The adage about the night being darkest before dawn could have a grain of truth regarding the long-delayed delivery of some degree of regionalism for England, by common consent the most centralised state of western Europe. The 2016 Cities and Local Government Devolution Act, followed by the somewhat ambiguously titled 2023 Levelling Up and Regeneration Act, have led to the creation of several English Combined Authorities, each with its own elected metro mayor.
Metro mayors lack the powers of London’s mayor
There are now metro mayors of Greater Manchester, West Midlands, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Teesside, East Midlands, Liverpool, North East, York and North Yorkshire, West of England, Cambridge and Peterborough. These cover around 34% of the English population, and over 50% if Greater London is included.
London has had its own elected mayor since 2000, along with a 25-member, directly-elected assembly, to whom the mayor is fully answerable. The mayor of London has greater power than the metro mayors over areas such as transport, police, economic strategies, emergency planning, and the statutory London Plan. But, above all, the mayor of London has precepting powers for local taxation.
In contrast, the metro mayors’ areas of power and responsibility are largely confined to transport (over which the Department of Transport still wields powerful control), policing, housing and further education. They are chairs of their respective combined authorities and require a two-thirds majority of cabinet members to act.
More ‘trailblazer’ deals needed for devolution
Compared with mayors of other world city regions, English mayors have fewer powers and resources at their disposal. Worse, in England, funding is strictly controlled by the Treasury, with each region having to compete for limited funds, which by their nature demand compliance with government policy and even political agendas.
However, there are welcome plans to allow two of the ‘provincial’ combined authorities –Greater Manchester and West Midlands – greater freedom with a ‘trailblazer deal’. This would give the mayors of these areas a single settlement payment and allow them to spend it as they, not Whitehall, decide. They would also be able to support local businesses to increase local tax returns. However, each of these “deeper devolution deals” has to be individually negotiated with civil servants, who determine which areas get which deal – classic Whitehall divide and rule tactics.
Economic imbalance between London and the regions
Currently, government funding still finds its way into the most prosperous regions. While West Yorkshire struggles to get a basic modern mass rapid transit system, London received the £18bn Elizabeth Line and now a truncated HS2.
The gap in economic performance between Greater London and the rest of England is staggering. In 2022, annual GDP per capita in Greater London was a massive £63.4K, more than double that of the poorer regions such as the North East, East Midlands, West Midlands, and Yorkshire and The Humber (ONS).
It is no coincidence that Greater London with a powerful single mayor and elected assembly hugely outperforms the rest of England. The English state has seen a long process of centralisation from Norman times to a peak through the years of the British Empire. This was enabled and sustained by the localisation and massive growth of heavy industry, particularly in the North and Midlands of England. Coal and steel, engineering, textiles, chemicals; all generated the country’s wealth. And all went into steep decline after the second world war with the loss of protected colonial markets and as previously vassal states became competitors.
Then came Margaret Thatcher’s policy of de-industrialisation and destruction of trade union power, symbolised by the breaking of miners’ picket lines at Orgreave in 1984. Switching to an economy largely based on service industries in London and the Home Counties left much of Northern England in catastrophic economic and social decline. This was worsened by Brexit which removed desperately needed EU regional development funding from declining post-industrial areas.
Most politicians now recognise that the ‘north-south divide’ is so extreme that urgent remedial action has to be taken. This was a top priority objective as far back as the first Blair administration. Led by Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, the Regional Development Agencies Act 1998 proposed eight Regional Chambers and the London Assembly. But the pilot referendum for the North East in 2004 was a disaster.
Vigorous, right-wing campaigning in the local press against ‘extra bureaucracy’ meant proposals were thrown out by a massive 78/22% majority. This killed English regionalism for two decades. Regional chambers were abolished between 2008 and 2010 and the coalition government even closed down the Regional Development Agencies in 2010. Government offices in each of the regions closed in 2012 as an ‘austerity measure’.
Hope for devolution, reignited
But there is hope for devolution. As regional disparities have become more extreme, there is a growing awareness that, as in most modern democratic states, regions of England of population size between five and nine million are, in terms of governance, far more manageable than a country of 56 million.
Yorkshire – one of the smaller English regions – has a population of 5.5 million people, more than Scotland, yet has three, soon to be four potentially competing combined authorities. But the three Yorkshire mayors, by 2025 to be joined by Hull and East Riding, have already pledged to form a White Rose Pact to work together region-wide for a common purpose.
There also needs to be a recognition that many other areas, such as regional economic development and investment, arts, further education, sport, heritage and tourism, nature recovery and climate change, are better dealt with at a regional, rather than a national or locally fragmented, level.
What is crucial is a strong sense of regional identity and history to bring grassroots pressures on any incoming government to secure desperately needed full regional devolution similar to that enjoyed by the other UK nations. By delivering the White Rose Pact, the metro mayors of Yorkshire could help achieve a step towards what a Labour government aspired to a quarter of a century ago, but whose time has now surely come.
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