Liverpool’s new mayor has pledged to appoint external, independent chairs to oversee aspects of council decision-making and to listen to the opinions of all the city’s residents, not just those of “a selected few”.
Joanne Anderson made history this month when she became the first black woman to be a directly elected as mayor of a major UK city. Aside from the strides in terms of diversity – every previous leader of Liverpool has been a white man – Anderson is determined that her leadership will be the beginning of a fresh start for the city.
On Wednesday the council voted to accept the recommendations of a report by Max Caller, a local government executive, including that government-appointed commissioners should oversee some council departments – the first official step in drawing a line under the previous administration.
Addressing the meeting, Anderson said: “It’s our job now to rebuild trust of our citizens after what’s happened.”
“The proposed intervention and the appointment of the commissioners is something that we face over the next couple of years”, she added, pledging to “work constructively with the commissioners” to make the necessary improvements.
The catalyst for Caller’s inspection was the arrest of the former mayor and other council officials on suspicion of bribery and witness intimidation as part of an investigation into allegedly corrupt property deals. The scandal loomed large over the mayoral vote. Stephen Yip, an independent with no previous political experience, ran on an anti-corruption message and garnered 40.8% of the vote, to Anderson’s 59.2%.
Anderson is keen to show the change from her predecessor, Joe Anderson. The coincidence in names (they are no relation) does not help (confusingly, the former mayor’s daughter is also called Joanne and sits as an elected councillor). This week Joe, who vehemently denies all allegations against him, launched a website in an effort to clear his name, and he plans to seek legal action against the government, saying the Caller report contains “lies and smears”.
The new mayor says she “has no response to that. I can only focus on the recommendations that we’ve been given by Caller and how we will implement them.”
Elected as a councillor in 2019, she is a relative newcomer to local politics, and before the campaign she did not have a high media profile. “I have no baggage,” she said, but she described her initial weeks as mayor as “heavy”, with “a lot of decisions to make within the first week”.
Although Anderson does not have local authority experience, as an equality consultant she has “worked in one way or another for all kinds of sectors, business, health, education. So I’m not fazed by that,” she said, but she’s had “tough decisions to make”.
“Luckily, I’m very decisive,” she added. In her first week she dismissed the previous cabinet and appointed a new team, including a deputy, Jane Corbett. The councillor of nearly 20 years was one of the few singled out for praise in the Caller report for “exemplary” work scrutinising development deals.
Anderson plans to seek out “external, independent input” to the cabinet. She added: “We’ll be much more engaged with stakeholders, and not just a selected few. If I’m going to engage with the hospitality sector [for example], it’s going to be open to all the hospitality sector, not just key people or figureheads.”
Anderson said that since her election, “men have offered advice, women have offered support.” One exception was a congratulatory call from Marvyn Rees, she said, whose victory in Bristol in 2016 made him the UK’s first directly elected black mayor.
Both preside over English cities that played a huge role in and benefited from the horrors of Britain’s slave trade. That history means Anderson’s victory is particularly poignant. She said that just under a year ago, following George Floyd’s murder in the US and widespread protests, she felt “absolutely devastated”.
“Obviously the world was upset, but for a lot of black women in my circle we were really affected by it. Especially those of us who had been fighting for race equality all our lives and it just didn’t feel like it had got any better, and a whole year later I’m leading the city, so it’s nuts,” she said.
While her large family were “not arsed” by her new role, she said, she was “absolutely loving” the reaction from young girls in the city.
Following Labour’s poor local election results, what lessons did she think the national party could learn from some of the successes? “Our values are expressed in what we do and what we say,” Anderson said. “We have committed socialists up here in the north in key positions.”
She highlighted an emphasis on grassroots politics, referencing some wards in Liverpool where she said every person knows the name of their councillor. Anderson said Liverpool had a long history of community wealth-building projects. “They’re our foundations and our roots, it’s not really about the label.”
Her definitions of socialism are not based on theory but experience: “When you’ve got, you share, and when someone’s in need, you help them.”
Anderson said she was not too “entrenched in national politics”, preferring to focus on her city, and had no plans for a move to Westminster should Liverpool vote to scrap the mayoral role in a planned referendum in 2023.
Despite having joined the party under Jeremy Corbyn, she said Labour had “got to move on. He’s not the leader any more, it’s about the policies.”
During the campaign she lamented that Keir Starmer was seen in the region as having “a lack of passion”, with a strategy of taking the middle ground which often seemed as though he “just forgot about us on the left”, but she hoped he would “move into a phase of just being himself”.
