It can be easy to ask yourself ‘why does Liverpool have two Mayors?’ when you consider the political leadership of the city. It’s even more complicated when the last two leaders of the city council have shared a surname.
For the past five years, Steve Rotheram has been shaping what the Liverpool City Region - a mix of six local authority areas - could and should look like. Under the title of Metro Mayor, the former MP and incidentally Lord Mayor, has set about attempting to reshape the wider Merseyside region’s transport network, housing and economic development.
A year into his second term, having comfortably been re-elected last year, Mr Rotheram sat down to discuss a busy 2022 and where 2023 might lead. Already there are major changes afoot, with the expected arrival of brand new Merseyrail trains onto the network.
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The new fleet has been hit with a raft of delays, but Mr Rotheram said he was the one to take the flak for the rolling stock not taking to the rails just yet. He said: “I have to start by saying we're losing (Cllr) Liam (Robinson), going to the city council as the leader of the Labour group, and hopefully as the leader of the council after May.
“That's a big loss for us. If people want to have a moan and blame anybody for stuff not happening, I'll hold my hands up, because I expected by now that we'd have trains on the tracks.
“They are running but we aren’t getting passengers on them. They have to do what's called fault free testing.
“They’ve got to run around 500 miles on each one, but because of everything that's happening, if we were to bring something in, and then literally stop them, and start them again and stop them it’s not going to work, I want it to be a big moment.”
Mr Rotheram said he wanted to welcome the trains with a “brass band” and see the new fleet as transformational for the whole area. During the testing runs, which many have seen on the Kirkby to Liverpool line, the new batteries are being put under rigorous exercise.
The Metro Mayor added: “They can go around 40 miles, so in other words, we can get anywhere in the city region. Imagine us taking over Northern services to Manchester.
“We could run them with our trains, and there's no additional cost of the infrastructure, they will have to buy new trains, but we’d be prepared to do that.” Passengers have been waiting a long time for the new stock, with a number of issues derailing plans for them to be online by the end of last year.
It has been six years since a deal was first struck to purchase the trains, but the Class 777s are yet to welcome commuters. Mr Rotheram said: “I don't think anybody foresaw a flood in the manufacturers.
“A pandemic, Brexit, and the national situation we’ve faced, it seems like it's been almost a perfect storm at times. I have felt at times it's conspiring against us and we seem to be heading towards something and then something else comes up.”
The Metro Mayor said the trains had been designed to assist disabled access, adding: “I just think that’s the way we should treat people.” He said he wanted commuters to have a sense of ownership over the new fleet and the roll out of the hydrogen buses on the St Helens to Liverpool route.
Mr Rotheram said: “There has to be a social value. It's more about self pride, I want people to feel like it’s theirs so the ownership thing is really important.
“I want them to feel that they own their buses, they own their trains, so I don't want to see anybody with chewy under the seats, that drives me insane.” Despite this, the former Fazakerley councillor was unwilling to put a definite timeline on when we might get the new trains.
He said: “I’m dead reluctant to put a date on it, I’ve got a date in my head, but I said before the end of this year and I meant that, but when it didn’t happen, not only was I disappointed but people were saying ‘he said they’d be going by now.’”
One of the more iconic sights on the Mersey horizon has been the region’s ferries and in November, it was confirmed they were here to stay with a new state-of-the-art vessel to be constructed. The decision wasn’t universally welcomed at first however, with some raising concerns regarding where they will be built.
Mr Rotheram was quick to dispel any worries about the contracting. He said: “This is part of the, unfortunately, the social media myth that sometimes grows up around things were contracted with Cammell Laird.
“It’s just the same as when you buy a car there'll be bits that are made elsewhere, and they assemble it there. They'll buy bits and get bits from elsewhere.
“I've heard people say you need to guarantee that it will be built there. I mean, one it can't be because they don’t make the glass and they don't build engines, the navigation system. They don't do any of that. We buy them in.
“I was disappointed in the way some people came out about that because we are and we've been determined to contract with a local supplier.” One of Mr Rotheram’s overriding messages since taking up office has been the desire to create a “London-style” connected public transport system.
He repeated that desire amid concerns about poor air quality conditions around the city region. He said: “We want people in the city region to get out of their cars.
“We've got areas which are really in poor air quality, very poor air quality across the city region, not just in Liverpool City Centre. We want to encourage them and that means the buses need to connect with the trains, and then the walking and cycling needs to connect with that.
“These are the layers that we're building, so when people say, what's the combined authority it's about having the strategic overview and that's the only way that you get all the bits fit together, whereas beforehand we had six local authorities basically competing against each other.” Looking ahead, the Metro Mayor said his expectations were "stratospheric" for what could be achieved in the next 12 months, dubbing it the "year of delivery."
He said: "We've got the Aintree Grand National, Eurovision and the Open golf, and I want people to be able to see what we've done on our transport network. That means that we have to get stuff done and delivered.
"We've, we've done really, really well so far on the likes of retrofitting and I want to see more than that."
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