So how much difference do you think great devolution can actually make to Birmingham's ambitions to grow?

think I always struggle with a one-size-fits-all mentality and that's bending to something that's decided in Whitehall that isn't cognizant of the place and people but I also understand that it's difficult for a government down in Whitehall to kind of proliferate that across however many councils there are in the country.

That's a difficult and a costly interface.

So devolution in and of itself, grouping it together around sensible place economic geography means that those areas aren't neither too small, but they're of a size where you can actually deal with those areas.

Devolution for us means that if we do have opportunities, whether they're in the creative quarter in Digbeth or whether they're in the knowledge quarter, and we know the skill requirement or what employers want, what investors want, so we could use devolution to respond to those things in terms of creating the skills pathways with them, putting funding programs in, working with the private sector, responding to the skills need, not just a generic, skills route or academic route inside of that and i think that's that's one of the key things for us is to be able to be agile and flexible in what the needs are or the city responds to that so we know for example we have high youth unemployment in the city we have great outpension of school there's that high youth unemployment.

So devolution should enable us as Birmingham and as the West Midlands to be able to focus and deal with that issue specifically and not feel like we're having to put them into a national programme that perhaps doesn't work or doesn't deal with the issues around that.

So, you know, we should be able to respond quicker.

Where do you see the, not pitfalls, where do you see it not working quite so well and how can that get better in the age of the sort of devolution that we briefly discussed?