Move senior Whitehall jobs to the North, says Leeds City Council chief Tom Riordan

Tom Riordan, who has just returned to his role at Leeds City Council after two months in a senior role on the test and trace programme, said the pandemic had shown that "you actually don't need to be based in a single place to do a job".

It comes after Boris Johnson suggested in a letter earlier this month that the House of Lords and Commons could move temporarily to York while the Palace of Westminster is restored.

And it has been reported that the historic city is being considered as a potential second seat of government with civil servants being relocated from central London.

Mr Riordan told The Yorkshire Post: "The idea that government could move part of the civil service and not just the back office but some of the senior jobs out of London and run them from around the country, in particular the North, is something that I would advocate very strongly."

The council chief executive was appointed in May to oversee the rollout of the government test and trace programme. The role is now being carried out by Oldham council chief executive Carolyn Wilkins.

He said his time in the job showed that people with experience of delivering projects on the ground should be "right at the heart of decision-making".

He said: "As an experiment it is something that I'm encouraging the Government to do more to make sure people like me and others from the public and the private sector are involved in when policies are being thought about.

"Because often you've got some very big brains in Whitehall but you don't always have the people who've actually had to go off and deliver things, whether that's in business or charity sector or public sector."

Mr Riordan said the country's political system remained too centralised and that the work done by local town halls in tackling the pandemic was "an example to Whitehall that you can't run the country from a desk in SW1".

He said: "We've got to get more power and control over our own destiny in the North, in Yorkshire, in places like Leeds.

"My experience is that the closer you get decisions made to the people who it affects, the better decisions because you feel the accountability very keenly, people tell you when you got it wrong and when you got it right and it leads to better decision-making."