Something unusual happened in British politics over the last few weeks: someone bothered to ask city leaders what they think.
The inaugural UK City Leaders’ Survey, conducted by the Centre for Cities and those cheeky, publicity hungry tykes at Arup, invited views from the leadership of 63 cities, whether metro mayors, mayors or council leaders. Inspired by the Menino Survey of Mayors conducted by researchers at Boston University, the survey symbolises the growing influence of urban leaders in this ridiculously over-centralised country of ours. We at CityMetric are quite in favour of this, for the understandable reason that we, too, need to eat.
The results, the survey authors stress, are not statistically representative: the response rate was about a quarter, and the findings are indicative rather than scientific. But they do give some indication of what city leaders are worrying about at the moment.
So, what did we learn – and are there any pretty charts to illustrate it?
1) Building housing is everything
“Housing and regeneration was identified, unprompted, as the biggest overall economic priority for the majority of leaders surveyed,” the report says.
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And within the housing sector, “supply was the overwhelming priority”.
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That’s nine out of ten respondents prioritising adding to their housing supply. Nearly half wanted to build more council homes.
So: the prime minister’s recent promise that she’d lift the borrowing cap to enable councils to build homes seems likely to be embraced with open arms.
2) Improving skills is everything else
“Leaders highlighted inclusive growth as another of their broader priorities,” the report says. “When asked to provide more detail in this area, they tended to specify adult learning.”
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Again, that’s quite the lead adult education has over other growth priorities, and the runner up is under 18 education. Both are running way ahead of other priorities including transport and public realm.
Adult education is an area that’s long been neglected by national government: governments of all parties have been far more concerned with schools and universities (which ministers and columnists vaguely understand) than further education or technical colleges (which they don’t). So it’s interesting to note that local leaders are worrying about this gap.
That said…
3) But care is, annoyingly, everything too
…it’s not clear they have the money to do anything about any of this.
“Social care was identified by almost every leader as being the public service under the most pressure. This was also the policy area where most leaders would wish to see further funding allocated through the upcoming Spending Review.”
This is unsurprising, of course, but here’s the kicker:
“In turn, many were prepared to sacrifice funding in other areas, such as adult skills, to achieve this.”
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It’s very easy to say that, were money available, you’d to increase spending on adult education. But the money isn’t available – and preventing adult social care services from falling over is a far more pressing problem.
You can see that from quite how universal concern about social care now is:
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That’s damn near unanimity. This is a problem.
4) Views on transport vary
“Leaders tended to identify roads within their area and supporting a shift from cars to other modes of transport (such as public transport) as the two key areas.”
In other words, everyone either wants to make things easier for cars or for things that aren’t cars.
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Glad we cleared that up.
5) City leaders are fretting about climate change
“Of the leaders surveyed, 79 per cent agreed to either spending money or sacrificing revenues for the sake of mitigating climate change. Only one leader strongly disagreed with this.”
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These findings are strikingly similar to those the Menino Survey found when it asked surveyed US mayors:
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I’m reminded of the late Ben Barber’s comment about why he believed mayors would save the world. National governments can mess around with ideas like sovereignty. Cities actually have to make sure stuff works.
6) On funding, they value certainty over flexibility
Would city leaders like to be able to move money around, based on local need? Or would they rather have longer budgets to give them certainty about how much they’ll have?
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That said, the difference is pretty narrow. I suspect a lot of city leaders would ideally have both.
The really interesting thing about work like this, of course, is how its findings change over time. So here’s to the 2019 UK City Leaders’ Survey. Nice to have something to get excited about each December isn’t it?
You can read the whole survey here.
Jonn Elledge is the editor of CityMetric. He is on Twitter as @jonnelledge and on Facebook as JonnElledgeWrites.
