Andy Street’s win for the Conservative Party in the West Midlands mayoral election drove a knife through Labour’s heartland right in the lead up to the General Election. As the results trickled in last Friday, it was clear the Conservatives had made huge gains at the cost of UKIP and Labour. Whilst the West Midlands contest was expected to be close, after seeing the Labour vote hold firm in some of the other big city mayoral contests, namely Liverpool and Manchester, party officials could have been forgiven for thinking that they may just pip it to the post in the West Midlands.

The West Midlands has historically formed part of Labour’s support base and a strong showing in the region should be crucial for any strategy which involves Labour winning nationally. Labour’s loss of the West Midlands on Thursday suggests that the party is facing tough challenges in the General Elections, something that was explicitly seized upon by losing Labour candidate Sion Simon, who was quick to highlight the feeling from the doorstep that traditional Labour voters did not feel that the party was standing up for traditional Labour values.  

Street won by with 238,628 votes to Simon’s 234,862 and was strongly helped by extremely strong majorities is Solihull (once thought of as solid Labour) and Dudley and a solid backing in second preferences. The West Midlands Mayor has the third largest personal political mandate of any UK politician, after London and Manchester, even if only 26.3 percent of the electorate turned out to vote last week. The Mayor will be the figurehead for a region of 2.8m people spanning from Coventry to Birmingham and Wolverhampton to Solihull.  

Similarly to the other Metro Mayors, Mr Street will hold his initial term until 2020, following which the mayoral term will be for four years. During the campaign Street adopted a ‘brownfield first’ pledge to help deliver 165,000 homes for the region. In a defining moment during the campaign, Street hit out at his Labour rival for seeming to suggest that Greenbelt development might be necessary, this move may well have been enough to motivate voters in leafy Solihull and swing the election for Street.

Now controlling a £1.1billion 30 year investment fund, in addition to the consolidated transport and adult skills budget, Mr Street has set out his immediate priorities to be threefold; build his team, create a taskforce to tackle homelessness and to hold a summit with regional business leaders on ‘Brexit’, having consistently set out his intention to ensure that the region played its role in ensuring the success of Brexit. Business leaders across the region have already warmly welcomed his election, hardly surprising given his business credentials as the former Managing Director of John Lewis.

He has also called on the government to increase investment into the region; given that he spent his first day in office giving Prime Minister Teresa May a tour of the UTC Aerospace Factor in Wolverhampton, it is to be expected that his demands will resonate higher on the national stage than his opponents may have been. What remains to be seen is just how committed this, or any upcoming government truly is to the devolution agenda and whether or not partisan politics will come to the fore.