Meet Andy Burnham’s right-hand-woman that you may have never heard of

If you were to make a list of the most powerful women in Greater Manchester, two immediately spring to mind.

If you were to make a list of the most powerful women in Greater Manchester, two immediately spring to mind.

Kate Green is the deputy mayor for policing and crime. Bev Craig is the leader of Manchester city council.

But while Ms Green’s influence is limited by her remit, and Coun Craig’s is curtailed by geography, there is one woman with more influence than both.

She’s not a politician, and nor is she party-political. You may have never even heard of her.

That’s Caroline Simpson, the £240,000 chief executive of Andy Burnham’s office, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), and Transport for Greater Manchester (TfGM).

She is ultimately responsible for running two public organisations with billion-pound budgets that millions of us interact with every day, and works closely with whoever’s elected as mayor to deliver their manifesto.

Another task is to promote Greater Manchester’s interests overseas. Under her tenure, the city signed deals with Japanese firms, sent a trade mission to Tokyo and Osaka, hosted a Japanese delegation, and will hold the 50th ‘Japan Week’ in September.

A small part of that is down to one of Caroline’s hidden talents.

“I did welcome two Japanese mayors to go to Manchester a couple of months ago where I did practice my Japanese,” told the Local Democracy Reporting Service in her first major interview since becoming GMCA boss.

“I’m not so sure it was convincing,” she added, laughing. Her foreign language skills come from a degree in Japanese and business studies from Liverpool John Moores University.

Liverpool is where Caroline’s career began, initially in organising ‘community-based regeneration projects on work and skills’. But remarkably for someone who has spent her entire career in the public sector, it wasn’t a natural calling.

“Like most young people, I fell into my first job which happened to be in the public sector. It was when I started to really work hard and feel very committed to what I was doing.

“I am a proud public servant. I’m absolutely an advocate for a rewarding career in public service where you can end a very, very busy day genuinely knowing you’ve made an impact.

“It sounds a bit twee, but you have had an impact on people’s lives. That’s massively rewarding.”

From Liverpool, Caroline’s career has always stayed relatively close to the M6. First came the regeneration jobs in the Black Country and Warrington, before a move to a Staffordshire housing association, and then on to Cheshire East council. In 2016, she became Stockport council’s economic growth director. Six years later, she was named its chief executive.

Last summer, she was named the GMCA’s second-ever chief executive, taking over from Eamonn Boylan who held the post when the Greater Manchester mayoralty began.

Like Mr Boylan, Caroline’s relationship with whoever the mayor is remains crucial to the success of the city-region. She says Andy Burnham has been ‘brilliant to work with’, praising his ‘energy’ and ‘ambition’, the latter of which she says she shares.

But unlike her predecessor, Caroline has a much greater degree of freedom. Earlier this year, Greater Manchester received the first ‘integrated settlement’ from the government.

The technical change means the city-region no longer has to bid for 150 smaller pots of government cash, instead getting a £630m lump sum to spend on six ‘pillars’ of policy. The extra freedom comes in the fact local leaders can move up to 10pc of each ‘pillar’ to a different policy area, so if Andy Burnham wants to spend a few million more on education, he can.

Should Caroline stay in the job, and there’s no reason to think otherwise, she may enjoy even more flexibility after the government unveiled its English devolution bill earlier in July, promising to take more power from Whitehall and putting it in the hands of mayors and combined authorities.

It’s not law yet, but will likely come into effect before the next Greater Manchester mayoral election in 2028. That means Andy Burnham should be more powerful than he’s ever been as mayor, and Caroline Simpson should be in the thick of the action.