Andy Street interview

Mayor of West Midlands on Commonwealth Games, Truss v Sunak and levelling up...

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“Mixed”. That is the verdict of Andy Street, the mayor of the West Midlands, on the success of levelling up.

If that is his verdict then you know there must be issues. The Conservative mayor and this region have been a poster-boy for levelling up. The West Midlands will spend ten times more on regional transport this year than it did before Street became mayor in 2017. This doesn’t even include HS2 and the new station Birmingham will get connecting it to London. Street also says the West Midlands has been the best-performing region over the last five years for attracting inward investment. HSBC has opened new offices here, Goldman Sachs has opened a regional hub, Accenture is coming and then there are the carmakers like Jaguar Land Rover who provide the heart of the economy in this area and tens of thousands of jobs.

But while the West Midlands has attracted public and private money, and Street says people are getting more qualifications and skills, he is also concerned.

“If you look at the hard economic numbers, the pandemic has been far tougher for places like this, the north-west and the north-east,” he explains. “So even though things have been done, is the gap across the country closing at the moment? No, it's not. The great irony is that for the ten years pre-pandemic we were closing the gap on the national average, we were doing really well. We've been set back. So in a sense levelling up is even more important after the pandemic.”

Street is talking in Birmingham at the Commonwealth Business Forum, where he is trying to attract more investment from the business leaders who have gathered ahead of the start of the Commonwealth Games. This event is part of a three-year plan to use the Commonwealth Games to promote the West Midlands as a place to invest. We are two years into that plan, with another year dedicated to following up interest after the 11 days of sport have finished.

So how can the post-Covid challenges of levelling up be addressed? “I would almost describe it as doubling down on some of the policies that were there in 2019, or were beginning to come,” Street says. “They are even more important than we thought they were before.”

This brings us neatly to the candidates to succeed Boris Johnson as prime minister - Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Street, one of the most influential Tory voices outside London, has yet to endorse either of the candidates after backing Jeremy Hunt earlier in the leadership race. On Tuesday Street tweeted out some commitments he wants the candidates to make before he decides who to back…