RAY MALLON has urged the Tees Valley to be one of the first areas to apply for a “metro-mayor”.

Mr Mallon, who finished on Sunday after 13 years as Middlesbrough’s directly elected mayor, said: “It’s about ambition.

“For me, the model has merit. If we had a sub-regional elected mayor, the Government would give us the money so that we could decide how much we would spend on transport, economic regeneration and skills. The mayor would have command of those three things, which together are our local economy.”

The Tees Valley is made up of five councils – Darlington, Stockton, Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland, and Hartlepool – which already share a Local Enterprise Partnership and which are pooling resources to create a “combined authority”. Mr Mallon sees an elected mayor taking charge of this new body, without creating an additional bureaucratic tier.

In an exclusive interview with The Northern Echo, he said: “At the moment you have five leaders, all decent people, but they have to think about their own areas. An elected mayor would coordinate the activity and would be impartial, thinking of the good of the whole area and not just of one borough.

“It would work. It’s about providing direction and accountability.”

Asked if he would consider standing as the Tees Valley’s first mayor, Mr Mallon said: “I’m going to take a leaf out of James Bond’s book – Never Say Never Again. The mayor will take a couple of years to go ahead, so I don’t think I would go for it because I would be 62 or 63, but I can’t discount it.”