By Vivienne Russell | 14 June 2012
There should be a mayor for the whole Merseyside area not just the city of Liverpool, according to the campaigner and TV producer Phil Redmond.
In an interview with Public Finance ahead of his address to CIPFA’s annual conference in July, Redmond revealed that he would have stood for election as mayor had the position covered the wider city-region.
‘If the mayor had been for Merseyside it would have been more exciting and I would have gone for it myself,’ he said.
Redmond described the question of where Liverpool begins and ends as the ‘elephant in the room’, noting that administrative boundaries had failed to keep up with population shifts.
‘My family moved out of the city centre to Huyton, I went to school in Kirby, but to us that’s the city. We’re Scousers but we suddenly found ourselves in Lancashire, then Knowsley,’ he said.
‘You’ve got streets right round the city where one side is Liverpool and the other side is Knowsley or Sefton.’
Redmond said administrative boundaries should reflect communities of people, not just arbitrary population numbers. He also criticised ‘strange’ local authority processes, which he said went on above and around people but without any involvement from them.
Redmond said the adoption of the mayoral model in Liverpool should have been preceded by a proper debate.
‘That’s a standard problem in Britain, we make great structural change and then have the debate after. We don’t seem able to sit round in a calm and mature way and say let’s think about this and come to a decision.’
Liverpool City Council decided to elect a mayor without holding a referendum. Labour council leader Joe Anderson was returned as mayor of the city on May 3.
There should be a mayor for the whole Merseyside area not just the city of Liverpool, according to the campaigner and TV producer Phil Redmond.
In an interview with Public Finance ahead of his address to CIPFA’s annual conference in July, Redmond revealed that he would have stood for election as mayor had the position covered the wider city-region.
‘If the mayor had been for Merseyside it would have been more exciting and I would have gone for it myself,’ he said.
Redmond described the question of where Liverpool begins and ends as the ‘elephant in the room’, noting that administrative boundaries had failed to keep up with population shifts.
‘My family moved out of the city centre to Huyton, I went to school in Kirby, but to us that’s the city. We’re Scousers but we suddenly found ourselves in Lancashire, then Knowsley,’ he said.
‘You’ve got streets right round the city where one side is Liverpool and the other side is Knowsley or Sefton.’
Redmond said administrative boundaries should reflect communities of people, not just arbitrary population numbers. He also criticised ‘strange’ local authority processes, which he said went on above and around people but without any involvement from them.
Redmond said the adoption of the mayoral model in Liverpool should have been preceded by a proper debate.
‘That’s a standard problem in Britain, we make great structural change and then have the debate after. We don’t seem able to sit round in a calm and mature way and say let’s think about this and come to a decision.’
Liverpool City Council decided to elect a mayor without holding a referendum. Labour council leader Joe Anderson was returned as mayor of the city on May 3.
