West Yorkshire mayor Tracy Brabin has hailed a special “taskforce” to speed up the region’s flagging mass transit ambitions, but what exactly is happening and how it might help is far from clear.
The Yorkshire Post reports:
A special taskforce has been set up at Andy Burnham’s No10 North to try and speed up delivery of West Yorkshire’s mass transit project.
But you have to go a long way down the story to (try to) make sense of it:
She joined a meeting of his National Economic Council from No10 North in Manchester, and gave the tram as one of her three priorities.
Ms Brabin said Mr Burnham’s deputy chief of staff Caroline Simpson immediately set up a special taskforce to speed up delivery.
This is “going to look at what can we do to ensure greater speed, whilst also keeping the oversight of a project of this scale”, she said.
That word “oversight” looks pretty significant here. Looks like central government is still in the driving seat.
Rather confusingly, the next couple of lines in the story seem to refer back to the meeting rather than the “taskforce”:
This included representatives from No10 North, the Department for Transport and the Treasury including Minister for Growth Dan Tomlinson.
“Everybody that you would imagine was there that needed to be there, and we were really problem solving live in the moment,” Ms Brain (sic) said.
And then:
Ms Brabin revealed that West Yorkshire Combined Authority would be targeting officials with experience around mass transit as part of the civil service secondment scheme.
Trying to make sense of it all, it looks like Brabin attended the first meeting of the revived National Economic Council at No10 North in July,
bringing together senior ministers and regional mayors to put devolution at the centre of the Government’s mission to make Britian better…
But the “problem solving live in the moment” is a reference to a No10 North “virtual situation room” in August, where it was announced in one of the funniest headlines you will ever see:
Whitehall officials to be posted into mayors’ offices as PM marks first month of No10 North
Postman Pat is going to have a very overloaded van.
The package follows direct requests from mayors at the first meeting of the National Economic Council, held at the end of July, where local leaders called for stronger local capability, faster decision-making and a closer partnership with government.
From autumn, high-performing civil servants will be seconded into mayoral authorities to build capability and capacity and accelerate the transfer of power to local areas.
But this version has civil servants “seconded into” the WYCA, not a taskforce at No10 North.
Looks like someone has got the wrong end of the stick somewhere.
Meanwhile, the WYCA is still
preparing the Strategic Outline Case (SOC), an early stage in the Government’s business case process, which we will submit later in 2026.
It was due in the summer, so capacity and competence do seem to be in short supply.
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