Hunt underway for new commissioners to help make West Midlands roads safer

West Midlands Mayor Richard Parker said the new Road Safety Commissioner and Active Travel Commissioner roles will help drive policies as well as challenging and scrutinising what the authority does in these areas.

The recruitment advertisements for the two separate roles are expected to go live on Wednesday (November 6).

The mayor said he will be looking for people, who are already experts in both fields, with different responsibilities and who will work with the new Transport Taskforce being set up, giving them a direct route to the authority’s Board.

They will be expected to work one day a week and be each paid £10,000 – around £200 per day – for their contributions.

But Mr Parker refuted claims he was ‘skimping’ on the roles by not employing them as ‘full time’ as he said they would be augmenting what the authority already had.

Transport for West Midlands (TfWM) has a full active travel team, encouraging people to do more walking and take up cycling, with a £71 million total budget whilst the authority already employs a road safety manager. Mr Parker said the commissioners would not duplicate any of their work.

Shortly after Mr Parker was elected in May, the previous West Midlands Cycling and Walking Commissioner Adam Tranter resigned from the role where he served for two and a half years.

In the wake of a string of deaths on Birmingham roads in the summer, the Mayor said a new safety commissioner would be appointed.

This new commissioner model follows what other combined authorities such as West Yorkshire and Greater Manchester have in place.

Mr Parker said: “We didn’t believe that there was a full time role and it would be impossible for one person operating independent of the organisation – doing more than a professional team of full time staff could do.

“What I wanted to do is get someone whose insight and expertise and experience can give us some challenge and scrutiny.

“I do want them to feed into the Transport Taskforce so there is that impact.

“Those taskforces will feed into the board so I will expect these roles to have an influence on policy, strategy and for these people to be contributing to matters going to the board in a way, frankly, that has not happened in the role in the past.

“We’ve had someone whose role was largely being out in communities engaging with people but that engagement wasn’t changing or having an impact on policy or doing things differently.

“In our view, that role was a bit disconnected for the way in which policy was developed and delivered.

“We want to bring [the new commissioners’] insight, their experience and their passion to the roles but we want their contribution to thread through the organisation. It has got to be different to those professional officers employed.”

He added: “Skimping would be cutting back the spending on the £71m that we’ve got.

“We want someone to complement the way in which we make decisions and add the additional challenge of scrutiny.

“Those scrutiny roles in organisations are not full time roles, they are additional roles that augment what the organisations are doing.

“What I’ve found there were lots of people sitting on boards which had little or no impact on policy.

“There were a number of roles around which people were given titles for things but when we tracked the impact they had it was often very opaque.

“We just want to create more transparency and more clarify and value for money. We’ve got a duty to ensure every pound of public money is spend the most appropriate way.”