Ben Harrison, Director of Partnerships at The Centre for Cities has written a great piece this week about the governance issues affecting city regions and the pace of devolution.
The announcement this week that the Government plans to hand a significant amount of EU funding directly to the [Manchester] city-region, but will resist doing so for other places across the country, is a further reminder of the clear blue water that can open up between cities in terms of the powers they wield, and the funding they control, when they get their governance right. Come 2017, Greater Manchester will have new powers over transport, housing, land, planning, police, fire, and children’s services, while other city-regions – even those in which real political and administrative progress has been made – have not yet decided either whether they are prepared to do a deal, or the basis on which they would do it.
My earlier blog on the (ridiculously named) Northern Powerhouse highlights, as The Guardian says, “George Osborne has confirmed Greater Manchester as the golden child of his “northern powerhouse” in a budget which promised hazy devolution deals to Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, the Midlands – and Cornwall – but left out the north-east of England almost entirely.”
Read the article by Ben Harrison at There’s more to devolution deals than the prizes on offer today.
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