What insights should we take from the strategic authorities in England to Should we have mayors? Should we be looking at the mayoral model that the First Minister appears to have ruled out?

Yeah, thanks Nicola.

So the mayoral model has garnered a lot of attention north of the border over the last couple of years.

Certainly there's been a lot of folks looking down south, particularly to Manchester, sort of suggesting that we might be missing a trick strategically by not having a sort of figurehead, a leading persona there.

leading places like the Edinburgh City region or the Glasgow City region.

So there's been a huge amount of debate about that.

It's obviously a very complex and muddy picture.

David, what do you make of all of that? And in answering this kind of substantive question, give us a bit of insight as well into how Manchester isn't England, right? There are lots of different versions of regional combined authorities across the country, but Manchester's story has been so dominant that it's become this one view of what the experience is when really there's multiple.

Does Scotland, and especially its cities and regions, have a devolution and local growth model that that it can advocate confidently with the new government in Westminster and with the recently re-elected Swinney government in Holyrood.

Hi, David and Mike.

Thanks very much for having me on the podcast.

Well, you set out a very pertinent question at the outset.

I think the devolution experience in Scotland has certainly been critiqued over the last 25 years and more now for simply centralizing powers at Holyrood, yet not sending powers further down to localities or to regions.

So this is very much a live debate in Scotland at the moment.

And I think it's fair to say, and indeed my colleagues and I have been arguing, that urban and regional policy in Scotland has been somewhat in abeyance up until the city-region deals, which came about in the mid-2010s.

Can you just describe what is Glasgow looking to get and how does it see itself perhaps as being in a different position from some other city regions of ever comparable size like Manchester or Birmingham?