Newly elected North East mayor Kim McGuinness says region has been left 'too far North to notice'

The newly elected North East Mayor says the office will give the region a "voice" as she started her first day in the role.

Kim McGuinness won the race to be the first holder of the post, winning 185,051 votes from across the North East - giving her powers and funding relating to job creation and skills, transport, economic development and planning and regeneration.

She says 'generations of centralisation' have left the region 'too far north to notice'.

"It's a really exciting time for the region," she said. "What this signifies is us taking power and control away from London and bringing it into our region and handing it to communities.

"I think the fact that we have this overarching joint vision that love the North East, our job is to make it even better, really helps us to set a direction in a brand new role in a brand new organisation.

"This organisation is designed to improve peoples lives, it's designed to get out there and promote our region on the national and international stage and that's exactly what we're going to do."

Among Ms McGuinness' priorities for the role are reducing child poverty, building more social housing, creating jobs and taking the public transport network under public control.

She said: "Already today I've instructed the combined authority to start the process of bringing our buses back under public control. It was such an important issue through the campaign.

"It's the mode of transport that most people who use public transport use and over the past twelve years, it's been cut by a third so we really need to get a grip of that."

Ms McGuinness also met with Combined Authority leaders to discuss aims for the next four years so that they could "get on with the job."

Kim McGuinness said the role represented a great opportunity to work with other regional leaders, such as Greater Manchester mayor Andy Burnham and West Yorkshire mayor Tracey Brabin, to promote the North of England on a national and international scale.

She also stressed the importance of women being represented in top elected roles across the country. She said: "I've ran this campaign and stood alongside five men competing for the same role. I think it's really important that we have women representing our regions.

"It was great to see Claire Ward elected in the East Midlands. We've increased the number of women mayors by 200%. We've finally got more women than mayors called Andy! But there's still a long way to go and I'm really proud to be one of them."

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