North East mayor Kim McGuinness on ambition, austerity and why she's the 'ultimate pragmatist'

“I’m fed-up of seeing us stuck behind Manchester or Leeds, let alone London,” said Kim McGuinness as she convinced voters she should become the first mayor of the North East. The pitch worked. As mayor for a region of almost two million people, she has a position which, if played right, could propel her to the highest reaches of British politics.

Her agenda rests on eliminating child poverty, bringing public transport under state control, and leading the region into a powerful future. At 39, her career could stretch for decades yet. But who is Kim McGuinness?

For this profile of McGuinness, Big Issue interviewed McGuinness about her life, ambitions and the controversies along the way. We also spoke to multiple figures who’ve interacted with and worked with McGuinness as she rose through Newcastle’s political scene. In a tight-knit local political culture, many requested anonymity to speak freely.

‘I am the ultimate pragmatist’

Speaking to Kim McGuinness, on one view, is speaking to a politician a few months into a big, new job who hopes to remain fundamentally normal. She walks her two dogs, still has the same friends as she did before her political ascent, met her husband in a local bar “the good old fashioned way”, and laughs with disappointment about her Great North Run time falling six minutes short of her 2:30 target. She reads books she describes as “family dramas”, and more than one source told Big Issue she was somebody you’d be happy to have a glass of wine with.

But her time in public office has been marked by austerity and the hollowing-out of public services. In turn, this has shaped the politician who now rules the North East. “I sat for ever such a long time, nearly 10 years, where I never, ever, ever saw a budget go up. That’s incredibly difficult, when costs are rising, need is rising, demand is rising,” she said in an interview with Big Issue.

Describing herself as “the ultimate pragmatist” politically, this approach is matched by the “tough choices” rhetoric coming from Keir Starmer’s new government. Play your cards right as a regional mayor and very big jobs start being discussed – just look at Andy Burnham and Sadiq Khan – but for McGuinness, who says she has always batted away the idea of becoming an MP, of being one of 600 in Westminster, the focus is on transforming the region she grew up in.

“My fundamental belief is that talent is completely classless, but at the moment opportunity isn’t,” she said.

‘Ambitious, but ambitious in a good way’

Kim McGuinness grew up in a council house on the Newbiggin Hall estate, in Newcastle’s West End, her father a scaffolder in the Tyneside shipyards and her mum a secretary. It was a “very working class household”, McGuinness recalled to Big Issue – not overtly political, but solidly Labour, solidly union. Times could be hard but people helped each other; a community spirit which runs through the way McGuinness now talks about politics.

Tony Blair’s election in 1997 saw “low level excitement” on the council estate, McGuinness said. New school facilities, community facilities and options for jobs opened up. That Labour government, said McGuinness, also paved the way for her to go to university and study history at Newcastle.

McGuinness moved away after university but returned to the North East in 2013, and got involved with door knocking and local campaigning in the Newcastle North constituency. Anger at the coalition drove her. It was then that Catherine McKinnell, the Newcastle North MP, sat McGuinness down and told her she should be on the council. McGuinness recalled turning it down, saying she wasn’t ready. McKinnell came back again, and again. A third time it stuck. But McGuinness’s first tilt at office, which saw her up against the leader of the opposition, ended in defeat. The next year, 2015, she was successful, finding herself elected as a councillor for the Lemington ward.

“I never made the conscious decision to stand for political office as such, but then obviously when I did get in there, I really, really enjoyed it,” said McGuinness. “I loved the bit when you would listen to, understand people’s issues, get them sorted. It feels good to be able to make a positive change for people. There’s a lot of frustration as well.”

Freshly-elected, McGuinness made an impression on fellow councillors. “She’s a very competent and diligent person,” said David Cook, a former Labour councillor also elected to the same Lemington ward. McGuinness, said Cook, got stuck into the kind of tangly ward issues which take up a lot of time – housing, cost of living – and showed the ability to move the wheels of bureaucracy.

“She’s ambitious, no doubt about that, but ambitious in a good way. Ambitious to make change, politically ambitious,” Cook said.

‘People complained about her getting them to work hard’

Being a councillor, however, is a job done on top of other jobs. So while she made her start in politics, Kim McGuinness’s career continued. Alongside work in insurance, charities and recruitment, this took her to York, where she became head of opportunities at the University of York’s Students’ Union.

“There were people who complained about her getting them to work hard. She wanted them to work past five o’clock. The way she worked, she did not switch off. She went for something,” said a source who worked in the SU at the time. This came to a head in 2017, the source said, after a review process in which all colleagues were able to anonymously leave feedback. “She left halfway through the term, which is unusual. She left after review. Some of the colleagues who she upset briefed quite heavily against her during the review,” said the source, adding she left of her own volition.

“I think she didn’t fully anticipate how much she’d upset people through what was a very reasonable, laudable goal.”

But McGuinness said there was another explanation: she was offered a cabinet position on the council, and quit to dedicate more time to this. “It just made sense at that time to go. I thought some of the things that came through – and I think every office has a little bit of that kind of stuff – of course we wanted to work really hard and make a difference to the students and make a difference for the SU,” she said, and argued the review process was irrelevant to her career now.

During this time, Kim McGuinness’s politics rarely came to the fore – only ever brought up when asked. “She would always be very, very clear that she was a pragmatist, she wanted to get things done, she wanted to improve things,” the source added.

‘Her abilities were quickly recognised’

The cabinet role was a first taste of real power, with Kim McGuinness now Newcastle City Council’s cabinet member for communities, culture and sport. It was a brief which included looking after the city’s parks.

Facing the same swingeing budget cuts as all local authorities in the midst of austerity, tough decisions loomed. The parks budget had been slashed by more than 90% – from £2.5m in 2011 to just £250,000 in 2016. A grant from public health was propping up services, while grass was going uncut, litter was being collected less, and Park Keepers were removed. A new scheme, predating McGuinness, was cooked up and the council handed control of the city’s parks and allotments to a charitable trust, Urban Green Newcastle. McGuinness sat on Urban Green’s board from 2018 until 2019. “She championed the project,” said Tony Durcan, who worked with McGuinness as a council officer and as an independent consultant during her time as PCC. “I think she welcomed that opportunity as a relatively new and young cabinet member, to get that profile.”

McGuinness saw it as a way to save the parks from the ravages of austerity. “The financial circumstances, in the absolute depth of the most difficult parts of austerity, left us in a position where we were really, really struggling,” she said. “I think that we, in the most difficult of times, made a decision that was about protecting those public spaces”

The move was supposed to secure the future of the city’s parks amid a crisis in local government finance. But it is already fraying. Urban Green has burnt through 10 years of funding in just five years, buffeted by Covid, among other things, and faces a showdown. Newcastle City Council has given the charity £1m in funding, but also mounted a £50,000 review into the arrangement. A decision is expected in November – determining whether McGuinness’s parks plan has a future.

‘I found it very demeaning’

In 2019, Kim McGuinness became the youngest police and crime commissioner (PCC) in the country, elected in a by-election to oversee the work of Northumbria Police.

“Like a lot of police and crime commissioner candidates from the parties, I thought she was probably more interested and suitable to be an MP, as opposed to police and crime commissioner,” said Georgina Hill, who ran against McGuinness for PCC. “The fact she grabbed with both hands this by-election to be police and crime commissioner, I think that points to the great ambition she’s got.”

Among McGuinness’s priorities as PCC were to put fighting poverty at the heart of fighting crime, investing in youth services, and tackling violence against women. “She was very keen to look at how the PCC could support and encourage people who lacked confidence, and who’d been damaged, to try and take their case forward,” said Durcan. “She wanted us to be able to support victims more easily.”

Her position meant that, when Covid struck, and people worried they might be arrested if they set foot outside the house, McGuinness found herself in charge of the region’s police. “It was personally very difficult, but at the same time you knew that what you were doing was incredibly important, and oftentimes the decisions that you made would have a real lasting importance,” she said. But she also saw the seeds of the region banding together: “I do wonder whether we would have arrived at the devolution outcome that we got if we hadn’t been through that time.”

PCCs swear an oath of impartiality, with then-policing minister Nick Herbert explaining in 2012 the oath emphasises “that commissioners are there to serve the people, not a political party of any one section of their electorate”. But, said a Conservative former member of the panel which scrutinised her work, McGuinness regularly used the role to attack the then-Tory government’s policies. “When Kim came in as the PCC, it appeared as though, repeatedly throughout any report, she regularly just wanted to go on a political attack against the government at the time,” said the source. This grew to the point that the councillor, who said they got on well with politicians of the opposite stripe, asked to be removed from the panel. “I found it very unnecessary. It was awkward for me and I found it very demeaning,” the source said. “I asked to be replaced, because to put it bluntly I just felt I was wasting my time.”

For Kim McGuinness, serving as an elected politician, she felt giving the public the bigger picture was fundamental to the job. “As policing got more complex, as crime got more complex, our resources were lessened over and over and over again. I don’t think it’s wrong in any way for me to point that out. I think in fact it is an important part of the role of a police and crime commissioner to put that context to people and also to be really clear about how you’re dealing with it,” she said. “I think it is just the comments of what I presume to be an opposition government who would prefer the agenda was about praising government”.

A confrontation with the government came in October 2021, when McGuinness quit her role negotiating police staff pay talks between the Home Office and police and crime commissioners, describing an offer as “grossly unfair”. It wasn’t a difficult decision, she said. “What I wasn’t prepared to do was go into negotiations effectively with police staff and deliver the message of zero pay increase at a time when we knew that our police staff had struggled, we’d seen the cuts to them nationally,” said McGuinness. “I was not prepared to be the government’s messenger for that to them.

In August 2021, McGuinness married her husband, David, an RAF officer, with the pair walking under a uniformed guard of honour, swords raised – a year after the pandemic wiped out their initial April 2020 date.

‘She knew politics was about changing things’

“Fuck off! I am not a gypsy!” wrote Kim McGuinness on Twitter in 2011. When the comments resurfaced in early 2024, after McGuinness had announced her candidacy for North East mayor, she was accused of using a “racial slur” and faced calls to resign. Yvonne MacNamara, CEO of The Traveller Movement charity, questioned how McGuinness had been selected as a councillor, PCC candidate and mayoral candidate “despite public racist behaviour”. Through a Labour source, McGuinness apologised, with the source saying it was a term she would never use.

The Traveller Movement registered a formal complaint with Labour leader Keir Starmer, but McGuinness stayed in the race. However, the charity was not pleased with her response: in a letter sent to councillors in the region, they complained she had made “no public comment” and said they had not received a reply from the Labour Party. The letter said the party had failed to investigate the matter, despite complaints to the party being made six months previously.

Speaking to Big Issue, McGuinness said she was “shocked” when she saw the tweet, which she sent in her mid-20s. “It’s not something that reflects the sentiment that I have now or ever have, against anybody, against the gypsy traveller movement. In fact, I’ve done an awful lot throughout my career on equality. I didn’t like it, I was very uncomfortable with it,” she said.

“I did issue an apology in response to the reporting for that, although I don’t think that was published. I did do that at the time.”

Her main opponent for the newly-created North East mayorality was the left-wing North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll, who had been barred by Labour from running – a move branded “undemocratic” by fellow mayors Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram. 

It was the creation of the new North East Combined Authority which prompted McGuinness to run, said Tony Durcan. “She had said to me that she would seek the nomination, but only if the authority changed,” Durcan said. “She wasn’t trying to get Jamie Driscoll’s job. She was trying to be the mayor of the new authority. And that distinction, I think, was important for her.”

Running for the newly-created office brought a higher profile – and a new level of unwanted attention which she found “incredibly difficult personally and politically”. She described a “very organised campaign of online hate and misogyny and borderline harassment”, coming from, she suspected, supporters of other candidates. More than once during the course of her career, the police have had to step in and take action. “I am lucky, and I’m almost reticent to say this, but of course I’ve had some awful moments where there have been people who’ve thought it’s a good idea to threaten me, or to step over that line. But thankfully, I do live a pretty normal day to day life where I try really hard to not think too hard about it, and just to get on with it.”

She saw off Driscoll, who finished second to McGuinness’s 41.3% of the vote, and declared her victory the “first step” to the North East taking control of its future.

Days after Labour swept into power nationally, McGuinness was one of 11 regional mayors invited to Downing Street. She has made her top priority fighting child poverty, wants to reverse the impact of austerity in the region, and has announced plans to bring buses into public control.

She has taken control as the country reshapes itself, with Keir Starmer keen to give mayors more power. On the eve of the Great North Run, McGuinness banded together with other northern mayors to rebrand levelling up as the “Great North”. The next day, the mayor ran the race wearing the number one bib, raising money for local charities fighting food poverty and helping get women into employment.

“You were never in any doubt she would land somewhere really, really good,” said the source from her time at York. “She wasn’t one of these ‘stars in your eyes’ figures who thinks they can conquer the world and sweats when you have to deliver. She knew politics was about changing things”.

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