Andy Burnham’s decision to establish No 10 North<\/a> in Manchester as part of plans to move decision-making away from Westminster and hand more powers to regions.<\/p>\nConservative MP Saqib Bhatti said there was a risk from the move that attention could become too focused on Greater Manchester at the expense of areas such as the West Midlands.<\/p>\n
But Labour peer Lord Falconer defended the government’s approach, saying Burnham’s commitment to devolution was intended to benefit the whole country rather than a single city.<\/p>\n
Bhatti said the West Midlands played a vital role in the UK’s economy, highlighting employers including Coventry-based Jaguar Land Rover, and argued the West Midlands should receive the recognition and powers needed to match its economic contribution.<\/p>\n
“We’ve had a really good run as the West Midlands, as being a really confident, powerful region of the country, and we are absolutely important when it comes to the economic growth of this country,” the MP for Meriden and Solihull East said.<\/p>\n
“Last year, Jaguar Land Rover had a torrid year, and look what happened to the economic stats of the country.<\/p>\n
“[The] West Midlands is bigger than just one party.<\/p>\n
“It’s bigger than any partisanship…all of us will have to come together and make noise, we need to be represented at the national level.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The West Midlands must not be overlooked as the government rolls out its devolution plans, an MP has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":711527,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-711526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=711526"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/711526\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/711527"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=711526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=711526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=711526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}