Asked if he approves of the prime minister’s “opportunity guarantee”, Steve Rotheram, metro mayor of Liverpool, laughs.

“You mean the one that I told the prime minister in a call that I wanted to do? I said to him, ‘Listen, if you want to rob the idea then do it, because the benefit then is that the young people do get the opportunities to do these things’,” he says. 

“It’s not about credit for where the idea came from, because there’s no such thing as an original idea, but I did speak to the prime minister about it with Andy Burnham. We told him, ‘What you should be doing actually is giving a young person’s guarantee. That means either apprenticeship, traineeship, college course or a job’.” 

And lo and behold, the PM announced his intention to introduce an opportunity guarantee, and shortly after, a range of initiatives dedicated to finding young people training, work and education announced by chancellor Rishi Sunak last week.

Steve Rotheram has been at the forefront of shaping, influencing and embedding education policy for Liverpool and more widely for 18 years. 

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Born in Liverpool in 1961, Rotheram was one of eight children. His dad was a forklift truck driver before becoming a Labour councillor, and his mum was a housewife. He says she was a very proud matriarch who stood up for women’s equality when it was unfashionable to do so. She was unequivocally, Rotheram says, “the boss”. 

Shortly after Rotheram was born, the family moved across to Kirkby, in Knowsley. “It was a promised utopia with flushing toilets and running water,” Rotheram laughs. He says that as a child, he had no idea how poor the family were. His father was unemployed for large periods of time and things were tight. 

When his father became involved in politics, he enlisted the help of his son - Rotheram remembers delivering leaflets on behalf of the Labour Party aged around 9 or 10.

Rotheram left school at 16 and completed an apprenticeship in bricklaying at Kirkby College, where, he says, he had an opportunity to catch up with English and maths skills. Rotheram had left school with very few formal qualifications. But at college, he learned how to apply maths theory - such as Pythagoras’ theorem - in a practical way. It’s something he prides himself on still being able to do today. His education at college stuck, he says, whereas at school, it was in one ear and out the other. 

Rotheram says he loved his apprenticeship, and that it gave him the foundation and the tools that he uses in his job today. He went on to work at a civil engineering firm Flaircloughs, and it was there that he was given the opportunity to work on the Falkland Islands. It was weeks after the Falklands War had ended, and he spent eight months there.

“It wasn’t for me, really, in all honesty. I was a mummy’s boy and am still now, even though she’s no longer with us. I found it quite odd, but I stuck it out and when I came back, that gave us enough money for a deposit on the house,” he says. 

Rotheram had married, Sandra, who lived a mile down the road from him - and on his return from the Falklands, they bought a house together in Aintree, Merseyside. The couple have now been married for 40 years, have three children together and still live in that same house. 

The slippery slope into politics 

It was when his first son started nursery that Rotheram considered entering the world of politics seriously. The nursery - and the school attached - was falling down; “there were more buckets than teachers”, and when he bumped into Peter Kilfoyle, the MP for Liverpool Walton, he voiced his opinion. 

“I told him: ‘This is a disgrace.’ He said, ‘Well, we need a Labour government and we’ll invest in education.’ He said it’s no good just moaning about it, you need to get actively involved,” Rotheram remembers. 

“I came home very enthused by speaking to Peter, and said to my wife, ‘He said, you know, to go to the first meeting, but I know if I go, then that’s a slippery slope. They entice you in, you go to a couple of meetings, you give out some leaflets and then the next minute, you’re running for councillor.’”

In 2001, Rotheram was elected as Labour councillor for Fazakerley, which he did alongside working for the Learning and Skills Council. He said that, because he lived in the area he represented, the role was hugely rewarding.

“I threw myself completely into being a councillor. I felt very honoured and fortunate to do that. The things I was doing would affect the area and the people of the area that I lived in. Every night we went out and we did something locally to try and make those minor adjustments that can lead to big improvements in people’s lives.”

Rotheram’s mother lived to see him be elected as councillor - a role that, he says, is all down to her. “Everything points towards my mum. She had the values and the principles of which I think you should aspire to. My dad had the political know-how, but I think values-based is a much better way in which you should approach things.”

In 2007, Rotheram was elected deputy lord mayor of Liverpool, before becoming the lord mayor of Liverpool in 2008 - the year that the city was named the European Capital of Culture. 

“Sometimes you’re lucky in life. I was very lucky to be lord mayor, I was in the right place at the right time. It was beyond my wildest dreams,” he says. During that time, he says, the whole council - which was Liberal Democrat - pulled together with him to highlight the reality of the city, and banish the misconceptions. 

Those in Merseyside will know about the extensive and heartfelt work Rotheram did around the Hillsborough disaster. In his role as mayor, he invited then culture secretary Andy Burnham to speak at Anfield on the 20th anniversary of the tragedy. The people in the stands made their voices heard, interrupting Burham’s speech with chants of “justice for the 96”. Burnham returned to Westminster demanding answers for those families.

When Rotheram was elected MP of Liverpool Walton in 2010, he dedicated a speech to the victims of the Hillsborough disaster, reading out the names of all 96 victims. The speech won an award for the parliamentary speech of the year. 

“It was a lot of pressure. I wanted to do justice to the issue itself and the families were all there. What people can’t see in the House of Commons is that opposite where the speaker sits is the public gallery, and from where I was standing, I couldn’t see them. And when I finished my speech, I sort of heard this noise and then it was obviously the families applauding, and then that broke out with applause in the chamber,” he says.

“As anybody will know, you don’t get applause in the Commons. It was the first round of applause that had been heard in the chamber since Tony Blair’s last speech before he stepped down as prime minister. It was quite momentous. I thought, ‘Wow, people might start listening now’. And of course, they did.”

Liverpool’s first metro mayor

To no one’s surprise, Rotheram was elected to serve Liverpool again in 2015. In 2016, he announced that he was running to become Liverpool’s first-ever metro mayor.

Devolution was “the thing” at the time, and Rotheram was interested in what it meant for Liverpool. The six local authorities had pulled together in 2014 to work together, having decided to work collectively rather than trying to drive change individually. Greater Manchester already had a successful model in place, the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities, and Rotheram had a strong political friendship with Andy Burnham.  

“We said, ‘Just imagine, if he was mayor of Greater Manchester’ - he lived in and represented Lea in Manchester at the time - ‘and if I was the mayor of Liverpool City Region, and imagine Manchester and Liverpool working together and the power that might be able to drag from Westminster’. And that’s what he did,” he says.

Rotheram was elected in May 2017 - and some of that power he’s managed to drag from Westminster is around adult education. In March 2019, the Liverpool City Region was awarded £32,189,715 in funding for 2019-20. 

In just one short year, several life-changing initiatives have been introduced across the region, like the Test and Learn scheme, which allows providers up to £50,000 to experiment with new and innovative approaches to delivering English for speakers of other languages (Esol), digital or literacy and numeracy skills.

Rotheram says that, as the country economically recovers from the coronavirus pandemic, a skills-led recovery in Liverpool is more important than ever.

“We need a skills-led recovery, and I proposed to the chancellor that we needed further support for adult education budgets from ways to work and future jobs fund-type stuff. But also for the apprenticeship levy to be used more flexibly and for traineeships to become pre-apprenticeships. 

“At the moment, too many people are denied the opportunity of apprenticeship because they haven’t got the requisite or the prerequisite skills to enable them to go on and do one straight off,” he says. 

More must be done to facilitate access to apprenticeships for all - especially for those from black, Asian or minority-ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, he says.

“Have a look at what’s happened in the last few weeks with Black Lives Matter and tell me that we’ve done enough as a country to really address the fundamental inequality of people from black and minority-ethnic groups, getting apprenticeships and other things like that,” he says. 

“We just quite simply have failed. And we can, if the government works with us, target now to ensure that we do give people a fair crack of the whip, that we do ensure that those people who have been left behind for certainly decades that they do get the opportunities because it’s going to be much more difficult with mass unemployment. We are going to have to make certain that underrepresented groups can find their way into whatever the jobs of the future will be.”

Ambitious plans 

It’s clear that Rotheram is an effective, determined and passionate leader. It’s quite easy to see how well he would fit into Labour’s shadow cabinet. But Rotheram’s deep commitment to the Liverpool City Region shines through in every sentence. It’s his area, it’s his people - and they won’t be losing him to Westminster any time soon. 

“I will always be involved in some way in politics because I’m passionate. I’ll always be somebody who is proud to represent the whole area. I was born in Knowsley, I worked in St Helens when I had my own business, I’ve worked on the Wirral. It’s the area that I know best. I represent 1.6 million people. Long may that continue,” he says. 

“I’ve got really ambitious plans. I think that we haven’t really punched at our weight at times; I want us to punch way above our weight. And I think that, despite all this, you know, post-Brexit in the post-Covid world, that if the government works with us, we can make things better for the people in our area.”