News / Politics
Marvin Rees: 100 days in office
Marvin Rees swept to power in May, trouncing former mayor George Ferguson at the ballot box and ushering in a new era of Labour control over the city.
But that was 100 days’ ago. Now, as he has had time to bed in and the honeymoon period is over, Bristol24/7 looks back at what mayor Marvin has achieved so far.
is needed now More than ever
Monday morning, first thing: get the inauguration speech out of the way. And an interesting speech too, preceded by a moving poem by activist Miles Chambers. Inside the speech was the announcement that he would get started right away with creating a City Office, a kind of meeting table for all the most influential bodies – from the police to the universities – in the city to feed into council policy.
Day 10: Introducing… the cabinet
The reason why it took two weeks to pick is probably because the new mayor chose to more than double the size of the cabinet to ten, including himself. Six of them are women, one is a Tory, one a Lib Dem and one a Green. The Tory appointment to the education brief turned some heads at the teachers’ union.
Parking, parking, parking. It defined Ferguson’s time in office; and not in a good way. So it was always going to be a popular move to put a stop to any more of the dreaded residents’ parking zones and freeze the fees until 2020, the year of the next election. However, this didn’t go far enough for some who wanted the (money spinning) RPZs abolished completely. No pleasing some people.
Day 31: Green Capital accounts made public
Another one which became a major headache for George Ferguson. A long campaign to improve transparency over the public money spent on Bristol’s year as European Green Capital led to protests across the city. Rees made good on his promise to open up the books by publishing 600 invoices for the public to root through.
Day 33: ‘Help me cut the budget’
The details of exactly how Rees plans to save money as funding from central government continues to fall are still a little way off. But he got the ball rolling when he revealed the extra £60 million the council needs to save by 2020. He followed this by introducing a new online budget simulator to a bunch of bored-looking schoolchildren (see above), and then asking the good people of Bristol to work out what to chop using a new tool. A full plan of attack is due to be released in October.
Day 52: Bristol to elect another mayor
The turkey that voted for Christmas? Not quite. But by signing a historic agreement with South Gloucestershire and Bath & North East Somerset for new powers and money to the West, Rees agreed to another mayor above him. Bristol will elect its “metro mayor”, like Manchester, in May 2017. Rees has ruled out standing for the post himself.
It’s fair to say rumours swirled from early on about whether the council’s CEO, Nicola Yates, would stay when Rees came to office. Appointed directly by George Ferguson, she left her previous job at Hull amid speculation of a breakdown in relations with the Labour Party there. She got her P45 just 54 days after Rees came in, triggering a new recruitment process for the £160,000-a-year job.
Day 66: (European) Capital of Culture
One of Rees’ flagship campaign policies, the European Capital of Culture bid looked to be in tatters when the UK voted for Brexit. But on a mission to the EU (the first by an English city leader after the referendum) the mayor said he had been told personally that Bristol should still apply to bring the award home in 2023, which would be three years into his second term.
Day 68: No drinking at Harbour fest
Rees famously told Bristol24/7 that he was “no party pooper” when he stormed into office. Sixty-eight days later the council stepped in to make some changes to the Harbour Festival as Rees went on BBC Radio Bristol to say he was concerned about a problem with the city’s drinking culture. Sales of more than six beers at a time were banned during the festival to keep it “family friendly”. Although of course this was planned long before Rees came to office; he was just able to take the credit for it. That’s politics for you.
Rees tends to offer very few glimpses into his political persuasions or which end of the Labour Party’s left-right debate he sits on. But a clue might have been offered in the only permitted political appointment to his mayoral office. As his special advisor, Rees chose Kevin Slocombe, his former PR man who had been seconded to Jeremy Corbyn’s camp for almost a year. The ex-postman and member of the CWU (the union which voted to pull funding for Bristol’s three Labour MPs) replaced George’s right-hand woman Zoe Sear (now head of communications and marketing at Triodos Bank), earning £63,622 – just under Rees’ £65,738 salary.
One of George Ferguson’s first acts as mayor was to change the name of the Council House to City Hall. It was no secret that few of the councillors liked the new name, which was supposed to begin a new era of transparency and openness. Privately, we were told there was no chance in changing it back. But at a meeting of Full Council, Rees said he would review the name, start a consultation and reveal the results to party leaders in September.
Day 88: Bristol houses just five refugees families
After a month of asking, Bristol24/7 was finally told by City Hall how many refugees Bristol City Council had housed since the Government promised to resettle 20,000 by 2020. The answer: just five families, or 22 people. Rees defended the council, saying housing stock had not been freed up due to the already oversubscribed waiting lists. He promised the council would “do more” over the next four years.
Jeremy Corbyn visited Bristol for the fifth time in the space of a year, having visited a number of times to lend support to Rees’ successful election campaign. The two of them had shared a platform various times during Rees’ battle. But there was a Rees-shaped hole on the stage as thousands of people gathered for a rally on College Green. Rees was on holiday. But his silence so far in the Corbyn vs Owen Smith debate hadn’t gone unnoticed, with some sections of the crowd demanding to know where their mayor was.
Honeymoon period officially over. Rees is forced to defend an apparent U-turn of his manifesto promise to introduce a pilot low emissions zone. He said the council was now working towards a “clean air zone”, which would be more comprehensive in the long run. But this didn’t stop the Lib Dems and Greens having their first proper digs.
Read more: Corbyn returns to Bristol (again)