5 The new English regional planning
5.2 English regionalisation – its institutions and practice
Chapter 2 showed that the return of regional planning practice in England was marked by the establishment from 1990 of a system of regional planning guid- ance. This delivered the first set of English regional plans by 1995. These plans had been prepared by the conferences of local authorities in each of the eight regions shown in Figure 1.2 and then, suitably amended, approved by central government. These planning conferences were the most important regional institutions, but not the only ones. Most regions had bodies which led on some kind of economic planning, and co-ordinated bids for European funds. Such economy-oriented bodies were stronger in the northern regions, where for example the Northern Economic Development Council had functioned as a tri- partite co-ordinating and lobbying group for the North East since the mid 1980s (Lanigan 2001). From 1994 GORs complemented these bodies, representing at first four government departments (Environment, Trade and Industry, Trans- port, and Employment). The GORs gradually built up their capacity to co-ordi- nate government actions in the regions, with a special focus on planning and economic development (Bradbury and Mawson 1997).
The New Labour government elected in 1997 was committed to devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. After referenda this commitment was made good in 1999 in Scotland and Wales (as we detail in Chapter 6). In the very different situation of Northern Ireland, a power-sharing Executive started functioning in 2000, only to be suspended in 2002. For London a new structure was created around a relatively strong mayor, alongside
a much weaker Greater London Assembly with only essentially scrutiny powers.
Ken Livingstone became the first elected Mayor of London in 2000, standing as an independent against the Labour candidate. He was re-elected in 2004, having been readmitted to the Labour Party. Planning in London has a rather different character to that in the rest of England, with some features more of a metropolitan or strategic nature than of a region, and so it is not treated in detail in this book (see Thornley et al. 2005; Newman and Thornley 2005;
Rydinet al. 2004; McNeill 2002). However, planning, particularly the making of the London Plan, approved in 2004, has been a central field of work for the Mayor, and therefore London will appear occasionally here.
The relative clarity of the government’s actions for the above territories dis- solved when addressing the English regions. John Prescott, who was to be the head of the super ministry, the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR), from 1997 until 2001 and again 2002 to 2006 (though from 2002 he lost functions to separate departments, the ministry being renamed the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister) had been the great evangelist of the English regions since the 1970s. Labour’s regional policy commission of 1996 (headed by Bruce Millan, previously regional commissioner in Brussels) had agreed that Labour should set up elected regional governments in England.
This was watered down in Labour’s election manifesto, given the strong dislike of regional government by Blair, Straw and other prominent ministers. Hence, in due course, only parts of Prescott’s aspirations were met by the legislation passed in 1998, the Regional Development Agencies Act.
5.2.1 Regional Development Agencies
The Regional Development Agencies Act had two main elements. The domin- ant one, at least at that stage, was the creation of Regional Development Agen- cies, somewhat similar to those seen as having had success in Scotland and Wales since the 1970s. These were set up for all eight English regions, using the boundaries of the Government Offices (which were in turn the boundaries of the government statistical regions created in the 1940s – on boundaries, see Hogwood 1995). In 2000 a ninth body, the London Development Agency, was created, with the difference that this worked to and for the Mayor of London.
The other eight agencies were responsible to central government, first Prescott’s ministry, and then the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) after 2001.
They were also responsible to a regional board, which had a chairman drawn from business as well as a majority of business sector members.
The RDAs’ purpose was to facilitate economic development for their regions, although they did have a final function added, to promote sustainable development. Given that they were created for all regions, this implicitly meant that the government was pressing for economic improvement in all regions.
The fact that the budgets of the southern regions (with the exception of London) remained always much smaller than those of the rest, meant that there was still an emphasis on supporting weaker regions more than stronger ones (see
Chapter 8 for more detail). However, the shift in emphasis was significant, sup- porting Brenner’s argument that neoliberal spatial development policy involved supporting winning regions as well as losing ones (Brenner 2004). This was to have very important implications for regional planning strategies as well.
We will meet the RDAs frequently in the following chapters, as they are key actors in the English regions (on the RDAs see Benneworth 2001; Roberts and Benneworth 2001). For now we need to stress three points. First, they have significant budgets. These have been increasing each year, and since 2004 have been in a ‘Single Pot’, that is to say the Agencies can move money between budget headings, pursuing, in principle, their long-term strategies as seems best to them. These resources are very noticeable in the stripped-down world of planning and regeneration in this period. These numbers are magnitudes larger than those of regional planning bodies, and much larger than the related func- tions of all but the very largest local authorities. Second, though, and working partly against this, they are largely the creature of central government, who approves their corporate plans and their economic strategies. They do need therefore to keep within the broad guidelines of the government’s economic strategy, with all larger elements of spending needing Treasury approval. Third, their business led boards have created a very much business-led philosophy, although with some variation between regions. This has been accentuated with the gradual tapering off in their responsibility for the Single Regeneration Budget schemes which they inherited. These schemes had had a much larger social and community element, while from about the time the DTI became the parent department, programmes began to switch to projects more related to competitiveness considerations. Recent RES revisions such as that for the South East in late 2006 show this clearly, compared with the earlier more socially and regeneration oriented strategies.
All three factors have been important in governing the relationship with regional planning processes, given that government has consistently refused to say that either planning or economic strategies should be the overarching regional strategy. The presence of the RDAs in the form in which they were created has affected planning fundamentally during this period, inducing a core process of continual mutual adjustment.
5.2.2 Regional chambers or assemblies
The second element in the 1998 Act was the formation of regional chambers.
These were bodies made up of at most two-thirds local authority councillors, reflecting the political balance of power between parties present in the region.
The rest were nominated from regional pressure groups, and were divided between economic, social and environmental representatives. How these members came to be chosen was very variable (Federal Trust 2003; Sandford 2005), with varying degrees of transparency. Different regions set up chambers of different sizes, as shown in Table 5.1. Furthermore, from the beginning some chambers opted for the title of RAs, and by 2002 the government had accepted The new English regional planning 91
this change of name (we will use the term assembly from here on, even for the early years, for the sake of simplicity).
The primary role in the legislation for the assemblies was to scrutinise the performance of the RDAs. They had powers to reject the Agencies’ budgets, and to return their RESs: not massive powers, but there were cases of assemblies using them, for example in the East of England in May 2001 when the assembly rejected the RES as too focused on business objectives and not fitting in with the social and environmental objectives of the region’s planning strategy.
It was also expected from the start that assemblies would work with others in developing other regional strategies, and that this could include regional planning guidance, if the body preparing guidance at that stage so wished. Some regions decided to give this role early on to the assembly, while elsewhere, particularly in the regions with the strongest regional planning tradition such as the South East and West Midlands, the transfer did not occur until about 2002, when government virtually ordered that this should happen. This resistance to trans- fer was largely because of the view among the local authorities who made up the regional planning bodies such as SERPLAN and the West Midlands section of the Local Government Association, that they were the more legitimate body to carry out regional planning, being democratically elected. The government’s antipathy to local government and preference for more corporatist or associa- tive forms, meant that this argument did not prosper.
5.2.3 Government Offices for the Regions
The third public agency deeply involved in the regionalisation process since the 1990s is in most respects the most important. Table 5.2 shows the overall budgets of the core triumvirate, and the financial dominance of the GORs is clear. Much government effort since 1994 has been put into making regional administration and management by central government more efficient (Mawson forthcoming). In 2001 a Regional Co-ordination Unit (RCU) was set up, first in the Cabinet Office, now based in the Department of Communities Table 5.1 Numbers of members of English regional assemblies 2004–2005
Regional assembly Number of members
East of England 107
East Midlands 111
North East 72
North West 80
South East 111
South West 117
West Midlands 100
Yorkshire and Humberside 37
Total 735
Source: Retrieved from English Regions website (www.ern.gov.uk), report by Snape et al.(2005b).
and Local Government, with the task of administering the GORs network.
Some 350–450 civil servants work in each GOR, headed by a Regional Director who is accountable to the Director General of the RCU.
On Mawson’s higher estimates, each GOR has annual expenditure of, on average, around £1 billion, but there are large differences, with London’s share at £2.7 billion reflecting management of the massive transport budget for London. From a planning point of view large budgets inevitably mean large influence, so it is no surprise to find that GORs have an increasingly large role in steering the statutory RSSs. This chimes well with research arguing that the primary effect of regionalisation since 1997 has been to give central government more power over all lower agencies, whether local or regional (Musson et al.
2006).
5.2.4 The English regions White Paper 2002
After the 2001 election the government promised to lay out its proposals for the second stage of English regionalisation, leading to the publication of the White Paper in May 2002. This had two parts. The headline section dealt with the The new English regional planning 93 Table 5.2 The triumvirate of English regional actors
Regional Year Budgets Main roles Accountability
public actor created 2003–2004 (£ millions)
Government 1994 5102.7 Implementing To central
Offices for the central ministries
Regions government
programmes in a co-ordinated way, and steering regional governance
Regional 1999 1984.8 Improving regional To parent central
Development economic ministry (DTI),
Agencies performance with regional board
steering progress within centrally set targets
Regional 1999 24.2 Acting as RPB and To Assembly
Assemblies scrutinising RDA membership,
programmes, plus 60–70% from local wider integrating role authorities, others
from regional partners Source:Based on figures derived from M. Sandford (2005).
Notes
The total for GORs depends very much on what is considered to be managed or influenced by them, within central government spending. Mawson (forthcoming) comes to a figure of £9.2 billion.
offer to English regions to elect their own Regional Assemblies. This was to be dependent on success in a referendum in each region. The option on offer was a modest one, with such elected assemblies to take powers over planning, the RDAs and the recently created Housing Boards, with some advisory powers over several other sectors, particularly culture. John Prescott was unable to per- suade other departments to cede powers to such regional bodies. In addition the White Paper insisted that regions wanting such assemblies must lose one of their two tiers of local government, moving to a unitary system. All this reflected the deeply varying enthusiasms of members of the government, with some as opposed as in 1997.
Very slowly the arrangements for the first referenda were made. That for Yorkshire never took place, because of, ostensibly, doubts about the reliability of the electronic voting system to be used. In the North East the proposal was resoundingly rejected, by 78 per cent to 22 per cent of those voting, on a turnout of 48 per cent, on 4 November 2004. As all agreed, this finished the prospect of any elected English Regional Assemblies for many years to come, as the North East had always been the region with most enthusiasm for devolu- tion, and had been expected, certainly up to 2003, to be likely to vote Yes. In fact even a few months before, opinion polls had suggested a majority in favour.
Whatever the explanation for the collapse of support (the unpopularity of the government among many Labour voters was probably very relevant), this event ended an era during which many planners had advocated elected regional government as the most important measure to make regional planning a force to be reckoned with in England. From November 2004 on, different kinds of aspirations had to be brought forward.
The ‘Chapter 2’ section of the White Paper was concerned with what should be done to improve regional governing in the absence of any elected assemblies.
It has, therefore, become the only potentially operative part of the 2002 initi- ative. The aim was to boost co-ordination by all public actors in the regions.
This particularly involved promoting the ability of Regional Assemblies to integrate strategies, and the capacity of Government Offices to bring together policy making and action in a connected manner. One sign of progress on this agenda was the Treasury’s action in 2005 to seek the advice of the three main regional institutions on long-term regional spending guidelines for economic development, transport and housing. However, a study in 2005 found little evidence of most government departments taking the White Paper agenda very seriously (Snape and Mawson 2005). Some were even carrying out regional reorganisations of their activities with no reference at all to the main regionali- sation drive of government.