Pro-building lobby group Britain Remade is making headlines with its “Give mayors the power to build” campaign, citing Leeds in particular as an example of where a lack of mayoral power is causing British cities to fall behind.
With West Yorkshire’s mass transit plans firmly in the news, Britain Remade is also running a Leeds Needs Trams campaign, but its latest pitch covers other cities, such as Bristol and Birmingham.
New analysis by Britain Remade has exposed the scale of the gap between England’s major cities and their European twins. As a result, the campaign group is calling on the Government to give England’s 14 directly elected mayors the powers they need to change this.
The data, drawn from tram, metro, and light rail systems across Europe, paints a damning picture: English city-regions twinned with well-connected European cities are being systematically left behind. Not because of a lack of ambition from local leaders, but because those leaders are forced to go cap in hand to Westminster for every penny and every planning permission for major infrastructure projects.
The lobby group doesn’t appear to have published the “new analysis”, other that what is in its (two) press releases, but it highlights clear disparities in the scale of mass transit systems in England and France and Germany.
Transport Insights 