South Yorkshire council leaders hatch plan for multi-million investment in economy

Council leaders will sign off the deal today triggering the first of what will become annual £30 million payments from the Treasury.

Talks will also now be held with the Government over allowing the Sheffield City Region Combined Authority to borrow against that money to create a rolling pot worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

The devolution deal promises £900 million over the next 30 years but council leaders will tell the Treasury that giving them more freedom over how they use the annual £30m they receive will allow them to speed up the impact of the cash.

Sir Steve Houghton, chairman of the combined authority, said: “We will be looking at all the spend being on a rolling five year programme. We can then turn that £30m a year into something like a five-year three, four, £500m investment to turn the economy around.

“The aim is you get more businesses paying more business rates and that’s not only good for jobs and the economy, actually given the government are saying local councils will have to survive on business rates and council tax going forward we desperately need those business rates to fund public services.”

The new mayor who will sit on the combined authority, agreed as part of the devolution deal, will not be elected until May 2017 but council leaders are already reviewing how they can use their new powers and money with schools likely to be a major focus.

Sir Steve said: “Whatever we do in the city region, and we’ll do a lot of good stuff, if our kids aren’t coming through with the right skill levels they are not going to get the benefit.

“What we don’t want to do is to start running schools. There’s enough going on, schools have enough problems without us adding to them. What we do want though is that we will have money to invest in schools and we want the schools to co-operate with us.

“What we are looking at is potentially establishing some sort of commission to say to the schools two things - how do we improve school performance, the Ofsted ratings, so we get them where they need to be, and how do we improve GCSE results and how do we sustain that over time.”

With public awareness of the combined authority and the new mayor still relatively low, Sir Steve, the leader of Barnsley Council, admitted there is a risk next year’s election could see the low turnout experienced in polls for police and crime commissioners.

“There’s always that danger so over the next 12 months before those elections we need to get the message out to people. I think there’s an opportunity because it is a mayor rather than a police and crime commissioner that, because of the London mayoral thing there’s probably a bit more knowledge about that but nonetheless we don’t want to fall into that trap and get low turnouts,” he said.