Burnham was the creation of the Metro Mayor office, not just in Greater Manchester, but in other kind of big city regions within England.

gave these places the power to essentially run those kind of bus services in the same way that London does.

That is now being rolled out.

It was first rolled out in Greater Manchester after a series of court cases, a lot of technical gubbins about buying the depots and rolling them out borough by borough.

Now that that model has been proven to be implemented in a metro mayor area, you're seeing other places now starting to introduce it.

So Steve Rotherham in the Liverpool City region, he's introducing... He's Andy Burnham's best mate.

Andy Burnham's best mate, is introducing bus franchising in Liverpool and Merseyside region.

And so other Metro mayors are picking this up as well.

It does require capacity and leadership and resource at the local level.

Because it's a big job to implement it.

It is a big job to implement it.

So we are seeing some Metro mayors are saying, thanks, but no thanks.

This isn't right for our area, which is fine.

But one of the initiatives which touches on this local government reorganisation point that Alex mentioned,

that what do you do about these places that don't yet have metro mayors?

The government has initially responded to that by saying, well, local authorities can now run these bus services without a metro mayor, which raises the question of, well, what do you do about accountability in these places?

Quite exactly.

But as well as that, sort of the future of devolution in these places where we don't have these metro mayor structures yet, where local government boundaries are still a bit up in the air, how devolution is rolled out in these other places is going to be a sticking point for the Burnham government.

Yeah, so in Bristol, they got rid of the local authority mayor who runs the city council there.

Showing 61–80 of 133 · page 4 of 7