LIVERPOOL'S directly elected mayor – currently Joe Anderson – will only serve for one more year after this May’s election, veteran councillor Richard Kemp, predicted today
The leader of the two-strong Lib Dems on the city council says Labour will ditch the city mayoral model in 2017 – the year people throughout the Liverpool City Region will vote for a metro mayor spanning the six local authorities.
Cllr Kemp told Liverpool Confidential: “This will not be confirmed by the council, but it is being talked about. If we had a city mayor and a city region mayor, who happened to be Joe Anderson, would we have to call him Mayor Mayor Anderson?
“From the information I have gathered the person elected to serve as Mayor of Liverpool this year will only serve for a year. I am 100 percent certain this will happen.”
Cllr Kemp has been named as the Lib Dem candidate to oppose Mayor Anderson this May, when the mayor seeks election for a second term.
Meanwhile, Cllr Kemp is calling for a cut in the number of city councillors from 90 to 60.
He says since the introduction of an elected mayor, councillors have been left with hardly any power and little work to do.
In a letter to the Local Government Boundary Commission, which is being followed up with a council resolution Cllr Kemp says: “It is now 13 years since the commission reported its review of the local government boundaries in Liverpool. The new boundaries that the commission recommended were introduced in 2004 and since then much has happened:
“We have introduced a mayoral system which has placed almost all the power of the Council in one pair of hands shielded by a cadre of cabinet members;
“We have lost many of our services and are doing about 40 percent less than we did when the last review was enforced. We also have lost some of our powers. We no longer place people onto a Police Authority and will shortly cease to provide councillors for the Fire and Civil Defence Authority.”
The result, says Cllr Kemp, is that Liverpool now has many more councillors than it actually needs, and this trend “will shortly be exacerbated by the decision to have an elected Mayor for the City Region from May 2017”.
Lib Dem mayoral rival Richard Kemp says there are too many councillors with nothing to doCllr Kemp said if the culling exercise was done quickly it could enable a new smaller council to be elected in May 2017 at the same time as people in Merseyside and Halton vote for a new Liverpool City Region Mayor”
Cllr Kemp said he was against the idea of elected mayors but if he was elected as Liverpool's - albeit for a year - he would follow the examples of those in places like Newham and Bedford where public sessions are held to enable anybody – local residents and business people - to have face-to-face sessions with the mayor.
“Basically I am against elected mayors and would much prefer to see a return to a committee decision, but in any model of governance I would want to see committees pre-scrutinising ideas and policies before final decisions are made.”
