Tory mayor urges government to be ‘straightforward’ in tier 3 talks

Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands, has urged the government to approach lockdown talks “straightforwardly” and to end “unedifying” public battles with regional leaders.

Following a week of fury from leaders across the north of England, Street said conducting public rows with mayors such as Greater Manchester’s Andy Burnham would not give “anyone any confidence or certainty” ahead of a winter of social curbs.

The former John Lewis boss said ministers should be clearer about the formula used to allocate funding to each region entering tier 3, the strictest level of coronavirus restrictions, and ensure that talks with local politicians were held swiftly and in private.

“I don’t want a protracted negotiation,” he told the Guardian. “If we were at level three, the very simple point is you must have a very serious health crisis on your hands, so you must be decisive over this. If there is a set formula from the government, in fact, it’s not a negotiation. Can we please be told that straightforwardly? Then we can, in a sense, respond to that.”

Street’s intervention follows a bruising week for the government in which its approach to implementing Boris Johnson’s lockdown policy has been condemned as a “deliberate act of levelling down”, “tawdry” and a “divide and conquer” strategy.

With Nottingham set to head into England’s strictest lockdown measures imminently, meaning the closure of “wet-led pubs” and other venues, and other regions close behind, scrutiny has turned to the formula used by ministers to decide the level of funding given to each area.

Robert Jenrick, the communities secretary, said this week that local authorities would be offered a standard financial package based on £8 a head for test and trace and an additional £20 a head for business support.

But local leaders have criticised this calculation as too simplistic as it fails to take into account factors such as business density, deprivation, proportion of hospitality jobs, and whether the area has already been in a long-term lockdown. There is also little clarity about what the business support fund can be used for, with council leaders saying there had been little guidance from government.