‘Spoonful of sugar’ to come with Budget medicine, Labour mayor suggests

Steve Rotheram, Mayor of the Liverpool City Region, told the PA news agency he believes economic growth will be delivered “through our combined authorities and through devolution”, but it could be “very very difficult” for people who are “looking towards a different type of government” if the Government decides to “go through an austerity Budget”.

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has previously warned that the Budget due at the end of October will be “painful”, and the Government has already seen a backlash over its decision to means test the winter fuel payment allocated to pensioners.

Mr Rotheram told the PA news agency that Labour stood on a manifesto with an “absolute central purpose” of delivering growth and he believes that “we deliver economic growth through our combined authorities and through devolution”.

Asked whether he thought this would be a Budget that would deliver economic growth, he said:  “I think there’s going to be sort of a spoonful of sugar along with the medicine.”

He added: “And that will be for those areas where there’s obviously projects that we can deliver quite quickly that fits into the other manifesto commitments, so GB Energy for instance.”

He went on: “It depends on what they want to do, if they want to go through an austerity Budget straight off without anything else then it’s going to be very very difficult for all of those MPs and all of those people (…)  who are looking towards a different type of government.

“But we have to look at things over five years.”

Mr Rotheram said of the Budget that he believes rail renationalisation “should be a priority” and he would also like to hear something on bus funding “across the whole country”, as any increase to £2 fares could be a “jolt to people given the cost-of-living crisis”.

He also said that he would like a “financial settlement” for his area.

“That would help us both in the short term, but also to plan so that we can get more strategic delivery over the next few years,” he explained.

Referring to his metro mayor colleagues, Mr Rotheram added: “We said this to the Tories, we’ll say it to Labour: we stand ready to deliver that increase in economic growth in our individual areas”.

Mr Rotheram was speaking ahead of Labour Party conference beginning in Liverpool this weekend, the first since the party’s general election victory in July.

Before he became the Mayor of the Liverpool City Region in 2017, Mr Rotheram was the MP for Liverpool Walton for seven years.

Hundreds of new MPs were elected for the first time in July, and he has warned new parliamentary recruits to be “careful about the attractions and the shiny things that can happen” in Westminster.

Reflecting on his time in Parliament, Mr Rotheram said that he had never visited the House of Commons chamber before he was elected, and that when he arrived he found a system that “isn’t geared up to make quick decisions”.

“It’s not a place where people can make a real difference in the immediacy,” he explained.

Mr Rotheram, who secured a majority of more than 27,000 in 2015 described himself as a “very impatient person” who wanted things to “happen very very quickly”.

However, he became frustrated with the mechanisms and decisions that “are far too far away from places like ours”.

While he described parts of the civil service as “making decisions when they couldn’t identify the difference between what’s called Kirkby and West Kirby”, Mr Rotheram compared that to his mayoral position, where “we do know all of that and so we can take those decisions and control our own destiny and make those right calls for our communities”.

With some words of advice for new MPs, he said of Parliament: “It can be a great place if you get the backing of all the machinery, but it can also be a very, very lonely place.

“I’d say to anybody who is down there to be careful about the attractions and the shiny things that happen down there – that’s not real life.

“It can lead you down very very dark alleys if you’re not careful, and so be careful of people that you surround yourself with, be careful of the places that you frequent.”

A Government spokesperson said: “Modernising our transport infrastructure is at the heart of our plans to kickstart economic growth in every part of the country.

“We will deliver the reforms on our buses and trains to get the country moving again, while also respecting people with skin in the game to make decisions for their own areas.”

Labour’s annual party conference will begin in Liverpool on September 22.