Metro mayor Dan Norris hits back at watchdogs’ criticism

Defiant metro mayor Dan Norris is refusing to change how he communicates with top West of England Combined Authority (Weca) officers despite criticism from finance watchdogs. Labour’s Dan Norris said he would continue to use the “red-box” system of communication, employed for centuries by government ministers to transport important documents from one department to another.

As reported earlier this month, Weca’s external auditors Grant Thornton found three “significant weaknesses” in the organisation’s value-for-money arrangements and issued six key recommendations following a probe into the £10,000 unlawful Birthday Bus wrap. Last December, the leaders of Bath & North East Somerset and South Gloucestershire councils agreed with the combined authority’s legal and finance chiefs at an emergency meeting that the mayor spent the public money to plaster a double-decker with massive photos of him and his dog for “political gain” against government rules.

North East Somerset & Hanham MP Mr Norris has denied any wrongdoing and was not allowed to give his side of the story to the official carrying out the initial inquiry into how the taxpayers’ cash was spent on the publicity stunt. Grant Thornton’s report said the mayor’s office failed to communicate with senior officers at Weca who were therefore “not sufficiently informed to enable them to intervene” to ensure the bus wrap did not breach guidelines.

It said the communication breakdown meant the mayor’s office staff were able to “bypass key governance controls that would have prevented the purchase of the Birthday Bus wrap”. The report said “underlying cultural and behavioural issues” at the combined authority that led to the Birthday Bus wrap had not yet been addressed.

It said there was a “wider problem of division” between the mayor and some top Weca managers. But Grant Thornton found that management controls had since been strengthened, while the authority’s bosses said the mayor’s office team no longer existed.

In March, the government issued Weca with a warning called a best value notice over the “poor state of professional relationships” between Mr Norris and council leaders and told them to get along better. During a grilling by Weca’s overview & scrutiny committee on Monday, September 16, the West of England mayor said: “What I would say about the whole report is I don’t recognise a lot of things that are in it, to be honest, because I know what happened.

“No one asked me. Isn’t that interesting that I was never asked what happened? It seems to me that if you want to know what the truth is, you need to get the stories of everybody to get a complete picture.”

He said there had never been an issue with officers or members contacting him and he always made himself available. A separate independent review by Solace – Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers – in June 2024 found the red-box system of communication between the mayor and senior officers was “not comprehensive or consistent enough” and that it was “not fit for purpose for modern regional government”.

But Mr Norris told the committee: “I’m not going to remove the red-box system. It’s used by government ministers, it’s established, it’s been built up and developed over hundreds of years and it works very well for government ministers so it should work very well for us.

“It’s also a way of being absolutely certain that we are agreed on what we’re communicating about. One of the things I’ve always found difficult about the mayoral role is the requirement by many people, not just officers but councillors, for informal discussions – hidden, secret discussions which I am very against.

“I have to be accountable to the people as well as to this committee and others and officers too, and I believe that you have to do things wherever possible in the open. When I came in, I found the organisation was dysfunctional and relationships with the unitary authorities were dysfunctional.

“That wasn’t about me as an individual, that had been happening under the previous mayor. I want that to be open. If people want to do deals, they should be able to do that openly.

“That doesn’t mean informal discussions or communications don’t happen. There are all sorts of ways of communicating but the red-box system is tried and tested.

“It means that you’ve got a trail so you can see what people have agreed and said. If it’s good enough for the British government, it should be good enough for our regional mayor area, so I don’t accept that’s not a good system.

“If there is a need for informal stuff, there are ways of doing that.” He said he was resistant to having secret meetings but that this did not mean informal meetings could not happen occasionally.

“But those only happen in the context of trust and there hasn’t been trust,” Mr Norris added. He said the report was a “snapshot of the past” and did not reflect the current situation, which was now much better.