East Midlands Mayor Claire Ward: "Our Communities Feel Left Behind"
Claire Ward was elected as Labour mayor of the East Midlands last May (Alamy)
7 min read
Communities in the East Midlands feel unrewarded for their huge "sacrifices", according to the area's first mayor Claire Ward. With Nigel Farage's Reform looking to capitalise on local disillusionment, she believes a green industry boom can help the region realise its potential.
Since being elected last May as the first ever mayor to lead the new East Midlands Combined County Authority (EMCCA), Ward has not done any long-form interviews for national newspapers. Ten months later, she feels now is the right time to sit down with PoliticsHome to “raise the profile nationally” of a region that she feels is often forgotten.
“I wanted to be in a position where we have stories to tell, not just a story of ambition,” she said. “Now we've got some stuff set up and we're in a position to do so.”
In the week following this interview, the Inclusive Growth Commission will publish a report to identify the different priorities for growth in areas across the East Midlands. According to Ward, this report will reinforce that the region has “huge potential” but “needs that golden thread”. As the region’s first mayor, Ward feels that establishing the identity of the East Midlands will be her first challenge, as it is often perceived as a “flyover region”.
“Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire have lots of similarities, but they're not natural bedfellows,” she said. “You often have to start by explaining, where is the East Midlands? These are areas where there are physical, economic assets, but they have been left behind for many, many years.
“When people come out of London and they're talking about devolution, they mean the north. We're not the north. When they talk about the Midlands, they tend to focus on Birmingham.”
Many of our communities haven't seen any of the benefits of growth in the country
The EMCCA represents two counties in the wider East Midlands region: Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. Greater Lincolnshire reached its own devolution deal and will elect its first mayor this May, while Northamptonshire, Rutland, and Leicestershire are yet to work out their own devolution arrangements.
“Leicestershire needs to work out what it needs for itself now,” Ward said. “That ship has sailed, they had an opportunity to be part of it, it just didn't work out.”
Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire were among some of the areas worst affected by Margaret Thatcher’s closure of coal mines, as well as the closure of coal-fired power stations in the decades since. In September, the country's last coal power station, Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottingham, closed for good.
“We're a region that's retired 27 per cent of the UK’s coal-fired power stations, but we only represent 3 per cent of the population, so we've sacrificed jobs and communities and so much in those years to do that,” said Ward.
These sacrifices are perhaps one of the reasons why the East Midlands represents a huge opportunity for Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party. In Greater Lincolnshire, Reform candidate and former Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns is hoping to win the first ever mayoral contest for the party.
Andrea Jenkyns is the Reform candidate for the mayoral contest in the neighbouring Greater Lincolnshire county (Alamy)
Two out of the five Reform MPs elected last year were in the East Midlands: Reform deputy leader Richard Tice won in Boston and Skegness in Lincolnshire, while former Tory MP and coal miner Lee Anderson won in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire.
“Many of our communities feel left behind,” Ward said. “They haven't seen any of the benefits of growth in the country or globally. They've seen the loss of the pits, the loss of their communities.
“They haven't got transport connections to get anywhere else, and they are trapped and that's the bit where we've got to start building. They no longer feel confident that politics can change, and that's why we're seeing people move to Reform and other right-wing movements.”
Ward hopes that the Labour government’s emphasis on devolution can help to change this by “building that confidence” that politics can make a difference, by providing greater access to education, skills, decent jobs, and transport connectivity. “You've got to raise ambitions,” she said.
Asked whether she would be happy to work alongside Jenkyns if she becomes Lincolnshire mayor, Ward said she would “work with anybody who has the same ambition to make my region a better place”. But she hopes the victor will be Labour candidate Jason Stockwood, “who has come from the community, who was actually born and brought up in that community, not just come to it for political purposes…”
Mayors are place first, before party – you have to be invested in your region more than anything
Ward said that the clean energy transition could hold unique opportunities for the region and help to make communities feel they have a stake in the nation’s economy again.
“Now is the time to think about what is on offer for the future in terms of hydrogen or nuclear energy,” she told PoliticsHome, pointing to the fact that the former West Burton coal-fired power plant in Nottinghamshire has already been selected as a site for fusion energy.
“Our future is in the opportunities for the construction and development around all these places,” Ward said. “We’re really keen on looking at those construction skills and the green retrofit technology that comes from it.”
The government's final industrial strategy is expected to be published in June, and Ward is particularly hopeful that it will map out a regional strategy for advanced manufacturing.
“We're actually the region with the highest level of manufacturing in this country – most people don’t know that,” she said. “We're the only region that has both an investment zone and a freeport. We are ripe for industrial investment, both from FDI and from the government.”
She added that the East Midlands has a “great aerospace and aviation and defence capability” and that the local tourism economy was “absolutely undersold”, with multiple castles and historic sites, and Sherwood Forest and the Peak District on the doorstep.
The Labour government has also set the target of building 1.5m new homes over the term of this government, and has set targets for local authorities in England to have 370,000 new homes a year.
Asked whether she supported these top-down housing targets, Ward does not directly answer: “For us, it has to be a case of starting to think on a bigger scale, rather than expecting those local authorities to do that in the short term.”
The mayor admits she is worried about the East Midlands not having the skills and capacity to deliver on the Labour government’s planning reforms and build thousands of new homes. “Everybody is struggling with that,” she said.
While she welcomes the government’s planning reforms, she added: “But we need the technical expertise as well to help us move quicker.”
Ward and other mayors are in the process of appealing to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) to change the brownfield housing fund which they inherited from the previous government. She wants the next round of funding to be more flexible so mayors have less restrictions on how they spend it.
Regional mayors, including Claire Ward (front right), visit No10 Downing Street after the general election last year (Alamy)
“We are still in the process of agreeing where that money goes,” she said, adding that she and the other mayors sit down with housing secretary and deputy prime minister Angela Rayner on a quarterly basis to discuss this and other devolution issues.
The East Midlands mayor laughs when asked which other mayors she admires. Rather than seeing them as trailblazers to follow and admire, she clearly views the other prominent Labour mayors as friends and rivals in equal parts, often having to compete with each other for investment.
No stranger to politics, Ward was previously MP for Watford for 13 years and served in Parliament alongside both London mayor Sadiq Khan and Manchester mayor Andy Burnham when they were MPs. After losing her seat to the Tories in the 2010 general election, she then worked in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector, before relocating to the East Midlands and taking on leadership roles at Sherwood Forest Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
She told PoliticsHome that she had decided to return to frontline politics after gaining more experience in business and healthcare, and that becoming a mayor was a much more “strategic leadership” role than being an MP: “For me, it's a much better role. Being an MP was a huge privilege, but this brings together all of my experience.
“I wasn't interested in standing as an MP, despite people trying to encourage me to do so. Mayors are place first, before party. You have to be invested in your region more than anything.”
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