When Birmingham Corporation first began seriously considering a municipal airport in 1928, it did not commission a vision document, appoint a stakeholder panel or spend three years deciding whether the runway was sufficiently inclusive. It decided that a great industrial city needed an airport, acquired land beyond Birmingham’s boundary, accepted the financial risk and built Elmdon, today’s Birmingham Airport. That matters because the West Midlands Combined Authority is increasingly the engine room for regional growth, sitting above councils whose financial freedom and capacity for great civic adventures have shrunk. The question is whether we have built a powerful new engine or one with rather too much sand in the works: smooth and reassuring, but liable to seize when asked to pull something heavy.
Sir Andy Street, Conservative Mayor of the West Midlands from 2017 to 2024, made the office visible, fought for investment and helped establish the Combined Authority as something Whitehall had to take seriously. Richard Parker, the Labour Mayor who succeeded him, is increasingly out talking directly to people, which is exactly what a regional mayor should do. But visibility and money are means, not achievements. Across England, combined authorities can point to bus franchising, trains, development land, skills programmes and investment funds. Useful stuff, but councils were doing versions of all that when television was black and white. Devolution ought eventually to produce something more radical than local administration over a larger geography.
So where are the big ideas? Why not a municipal West Midlands vehicle company, commercially managed and backed by private and perhaps Gulf sovereign capital, producing buses, vans, ambulances and specialist vehicles while drawing on an automotive industry that still makes some bloody good cars here? Why not a West Midlands Investment Bank, bringing together municipal pension funds, institutional investors and private capital to finance productive regional growth? Why not a regional energy corporation building district heating, solar generation and serious storage into new developments rather than asking developers to be greener and discovering that the architect has responded by drawing three extra trees, two bicycles and an improbably cheerful Labrador?
Then there is property. Every couple of decades someone with serious borrowing notices exhausted offices, tired shopping parades and buildings whose greatest architectural achievement is remaining upright. They buy cheaply, assemble sites, obtain permissions and emerge years later looking like visionaries. Why cannot WMCA occasionally do the same? Borrow intelligently, acquire strategic property, provide roads, power and planning, then offer oven-ready developments to private partners while retaining some of the uplift for the public. We have become remarkably good at socialising the awkward bits and privatising the profitable ones.
There will immediately be explanations about why some of this is legally difficult. Fine. Birmingham once had committees concerned with obtaining the legislation needed to carry out its ambitions. When the city needed water from Wales, its leaders did not discover that existing law was inconvenient and commission a seminar on resilience. They went to Parliament. Perhaps the modern Combined Authority needs its own Bills Committee: identify the powers required for investment, energy, land assembly or municipal enterprise, draft the case and fight for them. If Westminster says no, that is the beginning of politics, not the conclusion of the feasibility study.
Some ideas would fail. I would be astonished if they did not. Civic enterprise does not mean gambling taxpayers’ money on whatever survives a particularly long lunch. It means calculated risk, expert commercial management and a willingness to experiment. Try a sand battery on a district-heating scheme. If it works, build another. If it does not, stop. The only economic strategy guaranteed never to fail is one so timid that nobody notices whether it succeeded.
Devolution should ultimately be judged by what it creates. The West Midlands does not need another layer of government becoming expert at repackaging Whitehall money and announcing it back to us. It needs an institution prepared to build, own, invest and occasionally take a calculated risk. The real test for Richard Parker, and every mayor who follows him, is simple: when they leave office, will we be able to point at something genuinely new and say, “that exists because they had the nerve to do it”? Or will the enduring symbol of modern devolution remain the compulsory mayoral uniform: a brand-new yellow hard hat, an impossibly clean high-vis vest and something being built behind them by somebody else?
