Download - West Midlands Metro Mayor Manifestos

youth and adult skills

West Midlands Metro Mayor - Candidate Manifestos

• Train a new Mayor’s Army of skilled construction workers;

• Invest in apprenticeships and skills training, with a focus on construction and manufacturing;

• Create a Mayor’s Digital Skills Institute with responsibility for leading digital training efforts in the West Midlands;

• Retain graduates who study in the West Midlands or who grew up in the West Midlands with a “West Midlands First” programme;

• Create a West Midlands Skills Fund from the £150–180 million Apprenticeship Levy;

• Focus the adult skills budget on courses of twenty-first century skills;

• Make any business that provides goods or services to the WMCA provide employment or training opportunities to young people;

• Launch a “Mayor’s Mentors” scheme;

• Extend the Work Coaches programme across the entire West Midlands area.

Andy Street, Conservatives

• Subsidise student loan repayments when they decide after studying in the West Midlands to work with SMEs or manufacturers and live here; • Bursaries worth up to £5,000 to anyone living and working with local SMEs or manufacturers with apprenticeships or upskilling qualifications; • Upskilling workforce for career in emerging construction, connected homes and smart urban environments

Beverley Neilson, Liberal Democrats

• Adult Skills Budget.

The metro mayor will have control over the:

• Establish a tech talent pipeline with more young people enabled to gain key digital skills, and more apprenticeships in the sector;

• Bring forward a new West Midlands Commission on Employment and Skills which will much more closely align skills and infrastructure planning;

• Deliver 8,000 new technical apprenticeships by using new infrastructure spending on HS2;

• Contribute to a £30 million university centre - a new, university-level technical and hi-tech manufacturing centre in the heart of the Black Country;

• Deepen ties between schools and successful local businesses – including getting local business people into schools.

Siôn Simon, Labour

James Burn, GreensGraham Stevenson, Communists

Peter Durnell, UKIP

• Enable transfer to grammar schools for children between 11 and 13 years;

• Identify and ensure that our colleges provide courses in the key skills local employers need, in particular by increasing vocational training options.

• Aim to ensure that the skills budget is spent in areas and communities where there is employment demand, and with the objective of increasing productivity,

• Ensure that people in the West Midlands have the skills needed to match vacancies

• Improve careers advice by improving work experience

• Make recruitment to all TfWM and contractor jobs anonymous

No skills policies featured in manifesto


• Rule out any universal congestion charge on drivers in the West Midlands;

• Explore a scheme to incentivise more lorries and heavy vehicles to use the M6 Toll at peak times, and open up the M6 Toll for free where it will help during a serious traffic incident on the M6;

• Explore a lane rental scheme to charge companies for delays in digging up the road;

• Reopen the Camp Hill / Tamworth rail line, with new stations and reopen Sutton Park line to Aldridge Station;

• Start the construction of the Midlands Metro extension to Brierley Hill;

• Accelerate the rollout of contactless and smart payments on West Midlands buses, meaning that fares can have a daily maximum price cap;

• Increase cycling from 1% of all journeys to 5% of all journeys by 2023.


• 16-25s living in WMCA offered a Swift Travel Card worth up to £300 credit for free travel off-peak; • Free bus passes for all living here every first Saturday of the month• Zero congestion, integrated transport infrastructure development with Transport for West Midlands • Appoint an internationally experience Transport Commissioner• Major programme of tram extensions to develop network of destinations including Brierley Hill, Digbeth, Birmingham Airport and Solihull Town Centre• Birmingham and Moseley railway• Extend available train carriages• Extend the Universal Fare System, one payment system for all transport modes• Invest £10 per head into cycling• Appoint a Cycle ‘Tsar’


• Bring forward a plan to strenghten the role of the airport;

• Double the size of our tram system by creating a new 18-mile Metro-spine and by building out three key spurs;

• Drive forward a programme of new rail lines and stations across the region;

• Push the government to nationalise the M6 toll road so that all drivers can use it without charge;

• Create a Tube-style map of the whole transport system;

• Cap bus fares at £4.40 for an all-day ticket and freeze this price cap for at least a year;

• Introduce an integrated contactless payment system;

• Deliver free travel on bus and metro for all aged 16-19 in FE College;

• Establish RideShareWM - a portal for all car and bike hire and ridesharing opportunities.

Siôn Simon, Labour


Peter Durnell, UKIP

• Work with Highways England to improve the quality/ timeliness of information on signs across the West Mid road network;

• Investigate reopening Worcester to Derby (via Black Country) railway line, reintroducing passengers onto the Camp Hill line;

• Oppose the ‘London commuter belt extension’ (HS2).

• Bring together local councils, the community and other partners to form a regional infra-structure plan

• Produce an annual broadband action plan and pressure central government to vastly improve broadband speed

• Prioritise transport spending on local and regional links as much as national links

• Bus franchising as soon as practicable

• Introduce good-quality and fast Bus Rapid Transit routes

• Oyster card

• Student train and bus fares

• Free public transport for 16-19 year olds in FE

• Reopen railway lines in the Black Country, south Staffordshire and Birmingham

• £10 per head on cycling and cycling charter

• Initiate plans for cycle hire and cycle superhigh-ways.

• Introduce smart road charging in areas where public transport is a viable alternative to driving, and use this income to fund improvements in public transport

• Investigate instituting a workplace parking levy in areas well served by public transport.

• Bring an electric car-sharing scheme to the West Midlands.

• Complete public ownership of public transport - nationalising the M6 Toll Road, and looking at how to bring the National Express into line;

• Road re-instatement and tougher control of parking and on-street emissions

transport andinfrastructure

• Consolidated transport budget• Local roads network • Bus franchising and smart ticketing



• Fast-track crucial new developments such as Friargate, the extension to the i54 Business Park, the transformation of the Wolverhampton City Council, the area around Bescot Rail, and the Grove Lane/Cranford area;

• Ask every public body to pay the West Midlands (real) living wage, becoming an accredited living wage employer, buying only from real living wage suppliers;

• Run a micro-pilot on the use of a Universal Basic Income (UBI).


• Create a WM Regional Bank• Create a £1bn Innovation fund, soundly underpinned with regional assets and funding streams, to provide grants to start-ups• Create high craft-led and intermediate technology clusters bringing together cooperative-led growth through a new Chamber for Business Growth• Provide firms that work with schools, colleges and universities, or are acting as responsible partners in our communities, preferential terms on grants and reduced rates• Real Living Wage for all employees, using local procurement, and in addition bringing production back to the West Midlands and supporting local communities setting up micro and small businesses


• Lead the success of the WMCA Growth Company, helping West Midlands businesses to market themselves and gain investment;

• Support local authorities and developers with major redevelopment projects across the West Midlands, for example Friargate in Coventry, Snow Hill in Birmingham and Springfield in Wolverhampton;

• Co-sponsor technology accelerators with large businesses across the West Midlands to develop new spin-off start up ventures in their industries;

• Work with banks, venture capital firms and other investors to make it easier for small businesses and entrepreneurs to access capital;

• Turn unused public sector office space into co-working spaces for use;

• Set up Business Improvement Districts, where businesses club together to pay for improvements to their local areas

Siôn Simon, Labour


Peter Durnell, UKIP

• Concentrate WMCA policies on supporting small and medium sized businesses

• Appoint a deputy mayor charged with championing inclusive growth

• Pressure WMCA to produce comprehensive assessment of deprivation across the area, and a action plan to address it

• Push WMCA to use investment monies to support businesses (including social enterprises) and co-ops especially in the least well-off areas

• Try and ensure at least one third of public procurement spend in the WM goes to SMEs or co-ops and spend is localised wherever possible.

• SME representative on the WMCA board.

• Report annually on the availability and affordability of industrial and leisure space in the West Midlands

• One-stop shop for small business support and advice

• Champion the living wage throughout the WMCA and for its contractors

• Develop urban poly-tunnel farms;

• Adopt the Living wage as the only acceptable wage

business andenterprise


• Spend £200 million on preparation and decontamination of brownfield sites;

• Introduce measures to speed up housebuilding, such as a tax on vacant land being held for development;

• Push local authorities to bring more empty homes back into use;

• Make it easier for developers to convert buildings;

• Support a pilot of the Government’s new Voluntary Right to Buy programme in the West Midlands;

• Trial a Housing First service with intensive mental health support;.


• Start a house building programme that ensures access to homes of varying tenure and levels of affordability for everyone; • Make available more public homes for rent and sale, building on models such as Birmingham Municipal Housing Trust • Expand the private rental sector by ensuring responsible practices from both landlords and tenants• Provide sites for self build• Provide more locally built affordable starter homes• Identify, and make available, land for development following a Land Commission Report, especially smaller infill plots• Ensure access to finance for smaller regional developers who bring forward viable opportunities• Campaign to remove the borrowing cap• Work with social enterprises to convert empty homes


• Create a Mayor’s Office of Housing and Development to oversee the development of a statutory Regional Spatial Plan;

• Double the number of affordable new homes to over 3000 per year

Siôn Simon, Labour


Peter Durnell, UKIP

• Identify and refurbish empty houses;

• Convert empty shops and offices into affordable housing;

• Quantify and work to end the large scale relocation of families from other parts of UK to the West Midlands.

• Work with local authorities to support developments and increase housing density near existing good-quality rail and Rapid Transit routes and hubs

• Support and extend the current work started by the WMCA on forming a plan for the region

• Push for small developers, self-builders, Community Land Trusts and housing co-op brownfield land first

• Use CPOs to force land bankers to bring sites into use

• Planning of housing and brownfield sites linked to economic regeneration;

housing andplanning • Compulsory purchase powers




• Drive an effective home insulation strategy and address fuel poverty


• Engage with Energy Capital and other energy stakeholder groups in efforts to promote sustainability and low-carbon businesses

Siôn Simon, Labour


Peter Durnell, UKIP

No environment policies featured in manifesto

• Use bus franchising powers to ensure that 10% of buses are electric hybrid or hydrogen powered by 2020

• Pursue setting up a municipally owned West Midlands Energy Company

• Work with local authorities to issue green bonds to encourage decarbonisation

• Push for all new developments to include green space and parks

environment






• Engage with Energy Capital and other energy stakeholder groups in efforts to promote sustainability and low-carbon businesses

Siôn Simon, Labour


Peter Durnell, UKIP

No health policies featured in manifesto• Support the development of apps that provide health information

• Support the development of personalised care budgets,

• Improve prevention of health problems;

health andsocial care

No health policies featured in manifesto • Implement wellbeing measures, and prioritise as indicators of success as mayor

• Launch a campaign to tackle loneliness and social exclusion

• Oppose local government cuts to public health budget

No health policies featured in manifesto

Download - West Midlands Metro Mayor Manifestos

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