City driver: Dermot Finch, director, Centre for Cities

Ben Walker, Regeneration & Renewal, 4 May 2007

It's Dermot Finch's day off. "I'm giving you a priority access interview," he says. "I should be watching daytime telly." Had life gone differently, he could have been on it. Finch was an enthusiastic thespian in his youth, and is a keen pianist. He missed out on becoming casting director for Coronation Street, a job he interviewed for in the 1990s. But many close to him say he still has a knack for light entertainment. "Oh, I love Dermot," says one young, female public affairs professional. "He's great. Such a laugh at lunch. Has he told you about his Yamaha keyboards? He's pretty good."

Finch has largely left showbiz behind. Today, he is director of the Centre for Cities, part of think-tank the Institute for Public Policy Research. However, he still likes an audience.

He recalls a recent meeting with urban policy expert Professor Tony Travers of the London School of Economics. The two men share a fame of sorts - apart from when they leave the confines of Westminster Village. "Me and Tony were in a caff in Covent Garden the other day, talking about Gordon Brown and David Miliband and other stuff," says Finch. "A couple behind us said: 'We found your conversation very interesting. Who are you?' I said: 'I'm Dermot Finch and this is Tony Travers!' 'Oh,' they said. 'Anyway, it was fascinating.' Me and Tony, we were walking on air when we left."

Finch is an accomplished stand-up commentator, always ready with a quote for time-poor journalists, often travelling around the country preaching reform and radicalism on topics such as devolution, local government and economic development. But he has suffered his fair share of heckling.

This is the man who produced a report last year that said the best way to encourage economic growth in England's big conurbations - Greater Manchester, Greater Birmingham, and later perhaps Greater Newcastle and Greater Liverpool - was to establish London-style mayoralties with powers over skills, transport and regeneration across the entire city-region. With this, Finch lit the blue touch paper. Then he walked towards the flame, speaking in front of opponents - including people who feared that major cities would dominate any city-region and those who believed that smaller settlements would be excluded from such a system.

"Oh, city-regions!" Finch says. "That became a wind-up phrase. I remember going to Doncaster - one of my most hostile audiences ever. They thought city-region meant Sheffield."

Finch stands by his city-region mayor idea and is now concerned about what he calls a growing "power gap" between London, the UK's only city-regional mayoralty, and the big northern and Midlands conurbations.

In London, mayor Ken Livingstone is sucking power away from Whitehall at a rate the indirectly-elected leaders of Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle can only dream about, Finch points out. "Ken, as he should be, has been given more powers over skills, but what about Richard Leese, Warren Bradley and John Shipley?" he asks. "They have nothing like Ken's power. We cannot allow that power gap to open up. Local identity matters, but it shouldn't be a veto over sensible devolution."

Finch has found himself cast as a colourful adversary to the more solemn Ed Balls, the economic secretary to the Treasury and ally of Gordon Brown. Balls has written and spoken attacking Finch's city-region blueprint, and defending the existing system of regions. Whether you prefer Balls or Finch depends on your point of view, but like all the best rivals, they go back a long way.

Finch met Balls at the Treasury, where they were colleagues in the days of Labour's election honeymoon. Working with Balls, Brown and the then Labour paymaster general Geoffrey Robinson earned him contacts in the senior ranks of the party - "I have a habit of being in the right place at the right time," he says. He is mildly Brownite, but he was never a brown-nose. "I didn't run around the Treasury trying to get into meetings with Ed every five minutes," he says. Indeed, while Balls focused on macroeconomics, the young Dermot became interested in cities - through chance rather than choice. "In true Treasury style, my boss walked in and said: 'Dermot, you are doing cities.' I knew nothing about cities."

He waltzed through Treasury life, serendipitously - he says - got promoted and was sent to Washington DC as an economic ambassador, until one day he found himself "in the wrong place at the right time".

Finch was in New York for a business conference at the World Trade Center. His hotel room was midway between the two towers. It was 11 September 2001. Finch was sitting in his suite at 8.46am local time, when the first plane struck and sent him running from his room. "I saw that far too close," he says. "It reaffirmed this strange habit I have of being close to major events."

These days, he is trying to establish Centre for Cities as a body independent of the IPPR, a move that might free him from the media's belief that he works for a Blairite think-tank, a billing he hates. "We work with Labour Manchester, with Liberal Newcastle, with Conservative Birmingham," he says. "We are political because we are operating in a political field, but we are not partisan. And we are not anything-'ite'. Okay, we are 'Finchite'. I'll buy you a drink if you write that." Cheers.

CV HIGHLIGHTS

1991 Completes an MA in Irish studies at Queen's University Belfast.

1996 Made private secretary in the Treasury to MPs Michael Jack and Geoffrey Robinson.

1998 Appointed as policy adviser on productivity issues in the Treasury.

2001 Becomes first secretary (economic affairs) of the British Embassy in Washington DC.

2005 Takes up his current post.