Together4Bristol : Bristol Mayor’s last big speech, at Bristol Beacon

Bristol Mayor’s last big speech, at Bristol Beacon

Welcome to Bristol Beacon.

This is an appropriate venue for my last speech. This building captures many of the complexities and contradictions that is Bristol.

I’m a black, mixed race mayor descended from enslaved Africans – the great, great, great grandson of Samuel Richardson, who was hung by the British for participating in the Morant Bay Rebellion.

I am of working class stock: Irish migrants who settled in South Wales, my Welsh grandfather and the Bryer family in Bristol. And I stand here as mayor of a city with a history of entrenched inequalities and one which prospered and expanded through the profits of slavery.

This building was renamed from the wealthy slaver Colston. And it happened on my watch.

The city reaction has been mixed. Some will always call it the Colston Hall and will never come to the Beacon. Others had refused to attend the Colston Hall. They’re all Bristolians.

It was a key building, deteriorating in the middle of the city. I was faced with its closure and agreed to proceed with its renovation.

There were three major decision-making points where the costs increased: the original cost plan was £39million.

Then it came back as £50 million with a contingency of £20 million. After the complexities were discovered – it became £100 million. And ultimately, £130 million.

At every stage the best thing was to proceed, not only because of sunk costs but because of the positive impact on the city.

But our decision wasn’t just about getting this world class music venue. It was to get rid of a liability – a building, closed, derelict and deteriorating in the middle of the city.

I have 49 days to go. It has been a real honour to be mayor of Bristol.

We have all been on an incredible journey together. Let’s remember what we have overcome since 2016.

As David outlined, it’s been a time of national political chaos.

We’ve had austerity, the biggest squeeze on local government finance in history, bankrupting several councils including two of the UK’s biggest cities.

Internationally we’ve had the economic and social harm caused by Brexit, the global pandemic, a war in Europe.

And rampant inflation resulting in the cost of living crisis, itself increasing the need and demand for public services while pushing up the costs of providing those services.

We have had a series of migration crises. And we have had a growing understanding of the climate and ecological emergencies.

Across wider politics we’ve faced the surge of political populism, the blessing and curse of social media and the rise of fake news, and a record decline of trust in politics.

Throughout, we have operated in the world’s most centralised democracy, where cities only control about 5% of their revenue.

The money we do get from government remains subject to competition, short term and unpredictable.

And all of these are laid on top of Bristol’s underlying persistent challenges.

A city the Resolution Foundation suggested was one of the worst cities in which to be born poor. An unequal city fractured along race and class lines. A city with the worst affordability ratio of all major cities outside London.

But we are still standing.

And more than this, we have delivered: from housing to climate change and employment.

The record of our time here has been led by a mantra of homes and hunger and hope.

On homes:

14,500 homes will have been built since 2016 including many affordable and social.

More houses, and more affordable houses will be built in the city this year than in any year since 2004, when a Labour government was supporting cities to build. We have the biggest council house building programme in a generation.

With Private sector partnerships, we have delivered the Ambulance Station, Wapping Wharf, the Paintworks, Hartcliffe Campus, and the Launchpad housing scheme.

We have houses being built in some of the most deprived neighbourhoods.

In Southmead at Elderberry Walk. In Henbury, we are building council houses in Richardson Close, as we did in Alderman Moore in Ashton Vale. In Lockleaze, we have 185 homes in Bonnington Walk – and 268 homes in Romney House being built by our council owned company, Goram Homes.

Western Harbour master planners were appointed this week.

And we will deliver on other major infrastructure and housing projects, from St Phillips Marsh and Frome Gateway alongside Temple Quarter including the £500 million university campus, the £350 million Temple Island and £100 million Temple Meads development.

And, we will redevelop the St James area of the city. This started last week with the agreement to build on the Premier Inn site into iconic towers in the city centre as well as representing the shift to modern, high-density co-living.

On hunger:

We have 22,000 children in the city who are eligible for free school meals. In the financial year 23-24 alone, we’ve issued £4.5 million in vouchers for those children during the school holidays. Since the start of 2021, we’ve issued 435,000 vouchers, totalling £13 million.

On hope:

Through the Bristol WORKS programme and the commitment of city employers, we have provided 30,000 meaningful experiences of work for young people who would normally not have access.

We have tackled the infrastructure challenges that have been ignored for decades, including restoring the harbour walls and sluice gates. Our bridges are being renovated, the Chocolate Path has been restored, and our road network is being maintained with increased funding for potholes.

With our partner, YTL, we are delivering the fourth biggest arena in the UK and the most sustainable in Europe.

On leadership, we have honoured the 50:50 campaign with half the cabinet being women since 2016, within the most diverse political leadership the city has ever known.

On transport, we have pedestrianised the Old City: Corn Street and King Street with bus gates introduced and public transport priority through the city centre. Other areas of pedestrianisation like Cotham Hill and Clifton Village are supporting traders, and we have increased dedicated cycle lanes including £720,000 of investment in a new cycle scheme through Old Market; we have offered free electric bike loans and cycle training and are installing cycle hangers across the city – and we brought scooters to the city.

We kept to our manifesto commitments including keeping all children’s centres and libraries open.

We supported the creative sector, bringing Channel 4 to Bristol and introduced Agent of Change to protect music venues.

On Climate Change, we launched a world first with Bristol City Leap ensuring £1 billion of investment into our decarbonisation – this was on top of the £100 million already invested in decarbonisation work since 2016.

Our City Leap deal means that £771 million will be invested to cut energy bills, create green jobs, and cut carbon emissions by 150,000 tonnes, by 2029.

We have planted over 95,000 trees since 2016 and contributed to a deal with Ambition Lawrence Weston which erected the tallest onshore wind turbine in England.

All of this will contribute heavily to our One City goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2030s

We cleaned up our air with a Clean Air Zone – but that’s not the deliverable. It’s the total £40 million package of support we secured to mitigate its impacts on business and households. This money includes support for people to change their vehicles, free bus tickets, discounts on car club membership and £2 million for clean buses.

And that isn’t anywhere near everything but we don’t have all evening.

It’s also been a journey for me, as a person in leadership.

In 2012 I was on stage at Burges Salmon with three white men in their sixties and seventies.

I didn’t think people looked at me as the mayor.

This is what I would call a justified projection, because I actually didn’t think I looked like a mayor and was projecting that onto the crowd. Leadership didn’t look like me.

David Cameron had been in town promoting the mayoral model; the journalist present interviewed the other potential candidates but didn’t think it worth interviewing me.

Most of you won’t know this but when I did win, it took five or six months before I was comfortable to introduce myself as the Mayor.

Being the Mayor has been like putting on a suit jacket that was too big, only for one day to wake up and realise you have grown into it.

I went from an outsider to standing up at the State Of the City in 2016.

My mum and her best friend Jean were in the front row. I looked at them and said “Who would have thought it?”

My journey has now taken me and my mum; Kirsten; and my sister, Dionne, last week to Windsor Castle where I received my OBE.

We’ve had a series of young people through my office over the years and we share this journey with them and advise them to be ambitious even if their confidence is not keeping up with their ambition.

I experience my relationship with Bristol and – I would say – Bristol’s relationship with me, through race and class.

It’s the framework through which I have experienced our city’s social structures, journalism and activism.

I respect that other people will experience their relationship with Bristol in other ways, but race and class have dominated my life journey.

In that context, becoming and being mayor has been a journey of healing for my relationship with Bristol.

Around 1987, myself and four friends went to a party in a church youth club at Zion Chapel, Coronation Road. We were 15 year old black teenagers.

Afterwards, walking home over Redcliff Hill, a group of a dozen white men started shouting racist abuse at us and chased us. I have no doubt if they had caught us, we would been in serious trouble.

Throw forward to 2012. I am in Lawrence Weston, campaigning to be Mayor. I knock on a door. It opens and a big white guy, with tattooed arms, shaved head.

My early warning kicked in and I presumed the worst.  He then went on to say “I’m voting for you – you’re one of us”.

I will also share that my experience in the city through the prism of race and class, as Mayor has left me with a greater sense of belief in the authenticity of some of the Merchant Venturers than in some of the noisiest anti-racism and social justice activists.

And it’s left me feeling a greater sense of connection with the Cenotaph counter protestors than I do with the Colston Four.

I stress feeling – because it’s been natural and involuntary, a product of a shared story.

We came in with commitment to get things done.

The truth is delivery is a tightrope for politicians because it means making changes.

And change always means political conflict.

There is a path of least resistance in politics that says do little and avoid controversy. Stay away from housing delivery. Stay away from big transport solutions. Focus on making announcements, pushing gimmicks and exploiting photo opportunities. Then blame the government and other outside forces for ongoing social challenges.

But that serves the politician rather than the people and we came in to make a difference.

Plimsoll Bridge, the swing bridge over the Cumberland Basin, is at end of life. We were told it would cost £40 million to fix.

But rather than spending £40 million keeping things as they are, we saw an opportunity to put that into regenerating the harbour – with 2,000 homes and modern flood defences.

The result was the Western Harbour vision, a Brownfield site converted to homes that are a seven minute bike ride and 25 minute walk from the city centre, rather than a spare piece of land dominated by a road flyover.

I thought the plan would be welcomed. I was wrong.

I was invited to Holy Trinity Church Hall with residents of the area. There were at least 300 inside with others unable to get in. The overwhelming mood was anger.

I stood on stage by myself listening as some people asked legitimate questions and others accused me of all sorts. After an hour I spoke.

I suggested that before focussing on the point of disagreement and assuming my motivations – we needed to move upstream and see if we can agree on the truth about the Bristol we were living in.

I offered these fundamentals.

We are 42 square miles… We aren’t getting any more land.

We have a residential population of around 476,000 people which is expected to grow to 550,000 by 2050.

We have more than 22,000 people on our housing waiting list, with over 1,500 families in temporary accommodation.

We have to solve the housing crisis in the context of climate and ecological emergencies, which mean prioritising high-density development on brown field land in the heart of the city where people don’t need cars.

The questions remain:

Do we agree we need to solve the housing crisis?

Do we agree that if we build homes, they need to be built somewhere?

Do we agree brownfield sites in the middle of the city are better than greenfield locations that build in car dependency?

I am happy for people to say no at any point in that sequence, as long as they own the consequences.

If we could just agree on the challenge Bristol faces and the limitations on options available to us, our city conversations would be more constructive and pragmatic than destructive and conspiratorial.

I will add to the list of Bristol fundamentals:

One in five of our children live in low-income households.

We are one of the worst cities for racial inequality.

We are an unequal city in which almost 100% of Clifton teenagers progress to university, compared to 1 in 12 in Hartcliffe.

Almost 10% of our households experience fuel poverty and 4% experience food insecurity.

There is a gap in healthy years life expectancy of over 16 years between the richest and poorest areas in Bristol.

It’s important we understand and respect the raw material of Bristol as the framework for our debates about priorities and the costs of action and importantly, the costs of inaction.

Sometimes it’s seemed as though we are dealing with different Bristols.

Some of the argument and accusation that’s come at our leadership is grounded in a Bristol that doesn’t seem to be facing a housing crisis and a transport crisis; doesn’t have a rapidly growing population; has an infinite land supply; has a city council that is not limited by austerity; can deliver decarbonisation through political will alone without the need to raise billions of pounds to pay for it; and has the time to prioritise declarations of principles before the need to get things done.

The failure to ground ourselves in the same Bristol and a failure to work within the discipline of the same truth opens us up to conflict that is noisier than it is useful. It leaves us with a shallow and self-centred framework through which we misinterpret – accidentally or intentionally – the motives of others.

When we make decisions, we are acutely aware of the following realities.

We are facing multiple interacting crisis that require action now. The longer we delay, the worse they will get, and the more intrusive and expensive the solution

Every action has a cost. But inaction also has a cost.

And you won’t get everything you want.

I will add another element to the raw material that is Bristol. Our city culture.

We are a city of contradictions. Among them is the way we combine being home to some of the nation’s leading talent; a thriving creative sector; and a high number of business start ups, with a collective lack of self-belief that, when its full blown, turns into a debilitating cynicism.

It is born of past failures – a historic inability to deliver big projects, an arena, transport solutions, homes. But it puts a handbrake on today’s ambition.

We’ve seen this clearly around mass transit. We must solve the transport problem and that simply must include underground where needed. The alternative is gridlock or the inevitable failure to overcome the obstacles of trying to deliver a 100% overground system. The National Infrastructure Commission backs an ambitious approach, recommending we have a share of £20 billion set aside to help cities deliver mass transit.

It would have taken lots of work. But we are now in danger of guaranteeing it won’t happen because a number of local actors have failed to show the necessary ambition.

Compare this to the culture we managed to build around Temple Quarter, it’s because we came together around a bold ambition that we secured £95 million. We maintained support from Sir Ed Lister, Boris Johnson’s Chief of Staff; Peter Hendy, Chair of Network Rail; The University of Bristol; Homes England; WECA; and Government Ministers. And we stayed united and committed. We got the money over the line and now the cranes are on site.

Coming up with the motions, petitions, and opinion pieces is actually the easy part. Working with the city to build a shared front to raise the finance and working through the trade offs is harder.

We have been unapologetically ambitious for Bristol.

When I came in, the political debate was dominated by car parking and fun Sundays.

Today, the city talks about inclusion, homes and growth, billion pound regeneration programmes, carbon reduction and the climate challenge, biodiversity, race and class, and building a future city.

And from giving a TED talk at the global conference in Vancouver, to launching 3Ci, and speaking on behalf of the global Mayors Migration Council at several UN conferences on migration and refugees, we are shaping national and international agendas.

Along with the CEO of the RSA Andy Haldane, I co-chaired the Urban Futures Commission. The report we produced is – dare I say – the plan for UK’s cities, showing how we can unlock billions in productivity.

We need to take Bristol’s hopes and potential seriously. The people of this city must be prioritised as people with real lives, not just votes to be harvested.

We also need leaders who understand Bristol is a collective act. It’s not just about the council.

Bristol One City was the vehicle we set up to bring the city together.

At the City Gathering just last Friday, held in the Beacon, with 300 City Partners present.

City Priorities were affirmed – focussing on race and housing, the race and gender pay gaps, and school exclusions.

That’s how we will maximise the chances of success. Collaboration is how we won Channel 4, its how we got the money for Temple Quarter, and delivered Bristol City Leap. It’s how we have got so many homes built and an arena on the way. We need to learn from this model.

We have put a pipeline of projects in place that will land over the coming decade:

Temple Quarter; The Debenhams site; The Galleries; Western Harbour; Hengrove Park; Frome Gateway; Baltic Wharf; The Fruit Market.

Add in the Goram Homes business plan to that list, and that’s over 18,000 more homes on their way, to be agreed, consented, and built if the city can keep delivering.

We have delivered eight balanced budgets and the financial pressures will continue for local government. The future leadership will need to protect libraries, children’s centres, and the Council Tax Reduction Scheme.

And the work will need to continue to transform the drivers of increasing costs: adult social care and children’s care, including special educational needs and home to school transport.

This is all going to need a One City approach.

Leadership is a collective act. So thanks are always due:

The senior team at Bristol City Council.

And the political cabinet. I would particularly like to thank my two deputy mayors Craig Cheney and Asher Craig.

I must thank our city partners – the leader of the cities key institutions and sectors who have worked with us in the city office.

I would also thank my Mayor’s Office team.

And, personally, my friends and family; my wife, Kirsten; my kids.

For the best part of the last eight years, I have had on the wall of my office an extract from a speech by US President Teddy Roosevelt, from 1910, often referred to as ‘the Man in the Arena’. I want to share it, as we think about our roles in the future of Bristol:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasm, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory or defeat.”

Thank you.