North of Tyne Combined Authority
The new North of Tyne Combined Authority (NTCA) is a significant change in the governance arrangements for the region. Understanding of the NTCA and the election of its mayor does not appear to be widely understood and so we have pulled this information from various websites and Wikipedia to be of help.
The NTCA was created under the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016 with the following aims:
- To allow for some powers to be transferred from the UK government to some of England’s towns, cities and counties.
- To allow directly-elected mayors to combined authorities.
- To allow directly-elected mayors to replace Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs) in these areas.
- To remove the current limitation on some of the functions of these local authorities.
- To enable councils to streamline the way they are governed.
NTCA’s functions primarily relate to economic development, skills, housing and regeneration. NTCA does not replace the three existing councils, Newcastle, North Tyneside and Northumberland, nor does it take away any of their statutory powers.
The Mayor will have the following powers:
- The creation of Mayoral Development Corporations to support development on strategic sites in the North of Tyne area.
- Certain compulsory purchase powers.
They will also be the Chair of Cabinet which is responsible for exercising all decision-making powers on behalf of NTCA except where:
- The decision relates to a Mayoral Function.
- The decision relates to a transport function as this is the responsibility of the Joint Transport Committee.
NTCA will take on the role of an integrated transport authority and economic prosperity board. This gives the combined authority the power to carry out any function relating to economic development, regeneration and integrated transport across the area of the three councils it covers. For transport purposes it is able to borrow money and can levy the local authorities.
Each of the mayoral candidates have their own objectives and the NTCA has identified a number of areas that it wishes to address, such as:
- Consistently higher unemployment than the national average
- Lower productivity than the national average
- Social inequality with pockets of deprivation and a lack of job opportunities in some areas
More information can be found here: