Paul Howell: Sedgefield MP bids to be first North East mayor

A Conservative MP has confirmed he wants to be in the running to be his party's choice for North East mayor.

Sedgefield's Paul Howell told the Local Democracy Reporting Service that he was putting "his hat in the ring" to be the Tory candidate for May's election.

He added the official selection could be announced by the end of November.

Labour's choice is Northumbria Police and Crime Commissioner Kim McGuinness, while Jamie Driscoll, North of Tyne mayor, plans to run as an independent.

He quit Labour following a row over him being barred from the party's selection contest.

The regional mayor role is being created under a new £4.2bn devolution deal for the North East of England, which is due to be ratified in the next few months and will bring with it new funding and decision-making powers.

Whoever is elected will represent a population of about two million people stretching across Northumberland, Tyne and Wear, and County Durham.

Mr Howell, who famously turned former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair's seat blue in the 2019 general election, pledged to deliver a "holistic" vision for boosting the entire region's economy, business, and infrastructure.

Analysis by Richard Moss, political editor, BBC North East and Cumbria

Paul Howell is not the first MP to take a tilt at becoming an elected mayor. He has to be selected as the Conservative candidate first of course.

But as nobody else in the party has yet publicly declared their intention to stand, the field looks pretty clear at the moment.

If he gains selection, or indeed wins next May's election, he would be able to be both mayor and MP simultaneously. The government has barred the Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire mayors from sitting in parliament, but that does not apply to the new North East position. Barnsley Central Labour MP Dan Jarvis served a whole term as South Yorkshire's mayor while remaining in the Commons.

Although current polling is not encouraging for any Conservative, he might pin his hopes on a split in the Labour vote between official candidate Kim McGuinness and North of Tyne Mayor Jamie Driscoll, who left the party to stand as an independent.

That's not a luxury likely to be on offer in the fight to retain his parliamentary seat though. His Sedgefield constituency has been redrawn and renamed Newton Aycliffe and Spennymoor. That change, and the decline in Conservative support since 2019, could make it a tough one to retain.

Mr Howell told a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for the Leamside Line, the mothballed railway which local leaders are campaigning to have reopened, that he could be in the frame to be his party's mayoral candidate.

"The Leamside Line is a large and obvious priority for me," he said.

"But I am cognisant that there are other transport issues in the area. Looking at the great work Ben Houchen has done in the Tees Valley attracting business to the region, the North East mayoralty needs to shout in the same way that the Tees Valley does and get a cohesive vision for the region in terms of inward investment."

He later confirmed to the Local Democracy Reporting Service that "there is a process going on and I will be putting my hat into the ring".

Mr Howell expressed concern that the two candidates confirmed so far, Ms McGuinness and Mr Driscoll, are both former Newcastle city councillors, and said the mayor "needs to be more broad than that in their appreciation of the region".

The Leamside Line has been a topic of controversy lately after the government dropped a pledge to reopen it less than 24 hours after listing it among the projects that would be funded following the scrapping of HS2's northern leg.

Ministers have since said that a £1.8bn pot of transport funding to be devolved to the future mayor could be used to part-fund the restoration of the disused railway, which ran from Pelaw in Gateshead to Tursdale in County Durham.

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