It’s 6pm on a Monday evening, and Andy Street is not showing any sign of running short on energy. Literally minutes before, Boris Johnson announced the country would go ahead with stage 4 of the plan to return to normal life after Covid, to a mixed response by the public.

But that’s not why Street is animated: “That’s the prime minister’s announcement, not mine.” Instead, he’s eager to talk about the West Midlands - “the greatest region in the world” - and how he has led it through the pandemic. 

It’s been difficult, he admits. As well as the huge professional challenge, he’s dealt with personal ones too: he lost his mother earlier this year from Covid, just days before she was due to be vaccinated. 

“I have found it very, very difficult, and the most difficult of it all, of course, was the way my mum ended up dying as a result of Covid, which I had not anticipated,” he says. “She was out walking about with me only a week before she went into hospital. It was an incredible shock.”

“So, how do you deal with it? I suppose there are two things. The first is how I deal with anything: you just get it into a logical border structure, do one thing at a time. When you’re against that emotional roller coaster, just ‘doing’ is really important.

“The other thing I kept thinking was: people expect me to lead here, I’ve got to step forward and demonstrate that I can do that. And I can’t be indulgent; I have to rise above all that. I did very much try to think what citizens would expect of me as the regional leader. [They expect] clarity of communication, and telling people how it is straight, and then, of course, always being positive and optimistic about where the opportunities are. Because it’s absolutely clear to me, that people want, in a situation like this, some positivity to believe in.”

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A born and bred Brummie 

Street was born “by fluke” in Banbury, owing to his father working away. His entire family, throughout the generations, are from Birmingham, and Street was back living in the city by the age of 1. He grew up in Northfield and Solihull, and says his Brummie roots really matter in his job today, because he understands the psyche of the area.

Street is the eldest of three children; both his siblings have followed in his parents’ footsteps and gone into Stem-based (science, technology, engineering and maths) careers. Street’s father was a metallurgist, his mother a pharmacist; his sister is also a pharmacist, and his brother is an engineer - Street, as he puts it, is the “odd one out”. 

“When I was a youngster, my parents said, ‘why don’t you do the same as us and go and do some science’, but I was useless,” he laughs. “That was never going to happen - chemistry and I just did not mix. To be honest, I was not the most brilliant student, I was a bit lazy and more interested in sort of messing about with my friends until I was about 16. And then it was a teacher who changed my life.”

Jack Cook’s teaching ignited something in Street. He was the school’s first-ever economics teacher, and he brought the financial struggles of the late 1970s into the classroom. Without Cook, Street says he would have never gone to the University of Oxford, and then wouldn’t have been set on the path which resulted in his becoming metro mayor. “It’s true, teachers change lives,” he says.

He studied “the politicians’ degree” at Oxford - politics, philosophy and economics - but didn’t want to go into politics upon graduation. Instead, he wanted to become a social worker back home in Birmingham, but when the city council rejected him - they didn’t have enough money to hire him, and said he didn’t have enough life experience - he took a job on John Lewis’ retail management programme. 

He says he didn’t expect to stay for long, but caught the bug, and for 30 years he climbed the ranks, becoming managing director in 2007. 

“I loved that notion of proving that an employee-owned company could outperform a conventionally owned company - that’s what drove me,” he says. “People think John Lewis is a soft, cuddly thing, but no, John Lewis has to be better than M&S and Tesco, because it’s not there as a charity. To prove that we could do that is what drove me for all those years and that’s why I stayed for 30 years. It was wonderful.”

From retail management to mayor

The career change from retail to politics seems surprising at first, but in fact, the transition wasn’t completely out of the blue. In 2011, Street was asked to chair the Greater Birmingham and Solihull Local Enterprise Partnership, introduced by the coalition government. The role, he says, was his apprenticeship to being mayor, teaching him the balance of working between the public and private sector. 

When the devolution deal was struck in 2015, and Birmingham was looking for a mayor, people kept suggesting to Street that it should be him. 

“Now, I knew the referendum was coming up. David Cameron was PM, and I was a huge believer in Cameron, thought he was outstanding, and his type of conservatism was exactly what I believed in, but I knew that if he lost the referendum, he would stand aside. Then I wanted to see who the leader was and it was Theresa May,” he remembers.

“I went to see Theresa and said, ‘I will stand for this job, and give up everything in John Lewis on two conditions. Number one, you support me all the way. And number two, we run this campaign totally from the West Midlands. And she said, ‘OK, Andy, I’ll back you’. And the rest, as they say, is history. And I’m glad to say that support has continued to this day.”

Nobody thought he’d win as the Conservative candidate, he says: “They all said, ‘You’re mad, Andy, you’re just walking into a certain defeat’. And it probably was [mad], but I was absolutely single minded about it.”

So, why was he successful? How did he win the hearts and minds of those in the West Midlands and get them to vote Conservative? 

“I don’t think they were just voting Conservative, actually,” he says. “I think they were voting for someone to do a job. This is the whole thing about the mayoral model: it’s a job with an interview panel of 2 million people,” he says. “I actually think they liked the fact that I had a business background, rather than a traditional political background, because I think there’s a bit of weariness of career politicians, and I think I was able to present something a bit different.”

Pre-pandemic, Birmingham and the West Midlands were moving on leaps and bounds, says Street: the economy was the fastest-growing outside of London, Coventry was named as the City of Culture, Birmingham was chosen as host of the Commonwealth Games. He remembers a presentation given on the Monday before lockdown was called last year.

“Everybody who spoke was talking about how the 2020s will be the West Midlands’ decade. There was an incredible sense of optimism that after decades of underperformance - in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Noughties we’d underperformed, been the worst for many decades - we were suddenly in a really good position,” he says. “But the data is very clear. We’ve had a horrible, horrible shock from the pandemic.”

Trailblazing on skills and FE

But on skills and further education, Street is clear: the West Midlands is a trailblazer in providing people with opportunities to retrain and upskill.

He highlights the provision around electric vehicle maintenance at University of Wolverhampton, the rollout of the digital bootcamps, work on gateways to careers in construction for young unemployed people, the opening of the Dudley College Institute of Technology. 

“We have demonstrated that by working closely with our colleges, there can be really practical applied programmes for our young people, and I am 100 per cent certain that the dialogue with the combined authority in forming those, and then making sure the funding goes behind them, is a really good model,” he says.

Indeed, the digital bootcamps, which now are due to be expanded into every region of the country, originated in the West Midlands. 

“The prime minister described it as pioneering work, and that’s brilliant. But you know, the next bit of the sentence should be: ‘As you’ve pioneered that, Andy, what money do you want for other pioneering pieces? And now can you have more of the national retraining budget to do more of what you’ve been doing?’” he says.

“I’ve been really clear, we want two more things in our skills pot: 16-18 technical skills, because that’s most closely aligned, of all the education requirements, with the regional economic strategies; and then we want the careers service. This is the other critical thing if we’re thinking about social mobility: lifting people’s aspirations is absolute critical, and the system is fragmented. I genuinely think a regional career service that understands the opportunities in the regional economy would be the right service.”

So, is Street confident that he will get what he wants? The short answer: very.

“Eventually, we will. Eventually, that’s the key word, because the logic of it is right. That doesn’t mean it’s going to happen imminently, but I wouldn’t be asking unless I was utterly certain of the logic of it.”

And as we know, Street likes to do things logically. Today, it’s all about the adult education budget and upskilling adults. But tomorrow, next week, or next month, if Street has his way, it will be about 16- to 18-year-olds in the West Midlands: shaping their futures, providing them with opportunities, making them proud (or prouder) to be a Brummie.