North East mayor Kim McGuinness on the future of the region

Kim McGuinness took part in a special Q&A event on Tuesday (September 10) in which she took questions submitted by members of the public.

It included her take on how to improve living standards in our region against a backdrop of the Labour government’s cuts to winter fuel payments, how to reinvigorate struggling high streets, and improve safety for women.

Here is what the mayor had to say in the 45-minute session:
 
What concrete achievements have you actually delivered since being elected?

I said that I would get started straight away and that is exactly what I have done. Some of the things we want to achieve will take a long time to come to fruition. For example, bringing buses back into public control – but I started that process on day one.

Our new child poverty reduction unit will start to see action taking place very quickly. There are also some investments that will make a difference much quicker.

READ MORE: Mayors from across the north of England pledge new era of co-operation

We have allocated £25 million to Fulwell73 for the Crown Work Studios in Sunderland and we will see those film studios start to be built on the banks of the Wear. We have made investment into the Health Innovation Neighbourhood on the Newcastle General Hospital site, where houses and community  facilities will start to spring up very shortly.

I have also announced that we will get started, though it will take a long time to deliver, on taking the Metro to Washington.

It was important for me that everything has to be moving forward and people see that I will deliver on the promises that they voted for, and that is what I am getting on with.
 
When and how do you plan to end child poverty, a major campaign pledge of yours, when Labour is deciding not to remove the two-child benefit cap and is voting to cut winter fuel allowance?

It is not a short-term fix and there is not one single thing I could do as mayor, or any government could do, to end child poverty. I did not want to set a target that left 50 per cent, or any per cent, any child behind. 

But it will take time. We have established the UK’s first child poverty reduction unit and what we will see coming from that first is how we lighten the load of childcare for people. Far too many people are held back from the workplace because childcare is inaccessible or too expensive. We also want to look at interventions around school food and we know the new government will introduce breakfast clubs for every primary school child. 

For us, it is a case of working hand in hand with the Government to try and move them in the right direction at the same time as taking action locally to reduce public transport costs, and meet housing needs. These are things that are not overnight fixes but we know that those things we have control of locally will help thousands of families with the cost of living and improve standards of living.

For the first time in a long time, we are hearing a government acknowledge that child poverty is a problem. For the last 14 years we have had almost categorical denial that it was a problem that 30 per cent of children here live in poverty. 

Government are establishing a taskforce and I want to work with them on that. 

I don’t think anybody here or in this government wants to leave the two-child benefit cap in place, I don’t think anybody wants to change the winter fuel payment. But what they have walked into is a £22 billion black hole left by the previous government and they have said that tough choices need to be made.

I don’t like them, nobody likes them, it is awful. But if we want to start to change things it is something we have to push through. And in the meantime I will do everything in my power locally to create opportunity for every child growing up in this region.
 
How will you and your fellow mayors ensure that the benefits intended by devolution are not undermined by cuts being made by the Labour government?

We have not found a significant impact in the projects we want to deliver because we never had anything anyway – the last government didn’t do anything for us, hadn’t for a long time.

In the aftermath of the HS2 cancellation they announced briefly that they would fund the Leamside Line – it was deleted from the spreadsheet it was found on within 24 hours.

Our plans around Metro extensions and bus franchising and the projects we are investing in have not changed.

We want to continue to push for investment. Myself and the other northern mayors came together over the weekend to talk about what is next for our ‘Great North’. That is something that people really identify with in the North. We know this is where growth can thrive and with the right investment we can create great numbers of jobs and real opportunities for people here.

I will always stand up for our region first. This is the best place in the world and it is about time that people recognised that and that the investment we get matches it.
 
What can you do to make women feel safer in public?

It is one of the things that blights society and affects people you would never expect it to. We have not talked about it enough and part of the battle is bringing the issue into the public domain.

As police and crime commissioner I did a lot of work on making sure women feel safe going on public transport, going out and about at night, going into bars and town centres, and in parks. That is work I want to continue.

A major focus of our work on public transport will be the safety of women because too many women tell us that they don’t feel safe on our public transport at night. That is limiting for your social life and for your work options, it is really fundamental.

I am about to start a consultation on what people want from their public transport network and we will be asking the question of what will make women feel safer.

We will do some work on our high streets to make sure they are more vibrant and change public spaces by design to make them safer for everybody — for women, children, and people with disabilities.

We need to make sure women have equal access to work and address some of the factors contributing to the fact that 28 per cent of women here are economically inactive.
 
Why is redevelopment focused on places like Newcastle and the Quayside and not rundown areas like Gateshead high street?

There are a lot of parts of our region in need of attention from a regeneration point of view and Gateshead high street is a really good example of one. I know the council does have plans for it and I am supportive of anything that uplifts our areas and makes it a great place to live.

We will establish a high streets commission. It will not be a magical quick fix, it won’t go out there and regenerate every high street. But what it will do is help us understand what people want. People’s needs from their local high street have changed a lot because people shop online and don’t do a lot of what they used to on the high street.

While we need to adapt to that, we also want vibrant public spaces where people can socialise and access the services they need.

I want to understand better what people actually want so that, when we are looking at bringing funding in, we are funding the right things. That means more and better housing, retrofitting homes as well as building new ones, but it will take time and we need to work with people.

What we have seen a lot in recent years is a one-off, quick-fix approach with a High Streets Fund or a Levelling Up Fund. What that actually looks like is small amounts of money spent in ways that the public don’t have participation in and barely changes the picture of closed shops, or leaves huge parts of our country that don’t see any investment at all. 

What we want is a long-term approach to improving our region, improving living standards, fixing housing, improving high streets. While it may not happen overnight, I hope people will feel it is something that they have had a say in rather than throwing money at a place and it just being wasted.
 
Will the Gateshead Sage ever get built and what do you as mayor plan to do to help it?

I think there is a real determination to get the arena and conference centre delivered. It is well documented that the whole Levelling Up project has failed, people have not seen the benefit of it, and the gap between North and South has grown in the time that the previous government talked about Levelling Up.

The money they put in at times took so long to allocate that inflation overtook and it became really difficult to deliver those projects. I will work with Gateshead, absolutely, to try and get that project delivered.

At the moment it sits with them, but I am absolutely supportive of anything that uplifts our region, grows our economy, creates jobs, and this is a great example.

I think [providing funding from NECA] is something we would need to look at on an as-and-when basis. We aren’t there yet.  
 
How can young people become more involved in the combined authority and politics in the north east?

I want to set up a Youth Combined Authority. I have not done that yet, but it is absolutely a pledge I made and will be getting on with shortly.

I want young people to have a voice and I have campaigned for and with young people for many years for improved youth services, access to good quality education. Tackling child poverty is obviously at the centre of my agenda.

But people like me cannot do that to young people – we have to work with them to know what it is they want to see. Some of the best and most exciting ideas come from our young residents and I am really looking forward to getting started on that.
 
The North East is suffering from a major housing shortage. What are you going to do to fix this problem and build the social housing we need?

We need more social housing. It is a crisis in this country and we have more than 60,000 people in this region on social housing waiting lists. I am working with both the social housing providers and with Homes England to look at how we can unlock more money and investment.

I am determined that it is something we get better at delivering. I would like us to have more powers, more control over the Homes England budget in our region. For now, it is very clear that we need to bring those people together around a table and say that as much as we need more of every type of home there is an urgency around social housing.

At the same time, I want to look at how we retrofit more of our existing stock. There are too many homes that people don’t want to live in because they are not up to standard. There has historically not been funding for that and it needs to change.
 
The North East has the highest unemployment rate in the country. What are you doing to create more jobs and in what industries?

We have held this title far too often and for far too long. In the last year or two I lost track of the number of times I would wake up to Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss or Boris Johnson saying unemployment is going down, and in the North East it wasn’t. We need to be doing something about it.

We have very ambitious plans around how we turbocharge the sectors that we excel in.

Crown Works is a great example – we want to lean into our cultural and creative industries and that project will create 8,000 jobs in this region. Those aren’t just for actors and directors, it is for set designers, hairdressers, joiners, all great-quality local jobs. We have made it a requirement of the funding we have given that project that 80 per cent of those jobs must be for local people.

We are in the middle of creating our growth plan for the region and have already seen a great project working with Nissan on how we train the next generation of automotive engineers to get great jobs, not just at Nissan but the battery factories and advanced manufacturing.

We have unrivalled access to the North Sea for job creation in offshore wind for job creation on the banks of our rivers and our ports. We are using an investment zone there to support businesses creating more jobs in those industries.
 
Is restoring the Leamside Line realistic or are you wasting £8 million of taxpayer money on a business case for a project that the government is not likely to pay for?

I do believe it is realistic. That project is quite complicated. The part that we have kicked off is about the Metro, extending it to Follingsby and to Washington, which is the fourth largest town in this country without a railway line.

It is not just realistic, it is necessary. The Leamside Line is critical for this country because it adds more capacity to the East Coast Main Line and helps more people travel by rail.
It is really important for us but I don’t expect the Government to just pay for it. That is the change we need to see.

Everyone benefits when we build a new railway line – whether that is us locally, central government, employers around the region. We need to change the way we fund things, so we will be looking at building the right public-private partnerships to get these things funded.

I also want to see some of the important infrastructure of opportunity that goes around railway lines – using the fact that we have this plan to attract more investment from businesses who will create jobs along that Metro line, unlocking opportunities to build houses in brownfield areas that aren’t being used and build communities where people will want to live.

I am really ambitious about the plans to do it. This is an absolutely necessary investment from us and it shows how invested we are in getting it done. Of course we also need to have a conversation with the Government about what role they will play, but it is incumbent on us to think in a more innovative way about how we fund these major projects.
 
When will the outer west of Newcastle be served by the Metro, after 40 years with no suitable connectivity being provided in that time?

I am from the West End of Newcastle and this is an ambition that people from that part of the region have had for a very long time. I would love to see the Metro go everywhere, I really would.

But in the meantime we need to improve our bus services as well. The vast majority of people who travel on public transport travel by bus, and it is crucial that we get those links improved. That is why we are bringing our buses back into public control, so we are not in a situation where bus companies are driven entirely by profit but are providing a service to people.
 
How long until we get a fully working and running public service that is secure from cuts? What steps have you taken so far to fulfil the manifesto promise to bring buses into public control? 

I have started the process and it is a long process, and one in which the public will get a say. I am also working with the Government and we are seeing the Better Buses Bill going through Parliament, which is great news for me because it means we will be able to do these things quicker.

As it stands, we will be working really hard to get this delivered fully in my first term [ending May 2028]  because of the legal requirements and the amount of time it takes to go through procurement processes and such things. But we are working with the Government and I am very hopeful that it will be delivered in my first term.

We are being quite pushy to get the things we need in that bill. 
 
How will you improve transparency over transport delivery in the region, including Metro and BSIP performance, and what’s happening at bodies like the Local Bus Boards?

I fully intend to keep people up to date with the progress being made on Metro and its performance. It was important that I addressed that with Nexus – reliability is a concern for people and people should be able to rely on the Metro. 

There are issues around the Metro that some people might not be aware of because we don’t necessarily talk about them every day. Everyone knows the trains are very old, but we will get a new fleet of trains that will start to be rolled out later this year and that will have a real positive impact on that performance. 

We also need to fix some of the creaking infrastructure around the Metro system, things like the signalling. That will take time and investment and we have to be honest with people about the reasons they aren’t seeing the things they want, and to have a real plan to get it to be world class.

On buses, at the moment we have less control. But I am sitting down with all of the bus companies to talk about what we expect as bus users. Those Local Bus Boards have representation from councils and local representatives and it is important that we talk more about what happens in those spaces. 

Although the process of bringing buses into public control will take time, I want to see improvements before then. I want progress on better integration of our public transport and, in fairness, I have been met with openness from the bus companies in the ambition we have for the improvements we want to see.

I was pleased that this summer we were able to offer kids to travel for free across the bus network, whereas previously some companies had not participated in that.
 
What will you do to make our streets safer so that children and young people can walk, wheel or cycle to access play, leisure and education locally, and for free?

I have a lot of ambition around active travel. We have had a period over recent years where it has become part of a culture war, where it is motorist versus everybody else. That is a ridiculous concept – most people will at some point be motorists and also at times embark on active travel, whether that is walking or cycling or using public transport. It is really important that we accommodate all those things and do so in a way that people feel the benefit of.

I have ambitions for a much more joined-up active travel network that follows guidelines like proper separation from roads. It was great to go down to Tynemoth and Whitley Bay with Chris Boardman to see the difference the infrastructure is making there – with people walking along a proper pavement, cycling on a proper cycle route, and driving on a road.

It is not a big thing to ask for. We have seen small bits of investment that give councils no choice but to invest in small sections. We need to think about how we join up our region and create those quality active travel routes. It is, again, something that will take time. But we need to think about it in the round and having a combined authority and a mayor allows us to do that more than before.
 
How long will it be before the NE Active Travel Commissioner will be appointed and what will their main responsibilities be?

I plan to do that quite quickly and that person will be an adviser to me on how we create that joined-up active travel network and how we encourage more people to make an active travel choice.
 
The Tyne is underused as a transport option. We have the Shields Ferry but a ferry service working up and down the Tyne, from as far up as it can go to Tynemouth, could be a game changer. Is this a vision that could be looked at?

I think it is a great vision. The idea of a Tyne Clipper is something that would be absolutely outstanding.

However, I have to admit that we don’t currently have any such plans. I am really pleased with the plans for the Shields Ferry. Moving the ferry landing to the heart of the North Shields Fish Quay will be transformational, unlocking that ferry for more passengers and for people who use the Fish Quay which is one of the most vibrant parts of our region.

It [a Tyne Clipper] is a great idea, a great ambition and something I would love to look at. But we have not got any immediate plans. I genuinely think it is really exciting, though.