May no one else have to endure the pain of WMCA's A-F voting requirements.

Finally, not all metro mayors get paid the same. While their salaries can be used as 'comparators', salaries are set by combined authority members voting on the findings of Independent Renumeration Panels (not including London) which has led to some divergence

This led to me spending a long time trying to find past metro mayors' jobs, how long they had them for, and how to categorise them. Hopefully past political experience reflects that no journey to the role was the same, but for the unconvinced we also have age when first elected:

We also looked at past political experience. No political experience is required to become metro mayor, so there have been diverse routes to the role

As part of the role of a metro mayor is to act as a voice for their area, we looked at whether current and past metro mayors had been born within the region that they are now mayor of- turns out around half were!

Elections for metro mayors have previously had turnouts below 50%- although the first election for a post has consistently had the lowest turnout. This will be the first set of metro mayor elections using first past the post rather than supplementary vote.

Even if all incumbents remain in post and current North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll won the North East mayoral election he is standing in, in May we will at a minimum see an increase in the number of people who have been a metro mayor from 15 (see timeline below) to 17

The new first minister will take on the role mid-Senedd session, but that is not unusual. All but the first Welsh first minister (or as it was at the time, first secretary) have done the same.

Highly recommend listening back to this @instituteforgov.bsky.social event from yesterday.

While there is cross-party consensus on the importance of devolution, the event shone a light on areas where the panelists saw devolution already working, and where it could do more.

#IfGdevolution

With the news that Norfolk is delaying the election of a directly elected leader until 2025, here is the updated coverage of English devolution map from @philipnye.bsky.social and the @instituteforgov.bsky.social devo team.

At least my delayed train (after yesterday’s train was cancelled) had these views…

❔Wondering what the devolution deals announced by the government in the Autumn statement yesterday would look like on a map?

📍Luckily the @instituteforgov.bsky.social has one, highlighting both existing and proposed devolution deals across England!