My conversation with Oliver Coppard, Mayor of South Yorkshire
Director of Policy and Research
The latest in our ever-expanding ‘Meetings with Mayors’ series was a conversation with Oliver Coppard, the mayor of South Yorkshire: a politically diverse place of 1.4 million people, spanning cities, towns, and a lot of countryside, as well as a real range of socioeconomic outcomes. Fittingly, our discussion was wide-ranging too.
Here are some of my immediate reflections on this discussion – but if you didn’t join us live you can now catch the video of our whole event, which is available to stream here.
- We’re facing a public “crisis of agency” – and devolution must be part of the answer.
I was keen to revisit something that Coppard has spoken about before – that devolution is not only about “giving powers away”, but about rewiring the State itself and, as part of that, rebooting the State’s relationship with the public. Later in our chat, we also connected the sense of lost agency with the public vote to leave the European Union, where people, in Coppard’s words, “were prepared to exchange potential economic benefit for greater control over their future.”
This is all part-and-parcel with the wide puzzle surrounding the extent of public engagement with mayoral politics: as with local authority elections, voter turnout for combined authority elections remains stubbornly low, which doesn’t suggest an improving sense of citizen efficacy.
Coppard set out how this means something for how he works: “I want to be in a conversation, not just me pronouncing, and it has to result in action.” That means lots of visibility, two-way engagement, and a conscious effort to elevate the notion of a regional South Yorkshire sense of identity.
- Coppard is still willing to be unpopular
On the subject of where a sense of whole-region solidarity could be needed to make the mayoral model work, I asked Coppard about how hard it is to make the trade-offs between the interests of people in very different parts of his rather large patch.
One part of his answer was that the ‘what about us?’ reaction could shift if someone in Doncaster can see the overall regional benefit of investment that most lands in, say, Sheffield. That’s about being seen to work agnostically and follow the best available evidence – but it’s also another argument for promoting South Yorkshire identity.
But sometimes the trade-offs are there, and for Coppard, that means a Mayor simply has to be prepared to be unpopular. Coppard gave the example of clean air policies: “Poor air quality is harming kids. If water quality killed one in twenty people, there’d be a national outcry. ... I’m okay being out front on that debate. If it has an electoral consequence, so be it.”
- Getting things done will mean more powers … and ignoring the boundary lines
Coppard made clear that many of the most important things he wants to get done will involve a lot of collaboration with his neighbouring mayors, accepting, in effect, that the boundaries of our regions are ultimately quite arbitrarily defined: “we should solve problems based on function, not lines on a map that nobody lives their lives by.”
At the same time, he gave a list of areas where he would like to see his Combined Authority continue to evolve, setting out at various points a vision for an institution with higher levels of accountability and scrutiny baked-in; fiscal tools like a visitor levy; influence over local education (to help shape the future workforce amid the rise of game-changing technologies like AI); and health powers too.
We have more Meetings with Mayors coming up in December – I hope you can join us for those events.