The outgoing Mayor of Liverpool has fired a parting shot at the government-appointed commissioners overseeing the city council.
In less than two weeks time, Mayor Joanne Anderson will leave her position as the council moves to a leader and cabinet model at the local elections.
This morning, Mayor Anderson used her final meeting of the council’s executive team to hit out at Whitehall mandated officers who have been in place at the Cunard since June 2021.
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The former Princes Park councillor, who was elected as the city’s leader in May 2021, said she felt the commissioners, led by former police boss Mike Cunningham, had overstepped in how they had handled the council’s adoption of a new ethical charter. Mayor Anderson told members of the cabinet that amendments made to the document - agreed by full council in January 2022 - by the commissioners meant it was now “absolutely meaningless.”
Mr Cunningham said the commissioners had worked within the directions set by government on their appointment.
An ethical charter can be described as the set of principles and values that underpin the council’s policies, decision-making, the delivery of its services and its relationship with others. A cabinet report from last year said: “The Charter’s principles will guide and inform the Council’s policies and work alongside its legal duties and powers.”
Mayor Anderson told this morning’s meeting the commissioners had said they were “not happy with the contents” of the document set out by councillors and had sought to amend it. The Labour mayor said she felt this was a representation of the external officials “overstepping of their role” and she would be writing to Michael Gove MP, Secretary of State for the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities with her concerns.
The relationship between the council’s top team and the five-strong external officers has been mixed over the 22 months since they were brought into the Cunard Building. Having initially been frosty upon their initial appointment, animosity between the two parties was thought to have thawed, something acknowledged by both lead commissioner Mr Cunningham and Mayor Anderson.
However, the Mayor and her deputy, Cllr Frazer Lake, were both critical of the decision reached in the second commissioners’ report, published last August, which called for the appointment of an additional finance official. Mayor Anderson said the city’s “well known” problems should have been left to its own staff to fix.
On pushing back on the ethical charter, she told the cabinet: “I wasn’t prepared to accept the form of words that don’t mean anything.” Mayor Anderson said she expected it to go before the new council in due course.
Responding to Mayor Anderson's claims, Mr Cunningham said in a statement: “At all times over the course of the intervention, we have acted in accordance to the directions set by the Secretary of State.”
Marking her final meeting in the chair, Mayor Anderson took the opportunity to reflect on her curtailed time in post. She said she had not been a career politician and had never expected or aspired to be in the role.
Mayor Anderson said: “It was a role I stepped in to do in 2021 during an incredibly difficult and turbulent time for our council and the wider city. It has been the most challenging period of my life, and I’ll be the first to say we have been far from perfect, but I am confident that I have left the Council in a much better position that I inherited it, and have laid the foundations but further progress in the years ahead.”
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