The leader of Dorset Council has appealed to Prime Minister Andy Burnham to urge him to accelerate the approval of a devolution deal for the south west.
Council leader Nick Ireland will today be writing to Andy Burnham to call for the Heart of Wessex authority bid to be pushed forward, after having been rejected by the Government early last year.
The bid involves the proposals for Wiltshire, Dorset, Somerset, and BCP councils to become a combined mayoral authority, with Wessex leaders having also recently written to the new Prime Minister to ask for his help in reaching these goals.
In an interview with the BBC, Cllr Ireland said: ‘I would like Andy Burnham to recognise that as a Wessex footprint, we are ready to go, we have been ready to go for a while, and we've been telling the ministers at Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, so we'd like Andy just to sign it off, please’.
‘He said a lot of words about devolving power, growth in local postcodes, so we are ready and we'd like him to give us the powers’, he added.
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