A reinvented Birmingham is booming, while the wider West Midlands faces real hardship. What can a single elected mayor for metropolises as different as Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Coventry really do to turn the tide?

Two retired teachers are giggling in the restaurant in John Lewis’s Birmingham department store. I’ve just told them that Britain’s second city was ranked ahead of Rome, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Miami and Dubai in the global Mercer Quality of Living Report 2017.

“It’s probably because we have more miles of canals than Venice,” says Susan. “And more trees than Paris,” chimes in Beryl. “Oh yeah, and don’t forget Birmingham is apparently Britain’s jihadi capital,” Susan adds. “That’s got to count for something.”

What really gets the women laughing is when I quote them the gloss put on this ranking from the city’s council leader, John Clancy. “The fantastic quality of life in Birmingham is increasingly recognised, not just in this country but around the world,” Clancy enthused. “From our renowned Michelin-starred restaurants, to an unrivalled cultural offer with gems like the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the Birmingham Royal Ballet, plus international sporting events, this city has something for everyone.” Like John Lewis, Birmingham is never knowingly undersold.

Clancy, though, has statistics to underline his point. The number of foreign visitors to the city has doubled in three years, he says. The economic growth rate is 13.5% in the past five years, and 10,000 new homes are planned for the city centre. “It is obvious,” he says, “that Birmingham is becoming a destination of choice.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A video crew follows a resident of James Turner Street, Birmingham, for the Channel 4 documentary Benefits Street in 2014. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian

Viewed this way, the person who gets elected next month to the new office of mayor of the West Midlands will chiefly be in charge of managing the great renaissance of the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.

But there is another narrative that makes the mayoral job look much tougher. “Central Birmingham would pass for Boston, Massachusetts, its poorer outskirts for the less fashionable districts of Bucharest,” wrote the Economist recently. According to this counter-narrative, beyond the glitz of real-estate projects – such as the one behind the Town Hall boldly called Paradise – is the very hell of broken Britain itself. That’s not to mention Coventry, Solihull, Wolverhampton, Walsall, West Bromwich and Dudley, all of which fall under the mayoral ambit.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s recent report Inclusive Growth in the West Midlands: An Agenda for the New Mayor pointed out that homelessness in the West Midlands is nearly double the national average. Three in 10 kids here grow up in poverty. There’s such a regional skills shortage that employers report 18% of vacancies cannot be filled in Birmingham and Solihull, while the figure is 28% in the Black Country (across England it is 22%).



“What I don’t get is how a new mayor for an amorphous region is going to deal with all these problems,” says Susan. “What can they do that the existing local authorities can’t?”

She’s not alone in her concern. Many putative voters in the 4 May election are uncertain about how one office can contribute to the well-being of metropolises as different as Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Coventry. Still less do they know who the candidates are, or what they stand for.

Network West Midlands, which runs public transport in the area and will fall under the mayor’s control, is urging public transport users to vote on 4 May with marketing messages that enjoin them to “be part of history”. In truth, the first mayoral election is now likely to become a sideshow to history, or at least one part of it: the snap general election called by Theresa May might make West Midlands electors vote over national issues rather than the mayoral candidates’ policies. Worse, they might suffer from democratic ennui: already, according to one poll, 43% of the electorate is not planning to vote.

The overriding electoral mood is one of bewilderment. “What election?” says a man heading into St Phillips Cathedral for lunchtime Holy Communion when asked to name the most important electoral issues. “I’ve had no election material, no one’s been on the doorstep. What’s going on?”

What is going on is that the new mayor will chair the new West Midlands Combined Authority, which will take on a £36.5m annual budget over 30 years to spend on transport infrastructure, housing and training opportunities, attracting investment and improving mental health service. (Unlike Greater Manchester, the West Midlands won’t have control over a devolved NHS budget.)

The Labour candidate, Siôn Simon, is clear about the historic significance of devolving power to the West Midlands 31 years after Margaret Thatcher abolished the county council (1974-1986). Simon’s campaign slogan is “Taking back control, putting the West Midlands first” – by which he means taking back control from Westminster, in rather the same way the Leave campaign sought a return of power from Brussels. That’s cunning rhetoric to deploy in the Brexit heartland: all the West Midlands towns and cities voted to leave the EU (Birmingham only by a slender majority of 3,000, but parts of the Black Country by huge margins).

Simon, a former MP for Birmingham Erdington and current West Midlands MEP, thinks the new mayor can tackle the dearth of affordable homes. Just how may well be controversial. He recently promised a “difficult conversation” with Solihull about building new homes on green belt land – a proposal that Tories, doubtless mindful of their support among the well-heeled denizens of leafy Silhillian boulevards, have rejected.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Siôn Simon, the Labour candidate. Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andy Street, the Conservative candidate. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/Empics

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Beverley Nielsen, the Liberal Democrat candidate. Photograph: Martin Turner

As for his leading rival, the Conservative candidate Andy Street, his most visionary idea for the West Midlands so far has been to map the mutualising principle of the John Lewis Partnership (of which he was managing director until recently) on to the West Midlands. Specifically, he has proposed to spin off existing services into new mutually owned operations, to provide funding for these and social enterprises to compete for contracts, and to allow existing mutuals, enterprises and charities to take on public work.

Although 31 of 38 MPs elected in the West Midlands were Labour, Street reckons he only needs a 4% swing for victory. And he is the bookies’ favourite.

It remains unclear, however, how much support he will enjoy with younger Brummies, one of whom, Saffiyah Khan, went viral last month when she was photographed facing down far-right English Defence League demonstrator Ian Crossland after he and his chums intimidated another woman wearing a hijab. Khan’s smiling, bemused expression (and the fact she was slightly taller than her adversary) delighted many.

Jess Phillips MP (@jessphillips) Who looks like they have power here, the real Brummy on the left or the EDL who migrated for the day to our city and failed to assimilate pic.twitter.com/bu96ALQsOL

The image not only highlighted the city’s social power struggles – between women and men, Muslims and Muslim haters, Brummies and non-Brummies – but challenged the idea that the main contribution of Muslims to the West Midlands has been opportunities for jihadist recruitment. A few years ago, a Fox News commentator had to apologise for describing Birmingham as a “Muslim-only city” where non-Muslims “don’t go”. When it was revealed that Khalid Masood, who committed the deadly attack outside Parliament, had lived in Birmingham for a year, the news seemed to confirm that the city was a training ground for terrorists.

Soon after, the New York Times visited and reported not a multicultural city but a divided one: between Islamic ghettoes and the rest, and with a Muslim community itself divided between jihadist groomers and the rest. “After Terrorist Attack, a British City Linked to Jihadis Winces and Asks Why” went the headline. Can a city wince? It seems unlikely.

Indeed, few people here recognise the ethnically divided city described by day-tripping journalists. “It’s nonsense to say there are no-go areas for whites,” says Shahnaz Hassan, a Muslim who works in Birmingham’s booming financial services sector. “Just think of all the restaurants in Sparkbrook and Sparkhill filled with white people. They clearly don’t think those are no-go areas.”

Media misrepresentation, at least, has caused a spike in Brummie satire. The popular Paradise Circus blog commissioned Florrie Canaffordan-Internship to spend a weekend in Birmingham. “I was amazed at the vibrancy of this landlocked city Caliphate and will certainly be recommending it to my friends,” she reported after savouring Broad Street’s Ultimate Burka Bar (“We opted for the house special, which came served on a genuine, reclaimed Afghani IED”) and the suburb of Bournville (“The area is dominated by the Cadbury chocolate factory, and all the homes and gardens here are a monument to the faded and defeated power of 19th century infidel crusaders. Utterly charming!”).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Birmingham city centre, where there is a boom in office construction as financial services move in. Photograph: Alamy

How does this issue of extremism play on the campaign trail? Andy Street has argued that poor economic prospects made some residents prone to radicalisation. So, if the West Midlands has a problem with training terrorists, it’s one best solved by improving the lot of the masses in the manner of Street’s hero Joseph Chamberlain, the slum-clearing, tub-thumping Brummie mayor of Victorian times whose so-called civic gospel still inspires politicians of all stripes round here. “It’s exactly the same now,” Street has said. “We will only address those people who feel they’ve missed out if we can drive a successful economy that everyone shares in the fruits of.”

But what kind of successful economy would that be? Certainly, the one-time city of a thousand trades has reinvented itself. In the 1980s, unemployment was well over 20%, while in 2016 it was 6.5%. The city has positioned itself as the UK’s top regional centre for conferences and exhibitions, and promoted a service-based economy to replace the jobs lost in manufacturing: financial and professional services, tourism, leisure and retailing.

Siôn Simon’s slogan is 'Taking back control' – cunning rhetoric to deploy in the Brexit heartland

HSBC is moving its consumer banking operation from London Docklands to Birmingham, and Deutsche Bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers have expanded their presences in the city. According to Neil Rami, the chief executive of Marketing Birmingham: “Birmingham’s business, financial and professional services sector is the largest of any UK city outside London, with more than 7,500 companies employing 100,000 people.”

Already, the prospect of more financial services jobs is motoring a spree of office construction, which has reached its highest level in 13 years: 969,000 sq ft of office space was being built last year, a significant boost from the city’s 10-year average of 384,000 sq ft. True, this may be a speculative bubble that Brexit could puncture, but let’s not spoil the story. There are even reports that Channel 4 may relocate to the West Midlands.



Manufacturing is a different matter. On the plus side, Coventry got a boost last month with a new factory to make the TX5 electric London taxi: 5,000 vehicles a year will be produced by 2019, only three years after the Chinese-owned London Taxi Company’s future seemed doomed. But at Think Tank, Birmingham’s science museum, you can see firsthand how far the West Midlands has fallen since its manufacturing glory days: on show are the world’s oldest steam engine (made in Smethwick), the coins, buttons and buckles mass-produced at Matthew Bolton’s Soho Manufactory, the Spitfire hanging from the ceiling that was one of 10,000 manufactured in Castle Bromwich during the war. Can the mayor make the West Midlands’ industrial prowess more than history?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Female factory workers in Birmingham, 1851. Photograph: Alamy

Simon has called for investing in skills and apprenticeships to help strengthen the manufacturing base. “This region is a world leader in advanced manufacturing; it’s a great creative hub; we’re uniquely placed in biotech with our many great universities and our super-diverse population,” he has said. Street, for his part, has set out an £8bn, 30-year Renewal Plan to build houses, address skill shortages, boost jobs and transport.

Whether the incumbent has the powers to realise these visions is a different matter. The Liberal Democrat mayoral candidate (and former CBI regional director), Beverley Nielsen, is campaigning on the idea that the job is a poisoned chalice – that Whitehall is not just handing over power, but using it as a way to offload spending cuts. The national government, she has said, has ordered that “the first Mayor must make £4bn of cuts, because that’s the size of the funding shortfall which the Tories want to impose upon us”. The new West Midlands mayor, that’s to say, might well be spending more of their time in office managing austerity than massaging success.

Everyone seems to agree that if the West Midlands is to rise again, it has to get better connected. Just across the way from Think Tank is the proposed HS2 terminus at Curzon Street. When services start there in 2026 they will slash journey times to London from 1 hr 21 mins to 49 mins and integrate Birmingham into European high-speed networks. Not enough, argues Simon, who calls for a second runway at Birmingham airport and the nationalisation of the M6 toll road, projects derided by his Tory rival as waste of the mayor’s limited transport budget.

Night owls: portraits of life on the night bus – in pictures Read more

Of more immediate concern to voters is what the mayor will do to bus, tram and train services. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation argues that the mayor’s new public transport powers must prioritise connecting deprived areas to job opportunities, particularly in parts of the Black Country and Coventry. “Public transport’s been terrible for too long, especially when you compare it to London,” one man tells me at the tram stop on Stephenson Place. “Only recently did they introduce a card that you can use on bus, rail and tram like you can in London. And the fares don’t keep pace with wages.” Simon has proposed capping bus and tram fares at £4.40 for an all-day ticket. It’s a proposal that resonates with the many West Midlanders who for many years have felt ripped off by inadequate public transport services, whose prices keep rising while incomes fall.

The overwhelming challenge for the mayor is to make sure the West Midlands’ most deprived residents don’t get left out of the uber-narrative you can read in the Birmingham property brochures, of multilingual bankers swanning in Range Rovers from penthouse flat to Symphony Hall. Susan, the retired teacher in the John Lewis restaurant, put it best: “If, thanks to the new mayor, the rich get richer and the poor carry on getting fleeced, they’ll have been a waste of time – and our money.”

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion, and explore our archive here