The Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) are just one of many institutional innovations currently being put in place by the new Labour government in the United Kingdom. They are part of a panoply of measures some of which are explicitly aimed at strengthening regional government. However, in this paper we argue that the new innovations are being put in place with insufficient attention paid to the need to reform central and local relations, so that the scope for regional autonomy is limited. The consequence is that relations between regional institutions are much weaker than their links to central government. We compare RDAs and regional planning fora in this regard and show that little thought has gone into harmonising their activities at the regional level as the emphasis has been placed on ensuring that central government retains overall control over policy. We conclude that, if regional autonomy is to be seriously introduced, the central state will have to substantially rethink the scope of national policy, especially in the planning arena.
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