City regions must define area to excel

RE-ELECTED in May by the people of South Yorkshire with 50.9% of the vote, Oliver Coppard can now (as he jokingly pointed out at Labour party conference last week) call himself the most popular mayor in Yorkshire.

- ROB PARSONS

He told a Centre for Cities fringe event at the Museum of Liverpool that a key focus as the region's political figurehead was giving South Yorkshire a defined sense of purpose.

"South Yorkshire used to be a place that knew exactly what it was for. We had coal mining, we had steelmaking, industry was at the heart of what we did as a region," said Mr Coppard, before adding that the deindustrialisation of the 1980s had torn that system apart.

Across the pond in the US, Sheffield's sister city and fellow steelmaker Pittsburgh has reinvented itself as a hotspot for clean climate technology. And Mr Coppard hopes his region can do the same with its world-leading advanced manufacturing capabilities.