A former Treasury minister has said that further devolution is “as important as Brexit” to the nation’s future
A former banker and Treasury minister has claimed that the success of new mayoralties is as important for the country as Theresa May's Brexit talks.
Lord Jim O'Neill, who famously coined the “Brics” term for some of the world's largest emerging economies, said that “at least” four further regional mayors should be created.
Four mayoral elections are set to take place next year in Manchester, the West Midlands, the Tees Valley and Liverpool regions, while a further two in South Yorkshire and Bristol remain subject to legal challenges.
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“In my judgement, there should be at last four more,” O'Neill said yesterday.
“It might well be that how the mayoral elections next year go will determine this.”
He added: “I think for the health and the long term future of the country this issue is at least as important if not more important than Brexit.
“It has certainly become even more important as a consequence of what the country decided in July.”
O'Neill quit the government in September after less than two years in the Treasury, raising fears over Theresa May's commitment to the devolution agenda driven by George Osborne, and has become a crossbench peer since leaving the government.
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And he warned he was concerned that central government support for new mayoralties is being held back by political issues.
“We would have had more mayoral potential candidates if it were not for the nature of national politics and how a lot of people in Whitehall immediately think of these issues as politics and not economic and not social,” he said
“It is complex for Tory politics to think of the risk of yet more so-called Labour mayors.”