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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There's still the metro mayor of the West of England, who is Helen Godwin now, which sits in a tier above the city government.
Indeed, as Andy Burnham, as mayor of Greater Manchester, sat above Manchester City Council, and Steve Rotherham, as Liverpool City Region, sits above City of Liverpool.
The idea here is that the metro mayors are meant to be the strategic layer of government, that they include both the sort of urban core where there's lots of jobs, lots of employment, but also the surrounding suburbs where lots of people live who ultimately work in that central area.
In the case of the Bristol referendum, basically,
Bristol was one of the few places to get a local authority mayor back at the start of the Cameron government.
After a kind of fairly tumultuous period locally, politically, eventually there was a campaign to abolish the office of the mayor and there was a local referendum and the office was scrapped and it's been replaced by a more kind of councillor-led model.
That's not changed the Metro Mayor tier at all, but I think it does show that ultimately, you know, the...
these local governing arrangements are still a little bit fragile and sometimes it's a little bit new.
Well, there are
This is the era of the merit.
I mean, this is certainly the era of cities.
You know, all around the world, we see that cities are becoming more important to the national economies of places, indeed, the global economy.
I think there has been this kind of change in political and economic thinking that has recognized this increasingly over the past 10, 15 years.
So this is why central government has led with the mayoral model.
They see it does improve accountability and it does where it works well, does seem to have an impact on better provision of services and ability to kind of drive growth within local areas.
But yeah, I think we are unusual internationally.
I think it's still important to remember in just how centralised our state is, right, that it might seem kind of, our system is complex.
It might seem that these metro mayor institutions are still quite novel, but actually what we're proposing is not that we embark on some crazy experiment.
We're actually suggesting that we've become a bit more normal and a bit less kind of unusual in the degree of our centralisation compared to our real peers.
So I think maybe the easiest way to explain this is to think first about university system, which is very centralized.
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