News / Politics
‘We’re not trying to appear cosy – it’s a collegiate relationship’
It all seemed a bit cosy in Hengrove Park on a recent morning. Labour’s West of England mayor Helen Godwin had just announced that the Green leader of Bristol City Council, Tony Dyer, was going to be her deputy mayor for the next 12 months and the pair were facing the media together for the first time
Soon after their interview with Bristol24/7, a video was posted on Godwin’s Instagram account of her and Dyer stood on the roof terrace at WECA’s headquarters in Redcliffe. Godwin had a Bristol Rovers scarf; Dyer was wearing a Bristol City tie.
“We might not see eye to eye on everything,” says Godwin, before the pair say in synch “that we both want what’s best for the West”.
Talking to Bristol24/7 in a new block of flats called Dundry View that has been built by Bristol City Council-owned housing company, Goram Homes, the pair do not quite finish each others’ sentences like in the video.
But as the Labour Party infighting continued in Westminster, here in south Bristol there was a genuine spirit of collaboration.
“It’s a collegiate relationship,” said Godwin. “It’s no secret Tony and I get on and I would never want that to be any other way.
“What that means is that we do tend to agree on most things and where we don’t, or where people in our parties don’t – which is probably more often the case – then we will always talk about it and we’ll always figure out a way to resolve it, but we’ll do that privately.
“So we’re not trying to appear cosy. That’s not the aim. The aim is to work well together so that we can make our opportunity at devolution more successful than it has been in the past.
“I think in the past it hasn’t worked so well for us, not necessarily because of personal relationships, but I think the politics got in the way and the will wasn’t there to think about delivery first. And that’s what we’re both completely aligned on.”
It was Dyer’s turn to answer the charge of him and Godwin being too cosy: “What I’ll add to that is I think what residents want to see is politicians not taking swipes; they want to see politicians finding a way to work together to deliver what residents need.
“Now sometimes, you know we will be disagreeing on certain things. We represent different parties. But at the same time, our overall aims are relatively close together. And I think that also applies to the Liberal Democrats as well…
“We’re not going to pretend to be at each others’ throats just for the spectacle and clickbait. What we’re here to do is to represent our residents and to deliver the best for them going forward.”
So is this new spirit of collaboration something that Godwin could perhaps encourage her Labour colleagues at City Hall to participate in?
Despite having enough councillors to have two committee chair positions, the Labour group do not take up their allocation due to Labour Party rules forbidding arrangements with other parties without sign-off by the National Executive Committee.
This has resulted in two Lib Dem councillors chairing committees despite the Lib Dems having only eight councillors in Bristol compared to 20 Labour members.
Labour councillors do chair regulatory committees including human resources, planning and audit.
“Each of the Labour groups are their own entities and they’ve each got their leaders who will make their own decisions, along with the groups, about how they want to interact in whatever the systems are,” said Godwin, who was in former Labour mayor Marvin Rees’ cabinet during her own time as a councillor in Bristol.
Godwin said she will always give the party groups across the region “a sense of where I’m heading and the direction of travel” of WECA “but how they choose to work with whoever’s in power wherever their group is is is a matter for them”.
Three members of Marvin Rees’ cabinet from 2021 ran against each other to be Labour’s candidate for metro mayor, a position eventually secured by Helen Godwin – photo: Bristol City Council
With the West of England mayor being a former Bristol cabinet member, the new deputy mayor also the leader of Bristol City Council and WECA’s headquarters in Bristol, one obvious fear is that WECA is too Bristol-centric.
The combined authority will be growing larger soon too, after North Somerset councillors voted to support that they become a member of WECA, joining Bristol City Council, South Gloucestershire Council and North Somerset Council.
Godwin stressed that the deputy leader role due to be held for the next year by Dyer is rotated between the different council leaders.
“I purposefully spend a lot of time across the whole region,” said Godwin. “Some of the areas of the region I know really well. Others I’ve got to know much better…
“A lot of the mass transit conversations we’re having are outside of the Bristol boundaries. So I think it’s probably, dare I say, a bit of a lazy comment.
“We are based in Bristol. That’s true. But also a big proportion of our population is in Bristol and it is the economic centre. We’ve got to be alive to that.
“We’ve got two big cities, Bristol and Bath, who both have completely different offers and then we have a large rural and semi-rural population who I think about all the time especially when it comes to buses and public transport.
“I’m not thinking about the number 2 that runs through Bristol very much. I’m thinking much more about how do we connect up people that are living in Thornbury? We’ve got kids in Thornbury who want to go to SGS College but there isn’t a direct bus at the moment. That baffles me…
“I’m from the region. I think I can quite easily put myself in any any part of the region and get a good sense of what needs to be done so we’ll keep answering that challenge by doing better.”
For Dyer, it’s the opposite side of the same coin. Can he now be accused of potentially taking his eye off the ball in Bristol by focusing more on WECA?
Becoming deputy mayor is a nice little earner for Dyer, who will receive £19,300 from WECA on top of his £35,290 salary as Bristol City Council leader which itself is on top of the basic councillor allowance of £17,645.
“Bristol cannot thrive if the rest of the region is not thriving either. So I don’t see them as mutually incompatible,” said Dyer.
“I think gone are the days where we had situations where a few things didn’t go forward because Bristol saw Cabot Circus or Broadmead in competition with Cribbs Causeway. We’ve moved on from there. What we can see is that mutually beneficial opportunities arise for the city and for the region.
“We still have a lot of work to do in Bristol and I’m not going to be allowed to forget that. My Green councillors and also the councillors from the other parties in Bristol will be there to continue to scrutinise the decision-making on that.
“But at the same time, if the West of England region doesn’t work, then Bristol won’t work. And I think what we’re demonstrating is that after a long period of perhaps not performing as well as we could have, I think we’re now on course with the West of England seeing us moving forward very quickly and working well together.”
Godwin said that the West of England now has the opportunity to be “a trailblazer”.
She added: “We don’t have a mass transit system because of that desire not to to make it easy to get to Cribbs from Bristol and we’re really suffering for that now.”
A tram pulls up outside Bristol Airport in WECA’s new transport ‘vision’ unveiled in February – image: WECA
In February, a new West of England transport vision was unveiled, with trams and bendy buses among the CGIs. Godwin said that WECA’s head of mass transit, Mark Day, who was appointed in December, “is busy looking at all the options that we’ve got”.
Following the transport vision will come a transport strategy which Godwin says will show the “art of the possible” – looking at costs and engineering challenges.
“I’m looking for some sort of proof of concept in the next four to five years so that residents can see something that says, okay, she’s serious this is happening.
“So (Day and his team) are working to that timeline but we are very intentionally looking at all our options rather than saying it must be X or it must be Y because we’ve seen in other places that can sometimes cause challenges.”
Labour Bristol mayor Marvin Rees infamously clashed with former Labour WECA mayor Dan Norris about what a mass transit system would look like, with Rees’ favoured option of below-ground sections brushed aside by Norris.
In this new spirit of cross-party political collaboration, Dyer agreed with Godwin: “I think we can get buried in too much detail about whether it’s to be trams or bendy buses or an underground or whatever.
“The reality is what I want is a mass transit system that people can rely on, that is affordable and gets them from where they are to where they need to be. And I think if we can deliver that, it could be done by hamster-powered balloons, as long as it delivers what people need from a transport system.”
And with that, the West of England mayor and her new deputy were off to their next engagement, by road rather than hamster-powered balloons. Labour and Green. City and Rovers. Side by side.
Main photo: Martin Booth
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