A simple tweet lead to an interesting revelation on the future (or not) of the next Mayor of Liverpool.
My tweet suggested that I was struggling to give my vote to either Joe Anderson, who wants to be Mayor of Liverpool City Region, or to Richard Kemp, who doesn’t like the Mayoral model of governance and wants the council to revert to the Leader model. i.e. neither of the two main candidates actually want the job.
Richard, to give him his due, replied and informed me that all parties on the Council are planning to vote in February 2017 to abolish the post of Mayor of Liverpool and revert to Leader, this to tie in with the election of a Mayor of Liverpool City Region.
This makes sense as one of the benefits of a Mayor is having a figurehead recognisable to investors and the business community, and having a Mayor of Liverpool, a Mayor of Liverpool City Region, not to the mention the (ceremonial) Lord Mayor of Liverpool was just going to confuse everyone.
So let’s do some maths:
Liverpool City Council has 90 members, currently made up of 81 Labour, 4 Green, 2 Lib Dem, 2 Liberal and 1 Independent.
32 of those seats are up for election this year, currently held by Labour (29) with Green, Lib Dem, Liberal and Independent having one a piece.
So, even in the unlikely scenario of Labour losing every seat they contest, they would still be the largest group, and majority, on the council with 52 seats, with 38 councillors in opposition
We will also elect a Mayor. However as mentioned, according to Richard Kemp, and nobody has denied this to be the case, the council is set to vote to abolish the post in February 2017, in which case the reintroduced role of Leader of the Council would go to… who?
Not Richard Kemp, even if his Lib Dems win all 32 seats, this would only give him a total of 33 seats.
Not Joe Anderson, as if his role of Mayor is abolished he isn’t a councillor.
Not any other Mayoral candidate as the maths for the Lib Dems would apply to their parties’ too even if they win all contested seats.
The Leader of the Council would be whoever is the then leader of the Labour Group as they will remain the majority.
So in answer to my original tweet of struggling to know who to vote for, the answer is whoever you vote for, and whoever is elected, will only be Mayor for one year.
All the candidates need to give clarity around this. And the Liverpool Echo who appear to have missed this scenario altogether, need to sit up and take notice of what’s happening at the Town Hall.
