The Mayor for Liverpool campaign, spearheaded by former BBC journalist Liam Fogarty, has failed to gather enough support to force a referendum, despite more than two years of trying.

Labour has tried to encourage more polls – by slashing the number of signatures required to 5% of the voting public and by allowing them to be collected online – but has stopped short of ordering a vote.

The other 11 biggest cities that would be forced to stage a mayoral referendum are Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, Manchester, Bristol, Wakefield, Coventry, Leicester, Nottingham and Newcastle.

The policy – entitled Control Shift: Returning Power to Local Communities – also pledges to:

Allow residents to vote down high council tax rises in a referendum;

Give local authorities the power to cut business rates for “strategically important” businesses, such as post offices and country pubs;

Allow councils to keep the business rate revenue from attracting new firms to their area;

Allow councils to devolve unlimited funding to ward councillors.

Mrs Spelman said: “This is about bringing power right back to the local level, so that people feel they have real influence over the places that they live.”