Mayor Claire Ward's first day in office

Claire Ward, Mayor of the East Midlands, signs the declaration and speaks of her first day in office at Bolsover Castle.

Transcript

00:00This is my first day in the office. I've just signed the declaration. I'm heading to the new

00:05offices in Chesterfield. I'll be working with the team. We've got a small team at the moment

00:10and clearly I need to be working with them and with the council leaders as well. So there's a

00:17huge amount of work to do and it, as you say, is a massive region. In fact the East Midlands region

00:23geographically is five times the size of the West Midlands region and as anybody who gets out

00:31and about in the region will know, driving from one end to the other can take you two to three

00:39hours and that's just in a car, let alone trying to do it on public transport. And those are some

00:45of the things that we need to be looking at, how we're going to plan, what's going to be our

00:50strategy right across the rest of the region. So the first few days, the first few weeks and

00:56probably the first few months is going to be building those partnerships, meeting with the

01:00people who can help to make the changes that I want to make. If you look across the rest of the

01:07country where they've had regional mayors for a lot longer than we have, they've already shown

01:13their value because they've brought more money into their region and they've made a difference

01:18and they have been able to collaborate across different partnerships. That's what I intend to do

01:23here. We have been massively underfunded and underinvested in as a region and it's really

01:29important that we take those new powers and that funding from Westminster, we bring it into

01:34this region and we decide our own priorities.