Should we have more directly-elected Mayors?

Another in my mini-series (see here and here) of snippets from the Communities in Control White Paper that haven’t had the attention and debate that perhaps they should have had.

This time, the proposals on directly-elected Mayors:

We want to make it easier for people to demand that their local leaders move to establishing a directly-elected mayor through a referendum, so:

• we will consult on permitting on-line petitioning as well as traditional paper petitions to demonstrate support for a referendum
• we will consult on reducing the threshold for a petition to trigger a mayoral referendum from 5 per cent of voters – perhaps to 2, 3 or 4 per cent
• we will remove the stipulation that no referendum may be held for 10 years if a referendum is lost and instead move to a system where a new referendum may be held after four years in these circumstances

We will make the move to a directly-elected mayoralty more attractive to local politicians with an expectation that directly-elected mayors, where they exist, would chair the Local Strategic Partnership and, be the new Crime and Policing representative, as announced by the Prime Minister in the draft legislative programe for 2008-09. [p.94]