ELECTED MAYOR: As Burnham promises to ‘rewire Britain’, could Swansea Bay ever get a powerful regional mayor?
The man widely expected to be Britain’s next prime minister has promised the biggest shake-up of political power in modern British history.
In a speech in Manchester this week, Andy Burnham — the frontrunner to succeed Sir Keir Starmer in Downing Street — pledged to “rewire Britain” by stripping power from Whitehall and handing it to local leaders.
“The days of Whitehall fighting the devolution of power into the regions and nations are over for good,” he said.
He promised to create a “No.10 North”, a new government hub in Manchester that he called “the nerve centre of a rewired Britain”.
It is a striking moment. And it has reopened an old question closer to home: could Swansea Bay ever get a powerful, directly elected regional mayor of the kind Burnham himself became in Greater Manchester?
The short answer is that it remains a long way off, and the obstacles are considerable. But the idea is no longer quite as far-fetched as it once seemed.
Andy Burnham
(Image: Creative Commons 2.0)
A prime minister in waiting
Burnham’s speech was not just one mayor musing about devolution. He is, for now, the clear favourite to be prime minister within weeks.
Sir Keir Starmer announced last month that he is stepping down as prime minister, triggering a Labour leadership contest.
Burnham returned to Parliament by winning the Makerfield by-election in June, and if no rival emerges, he could be in Downing Street within weeks.
That means his devolution agenda is not a think-tank wishlist — it could soon be government policy.
How the English model works
Across the border, the model Burnham champions is well established. England now has a string of directly elected regional mayors who control sizeable budgets and powers over transport, housing and economic development.
The appeal is a single, recognisable figurehead who can speak for a whole region, attract investment, and be held directly accountable by voters.
And the model is spreading. This week Devon’s county council leader, Julian Brazil, wrote to Mr Burnham saying his county was ready to elect its own regional mayor as soon as next May.
Devon argues a mayor would help it build more homes, grow its economy and support industries from farming to defence, with Cllr Brazil saying the county “stands ready to play its part”.
Its chief executive, Donna Manson, said the authority had already begun talks with government officials and was confident mayoral elections could be held early next year.
Looking down towards the town of Ilfracombe in Devon, with the harbour in view. (Image: Lewis Clarke / Creative Commons 2.0)
Why Wales is different
So why not here?
The first answer is that Wales does things very differently. There are no directly elected regional mayors anywhere in Wales, and none of the 22 councils has one.
Welsh local government runs on a leader-and-cabinet model, in which councillors choose a leader from among themselves, rather than the public electing a single executive figure.
The bodies that already run the region
For all the talk of new models, Swansea Bay’s regional governance is already being reshaped — just not towards a mayor.
For nearly a decade, the defining regional project has been the £1.3bn Swansea Bay City Deal, which funds major schemes across all four counties — from the Pentre Awel health and life-science village in Llanelli to Swansea’s city-centre digital district.
The City Deal has been overseen since 2017 by its own joint committee of the four councils, advised by a private-sector economic strategy board.
Now its work is being folded into the newer South West Wales Corporate Joint Committee — a statutory body, created in 2021, that covers exactly the same four-council area and holds powers over economic development, strategic planning and regional transport.
City Deal funding is transferring to the CJC, which councils have stressed is an administrative change that will not affect the delivery of projects already under way.
The CJC is chaired by Swansea Council leader Rob Stewart, and brings together the leaders of Swansea, Neath Port Talbot, Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, along with national park representatives.
It has been busy. In May it took a £6 billion regional investment prospectus to a major property and infrastructure forum, and it has signed off a regional transport plan and an energy strategy.
In other words, the region already has a single body steering its economy and infrastructure — but one led by a committee of council leaders, accountable to their own councils, rather than by a single figure elected by the public.
That is the crucial difference from the Manchester model. The structures are consolidating; the question the mayoral debate poses is whether one accountable, directly elected person should sit on top of them.
Pentre Awel in Llanelli (Image: Swansea Bay City Deal)
Wales has been here before
There is, in fact, a Welsh precedent — and it is close to home.
In 2004, Ceredigion held the only referendum ever staged in Wales on whether to have a directly elected mayor. Voters rejected the idea decisively, by 14,013 to 5,308 — almost three to one.
The vote had been forced by a petition, after local anger over plans to build thousands of new homes in the county. Opponents argued that handing one person so much power over council policy would be dangerous.
More than two decades on, no Welsh council has an elected mayor, and all 22 still use the leader-and-cabinet model.
The case for — and against
The argument over whether that is enough is not new in Wales. Back in 2016, writing for the Institute of Welsh Affairs think tank, the Cardiff councillor Joseph Carter argued that a committee of council leaders, all jointly responsible for a region, lacks the single accountable figure a mayor would provide.
He warned that without one, a region risked “a power vacuum, uncertainty” and lower private investment than hoped — and held up Greater Manchester as the model Wales should follow.
There is a cautionary tale close to home about what can happen when regional co-operation depends on every council staying at the table.
For years, school improvement across the region was run by a shared body called ERW — Education through Regional Working — bringing together the four Swansea Bay councils alongside Ceredigion and Powys.
But in 2020 Neath Port Talbot pulled out, citing concerns over the consortium’s governance, quality and cost, and chose to run its own arrangements instead.
Other councils followed, and ERW was formally wound up in 2022. Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire and Swansea went on to form a new partnership, Partneriaeth, while the Mid Wales authorities went their own way.
Supporters of an elected mayor argue it is exactly this kind of fragility — where one council walking away can bring down a regional structure — that a single, directly accountable leader is meant to guard against.
Critics counter that an elected mayor would simply add another expensive layer of government between councils and the Senedd. Writing for the Institute of Welsh Affairs, Joe Rossiter noted that Wales already has 22 councils, seven health boards, four corporate joint committees and dozens of other public bodies — and that the argument the country has “too much duplication and layers of governance” for its size is now well established.
Swansea Council’s Chamber in the Grade I listed Guildhall
(Image Swansea Council)
The new First Minister pushes back
Then there is the politics — and this is where it gets interesting.
Wales now has its first Plaid Cymru First Minister, Rhun ap Iorwerth, whose party won the most seats at the 2026 Senedd election and formed the Welsh Government.
His response to Burnham’s speech was pointed. The First Minister warned that the headline pledge “will mean very little to the people of Wales”.
Mr ap Iorwerth said Wales should not settle for anything less than the same powers as Scotland, and argued that a new Downing Street outpost in Manchester would do little to address Wales’ constitutional concerns.
“I have been arguing for many years that the Westminster system is a broken system,” he said, adding that he would keep making the case for a stronger Welsh settlement whoever is in Number 10.
A particular sticking point is money — and here the difference between England and Wales is more than political.
English metro mayors can be handed budgets and devolution deals directly from the Treasury. In Wales, the financial plumbing runs through Cardiff: funding flows to the Welsh Government as a block grant, set by the Barnett Formula, and is then distributed within Wales by Welsh ministers.
That means even a Westminster prime minister who wanted to bankroll a Swansea Bay mayor could not easily do so over the Welsh Government’s head — the money would, in effect, still have to pass through Cardiff Bay. It is a tension that has flared before, with Welsh politicians accusing Whitehall of bypassing the Welsh Government on regional funding.
It makes the funding question especially pointed given that Burnham is reported not to intend to change the Barnett Formula at all — something the First Minister called “disappointing”.
For his part, Burnham did namecheck the nations. He said his “No.10 North” would offer “new opportunities to extend devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland”, and a spokesperson said he would put Wales “at the centre” of any government he runs.
Senedd, councils — or a mayor?
But crucially, it is far from clear what any of that would mean in practice — and, importantly, whether new powers would go to the Senedd or to local areas like Swansea Bay.
That distinction is the heart of the matter. The English mayoral model devolves power downwards to city regions. The Welsh debate has tended to centre on whether power should sit with councils, with new regional bodies, or with the Senedd itself.
It is worth drawing a distinction here. Welsh councils can already adopt a directly elected mayor for a single authority — though only if local voters approve it in a referendum, and none has ever done so. A Greater Manchester-style mayor covering a whole region, by contrast, is a different animal: there is no mechanism for one in Wales, and creating it would require the Welsh Government to legislate. There is no sign of that happening, nor much appetite for it among Welsh leaders.
And there is a deeper reason Cardiff Bay is unlikely to welcome the idea. For the Welsh Government, the Senedd is itself the nation’s regional tier — the body that already holds powers over transport, economic development and the rest.
Seen from Cardiff, a powerful Swansea Bay mayor with their own budget and mandate would not be a junior partner but a rival — a competing centre of power and a competing claim on funding. The Plaid Cymru government’s instinct is to draw more authority towards the Senedd, not to hand it to a new tier of elected regional figures.
Voting Ballot Box
(Image: Chris Loades)
A question of how we vote
Any debate about new ways of governing Wales runs into a live argument about how Wales votes in the first place.
The 2026 Senedd election was the first held under a new closed-list voting system, using the D’Hondt method across 16 enlarged constituencies, with voters backing a party list rather than ranking individual candidates. It came in alongside an expansion of the Senedd from 60 to 96 members.
The system was widely criticised, and not only by its opponents. Swansea Labour MS Mike Hedges said it “does not work”, and that “any system is better than the one we used in the last election” — though he does not himself favour the main alternative.
The new Plaid Cymru Welsh Government wants change too. Its manifesto promised a full review of the Senedd voting system and a push for the Single Transferable Vote — a more proportional system in which voters rank candidates — for both Senedd and local council elections.
That matters for the next big vote on the horizon: the council elections due in May 2027.
Welsh councils already have the power to switch to STV if they choose, under powers introduced in 2021. But the bar is high — it needs a two-thirds majority of councillors — and take-up has been slow. Bridgend opted to stay with first-past-the-post for 2027, while a similar move in Gwynedd fell just short.
The point, for the mayoral question, is this: how Wales chooses its representatives is already being reopened — and any future argument about elected mayors would land in the middle of that bigger debate.
A homely complication
There is even a local quirk to navigate. Swansea already has a Lord Mayor — but that is a ceremonial civic role, rotating each year, and entirely different from the kind of powerful executive mayor seen in Manchester.
Cllr Penny Matthews in her Lord Mayor’s robes following her inauguration at Swansea Guildhall on 15 May 2026. (Image: Swansea Council / supplied)
The Devon connection
Yet the Devon move shows how fast the conversation is moving across the border. And there is a direct Swansea Bay thread to the Devon story.
For years there has been talk of a ferry across the Bristol Channel linking Swansea with North Devon — a project that recently won 98% backing in a Swansea consultation, even as doubts persist over whether it will ever sail.
If both sides of that channel ended up with elected mayors banging the drum for their regions, supporters might argue, long-stalled cross-border ideas like the ferry could finally find the champions they have so far lacked.
So, could it happen?
For now, a Swansea Bay metro mayor remains a thought experiment rather than a plan.
It would need a change of approach in Cardiff Bay, new Welsh laws, and the buy-in of four council leaders before it could ever become real — and the current signs are that Wales intends to chart its own course, not copy Manchester’s.
But with the man who built the Manchester model on the brink of Downing Street, the question of how this corner of Wales is governed — and who speaks for it — is unlikely to go away.
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