Combined Authorities for more sub-regions? – Learning the adverse lessons from England beyond the metropolitan conurbations

Introduction

The English city regions story is far from complete. While much of this special issue is concerned with the strength, limitations and variability in the powers of the first six Combined Authorities (CAs), there is also a little-known story about how all areas of England were invited to form CAs, leading to serious consideration by all but a handful of areas. Many of the resulting proposals fell by the wayside when local authority (LA) councils were unable to agree with each other, or, probably more significantly, flinched over Whitehall’s then insistence on the element of an elected mayor leading each one. A central government policy paper on future CAs was awaited at the time of writing.

To most policy analysts it will be worthwhile entrenching the role of CAs. They have arguably a firmer legal basis for undertaking some unique tasks of co-ordination than did Labour’s regional machinery. But if they were to be strategic and efficient, their boundaries should respect housing market and travel-to-work areas (TTWAs). Including now the Sheffield City Region CA, four of the seven CAs bear close resemblance to previously recognised city regions that were former Metropolitan Counties. Arguably then, the CAs as they currently exist, including Tees Valley and the ‘West of England’, simply represent a longwinded way of restoring the new Counties of 1974 by re-combining Metropolitan and some other Boroughs, though with deviations awaited east of the Pennines in Yorkshire and the North East Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) (as recorded in other papers of this issue). Only the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough CA breaches these statements, though it is a LEP area.

It is worth noting that ‘larger-than-local governance’ is not prevalent within Scotland and Wales. Both have city region deals (equivalent to city deals rather than devolution in England) following the abolition of city region strategic planning in Scotland and early steps in Wales from an advisory group of 2015.

The importance of more CAs

To some readers, it may be that the existing pattern of seven CAs, extended to the area North of Tyne in an election of May 2019, is enough. CAs were first established under Labour legislation of 2009 and recognised most areas of contiguous development in ‘conurbations’, following the perceived success of the Greater London Council being superimposed over 33 otherwise independent LAs. Starting with Greater Manchester in 2011, they were centred on all the original seven ‘Core Cities’ of England. Further, many people could not necessarily see the point of a solution for complex urban areas being extended to other areas including ‘rural’ areas.

This is, however, to miss several very important points

Given the then overall interest in devolution, the government’s invitation of 2016 for LAs to combine in new proposals for CAs was deliberately sent to all LAs in England outside London, and remained open until March 2019, pending a further government statement in theory awaited at time of publication.

Building combinations on the map of England

The generation of new CAs, important as they might be, is heavily dependent on the existing structure of local government. In fact, this paper will argue that some renewed 1990’s division of town and country left a structure making the proposition more difficult. One illustration was the main failure of 2018, in the government’s inability to approve the longstanding ‘Solent’ proposal for a CA including Portsmouth, Southampton and surrounding areas in October (LGC+ 5/10/18).

Many policy papers in recent years have addressed the concept of ‘place-shaping’ or ‘a sense of place’ as a corrective to perceptions of governmental remoteness. Yet, unlike the important Royal Commission on Local Government in England (1969), the ‘Maud Report’, almost no national documents address where the places to be ‘shaped’ are to be located and thus where the boundaries run between them. That is because the new government of 2010, persuaded by lobbying documents preceding the election, was ideologically dominated by a Localism which sanctified a bottom-up approach. In this, local bodies were invited to come up with their own alliances, and (secondarily) therefore boundaries, to provide sets of areas, hopefully covering the country with LEPs, CAs and Clinical Commissioning Groups.

Rescaling and restructuring in England have overwhelmingly consisted of a functional approach to boundaries. Technically, this point has a long history: among the first ‘functional areas’ were those of Labour Exchanges, whose attendees naturally knew nothing of the small and/or archaic boundaries of the numerous pre-1974 LAs, leading instead to officials’ local ad hoc descriptions of areas on paper. In turn, Department of Employment grouped these into the first ‘Travel-to-Work Areas’, as areas for which sensible unemployment rates could be calculated. These rates were then used under the Local Employment Act, 1960–6, for the allocation of assistance, including for example government location of large car factories. After this, Newcastle University won the contracts for calculating TTWAs from the 1971–2011 Censuses on a ward-level basis, and they continued in use until rates for that purpose for whole post-1974 LAs came to be acceptable, and indeed ONS will know them as a less used geography now.

For all the talk of greater use of ‘functional regions’, TTWAs, in their strict sense, have been neglected precisely by the use of whole LAs as building bricks, and appear to have been unknown to the civil servants and ministers approving new LEPs and CAs. Analysts who construct Housing Market Areas also use local data rather than boundaries of the LAs. In this paper we will deliberately use TTWAs as the primary indicator of the centres and respective broad areas for potential individual CAs, before viewing the secondary issue of the best fit of the available building blocs, i.e. in the present geographical structure of LAs.

The history of TTWAs attests to widening daily communication across the map. Of first importance has been a widening and intensification of the scale of daily life. On a consistent statistical measure over time, the number of TTWAs in England (Nomis ¹ ) has fallen from 224 (including London) in the 1981 Census to 154 in the latest Census from 2011. The changes in the workforces of the largest TTWAs were due more to the expansion of daily travel rather than to any expansion of employment. From 1981 to 2011 the eight core cities of England registered an employment increase of only 1.5% overall, due mainly to an increase in female jobs (many held by commuters) of 13.9%. Employment in the surrounding areas in their respective city regions grew more rapidly, until a very marked upturn, of 14.1%, occurred in the core cities themselves during 2012–17. We can explore whether there was a similar dynamic around the medium-sized candidates to be centres of new CAs.

Latent ‘functional regions’

The cry arises from urban specialists and think-tanks for a future management of England which handles the growing development needs around the major nuclei through shared governance of functional areas. Although work trips are becoming relatively less important with the growth of part-time work, work at home and leisure trips, nonetheless TTWAs, which are defined from the ward level upwards, provide the single best indicator of shared activity, across functional areas, admittedly with a slightly arbitrary measure of self-containment of 75%. (Office for National Statistics with M. Coombes, 2016). On this basis what then are the next geographical priorities for CAs across England?

The question can be answered by using the identities provided by the set of TTWAs defined from the last Census of Population, 2011, to attain 75% self-containment, i.e. that 75% of workpeople work in the same TTWA as their residence and vice versa. After eliminating TTWAs centred in the established CAs and those areas of Yorkshire and the North East which have had CA agreements, then the largest among these units of employment (based on the sum of employees working in the areas in 2017) that is so far lacking a CA agreement is centred on Leicester, as shown in Table 1, column 1. As, in this case the TTWA boundaries are similar to the County of the same name. This would suggest a CA combining the City and County, congruent with the Multi-Area Agreement (MAA) of 2009, the current LEP and a so far abortive CA proposal. The second entry of the table supports the case for combination around Nottingham, the only English ‘Core City’ not to have been involved in final CA negotiations, although the last originally to join the group. These two areas are followed in the table, which covers the largest 15 relevant TTWAs of England, by centres of ‘East Anglia’ and the recent South East Region.

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Table 1.

Characteristics of the largest TTWAs that lack equivalent Combined Authorities (England).

	Workplace employees in area	Core City as % of workplace employment	Core City resident employees as % of column 1	Increase in workplace journeys to Core City as % of resident employment
	(thou., 2017)	2017	2017	2011–2017
Leicester M	435	37.9	31.8	27.7
Nottingham m	389	57.8	29.5	40.5
Luton	387	24.6	22	−20.5
Southampton M	336	32.6	33.6	24.5
Guildford & Aldershot 2	330	23.6	18.8	7.9
Crawley m 2	327	28.6	15.9	33.7
Reading	313	33.2	23.9	30.1
Oxford	305	38.8	25.1	31
Medway m	241	37.7	50.8	−58.7
Portsmouth M	227	45.7	41.1	13
Hull m	229	55.9	47.2	20.9
Chelmsford 2	224	40.2	32.6	3.7
Milton Keynes m	222	81.5	52.7	17
Norwich 2	218	42.3	26.5	31
Stoke-on Trent	217	54.1	46.1	1.2
TOTAL	4371	41.7	31.8	14.5

TTWA: travel-to-work area.

Note: M=centre of previous MAA; m=centre of MAA under negotiation at 2010; 2= second-tier Local Authority.

The need for combination is reinforced by further data from Nomis, showing how (at column 2) the core LA of each area, in most cases an independent upper-tier Unitary, has a limited share of the workplaces of its respective TTWA, an average of about 40%, and an even lower share of resident employees (column 3), averaging around 30%. The influx of workpeople to the cores is reflected in much lower shares of residents in jobs, except in some ‘older’ centres. The resulting interdependence of core LA and the surrounding area is emphasised further by the last six years’ apparent increase of net travel-to-work into the core area (column 4), equivalent to about 15% of the core LA’s recent resident workforce, most marked in the cases of Nottingham, Crawley (close to Gatwick Airport) and Reading, but negative in a few areas.

From this most recent data the case for CA status is strongest in the cases of Nottingham, Milton Keynes, Norwich and Oxford – based on the 2017 difference between cols. 2 and 3.

The case made here is that buoyant activity and growth extending well outside the named centres make the important argument for having the overview of an operational CA, potentially offering co-ordinated planning of some of the most important areas of national development – notably part of the Oxford-Cambridge Corridor and other areas at that approximate distance from London noted by many authors, most recently by Green (2018)

It has long been recognised that locations within the ‘golden arc’ extending north from Southampton and then east to Felixstowe are the most favoured in Britain for investment…. and within the South East, dynamic clusters of economic activity are recognised around Cambridge, Milton Keynes, Reading, Oxford and Portsmouth. (365–366)

The reality from which functional combinations might be rescued

The problem of fashioning CAs from the present type of LA structure did not have to have been like this, in that the original Maud Report solution was to combine authorities into large mainly Unitary sub-regional Councils. Recent testimony from Conservative politicians involved in the rejection of Maud’s mainly single tier solution indicates profound localism and thus severe dissension over the resulting proposed amalgamations. The eventual solution then was for an entirely two-tier approach; however, the Banham Commission (the Local Government Commission for England ² ) promoted many larger second-tier Authorities to independent Unitary status ad hoc in 1996–8, although there was no change in the number of LAs until Labour’s promotion of interested whole counties to Unitary status in 2007–9. Only now is this level of fragmentation being willingly rejected in places.

A fragmented pattern of 120 upper tier LAs covering England (outside London, Figure 1) was exposed by the abolition of regional agencies. It was their closure by the incoming government of 2010 that led gradually to the perceived, renewed need for ‘wider-than-local’ governance, anticipated by the problem of otherwise ‘relying on districts for the Planning of England’ (Townsend, 2009).

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Figure 1.

CAS as at February 2019 from the available building blocs – upper-tier local authorities.

The original initiative for sub-regional co-ordination came from Communities and Local Government under Gordon Brown’s government, establishing precursors to CAs alongside Labour’s regional machinery in the shape of 15 MAAs ³ between 2008 and 2010, with five more under negotiation. A sea-change of coalition government thinking used pre-existing Labour legislation of 2009 to permit CAs, beginning with Greater Manchester in 2011, with three more existing prior to an Act of January 2016, which required the addition of directly elected mayors to CAs in conjunction with negotiated devolved funding and powers.

Not all readers will be familiar with what were the available building blocs for CAs (Figure 1)

36 unitary Metropolitan Councils (dark green) which from 1974 had formed the second tier of new Metropolitan Counties until the latter’s abolition in 1986.

Most of the eight areas that elected mayors in May 2017, 2018 or 2019 (areas ringed in red) represented the restoration of units first created in 1974. Four of the eight mayors, in Greater Manchester, the Liverpool City Region, the West Midlands and the Sheffield City Region cover the same areas as former Metropolitan Counties (with one change) and two relate closely to two new counties also established in 1974 for functional river-based sub-regions, Tees Valley and West of England (the former Avon county).

The sixth mayor, the first one covering a shire county but including also a Unitary council, was for ‘Cambridge and Peterborough’. This makes the point that the ‘Unitary councils’ that were extracted from previous shire counties frequently found, when seeking a combination after 2014, that their nearest potential partner comprised the rest of their original county. If by any chance the Banham Commission had not given ‘independence’ to Peterborough in 1998 (in the way that Norwich failed to gain ‘independence’) then that ‘combination’ would not have been available. There are other cases where a partner is not available for simple geographical reasons.

So, the green shades of Figure 1 both define and restrict the scope for combination, except for one further major development. That was the use of second-tier district boundaries under the 2016 Act to extend proposed CAs beyond upper-tier areas into adjoining counties, which we can refer to as the ‘Chesterfield problem’. In this case, Chesterfield, as a second-tier Authority, was part of the Sheffield City Region LEP and proposed CA, while simultaneously located within the upper-tier County of Derbyshire. In this and similar proposals aiming typically to enfold commuter areas with a central city, political problems have been met especially as regards splitting the transport financing of County Councils.

In turn, however, government came to welcome, increasingly in 2018, a separate and arguably rival kind of re-organisation of all of a county’s second-tier districts into a single Unitary authority or into two or more CAs (striped green on the figure). The whole process, as studied below, was producing ‘bottom-up’ consideration of re-organisation open to any area and without unanimous agreement up to the Act’s closing date of March 2019. The main analysis for this section is based on the content of all items of re-organisation recorded in the Local Government Chronicle Daily News ⁴ (specific evidence from this source is cited below by reference to the date of the item – for example ‘(LGC+ 12/6/16)’), and a classification of the occasions of difficulty or delay met by actual proposals.

The compromised process of combination beyond the present CAs

Given the latent need for CAs especially around towns and cities in the East Midlands and the south, as we identified through TTWAs, how could such functional areas be at least approximated by use of the LA building blocs identified in the last section? It is worth referring back to the precedents we mentioned for recognising sub-regions before 2010; indeed, there is plenty of circumstantial evidence of some continuity of identity and definition from MAAs into LEPs and then into prospective CAs, as one suggested minimum requirement for all three groupings was the inclusion of at least two upper-tier authorities.

MAAs were an English political framework that aimed to encourage cross boundary partnership working at sub-regional levels to work with partners and government collectively to improve local economic prosperity. The similar nature of cross-boundary working for LEPs took further the practice of following boundaries taking in some lower-tier districts, some of which actually entered two LEPs simultaneously (Pugalis and Townsend, 2014). These are among the boundary questions up for review in a concurrent review of LEPs.

The ‘Chesterfield problem’ has proved more fatal for CA proposals than for LEPs notwithstanding that there have been many proposals for CAs to use lower-tier boundaries. A partial answer to that has been ‘Associate status’, which allows most commuting districts around the West Midlands CA a vote on its board. This takes in much of the functional region around Birmingham (leaving a combination of Staffordshire and Stoke-on-Trent as the main CA still missing in the former West Midlands Region).

In the north, MAAs had included by 2008 or 2009 precursors of all the eventual CAs and also ‘Pennine Lancashire’ and the Fylde Coast, both with the parent County Council of Lancashire, while ‘Hull and the Humber’ were in negotiations at the time of the 2010 election. The current Minister for the North, Jake Berry, has stressed (LGC+ 28/11/17) that filling gaps in the CA pattern across the north is a priority; he urged those areas to ‘seek extra powers using the government’s forthcoming devolution framework’ (still awaited); this would follow a number of different formulations to date for Lancashire, and the possible revival of schemes for the Cheshire and Warrington LEP area.

A typology of CA proposals applied in the East Midlands and south

This paper has already identified a priority for new CAs in the East Midlands and the south, so accordingly it is of interest that the East Midlands already had MAAs for Leicester and Leicestershire, with one in negotiation for ‘Nottingham’. Further south lay MAAs for three important areas:

PUSH; the Partnership for Urban South Hampshire, including Portsmouth, Southampton and eight second-tier Authority areas

Most extant MAAs were converted into LEPs, though in some of those and other cases they took in second-tier districts from Unitary Counties. We can construct a typology of proposals and apply it in the East Midlands and south as follows:

The forces delaying combination

The 10 CAs for which orders had been passed in the period since the 2015 general election (including three subsequently abandoned) are a minority among the history of proposals. There is, in fact, widespread agreement that the process of establishing CAs almost ground to a halt during 2016–17, with in 2018 the important case of the Solent falling by the wayside in 2018. There have still been no completed and operational CAs in the whole area of the former East Midlands, East Anglia, the South East and South West apart from the West of England CA, covering most of the former County of Avon. Yet we have mentioned proposals existing at one stage or another of the period 2015–18 from almost all areas. What have been the main factors in this failure?

CAs – Taking stock at the end of 2018

At the grand level (Morphet, 2017), ‘devolution in England was going to be setting the direction of travel for its domestic agenda and at the forefront for its programme for democratic and economic renewal’ (Betts, LGC+ 13/5/18). However, the impact of the Brexit referendum on government appears to have stalled the generation of new ones, among the many government policies it has affected.

That was not the promise of the Conservative and Unionist Party (2017) manifesto for the 2017 general election, which said that for ‘combined authorities that are based around our great cities, we will continue to support the adoption of elected mayors’, but made the highly significant statement that ‘we will not support them for the rural counties’, a change for which the County Councils Network claimed credit. This government relaxation for ‘rural’ rather than ‘urban’ areas brought some areas closer to agreement but has not so far released a flow of new CA agreements. It invites dispute between local government groupings over what is a ‘great city’. The confinement of future mayors to ‘great cities’ led to speculation about the future status of members of the Key Cities Group, notably Derby, Hull, Oxford and Southampton. The Group was initially formed in summer of 2013 and has now been championed, revamped and expanded by Peter Box, Leader of Wakefield Borough (Key Cities Group, 2018).

The devolution framework promised in the Conservative manifesto should set out the suite of powers that are available for all future areas, and on what terms they will be devolved. The need for a thorough departmental review is palpably obvious, but the promise of one from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) was subject to mounting delay in the closing months of 2018. Admittedly, there have been repeated flimsy efforts to develop voluntary co-operation between LAs, one of the latest being from the new Housing Minister saying at the Conservative Party conference: ‘Our general thrust is for groups of LAs to come together to form a kind of strategic partnership for a particular region or area so that we can fund the infrastructure that’s related to it’ (PLANNING, 2018 12 October). The change of senior MHCLG minister to James Brokenshire has itself led to uncertainty, as has his response to the ONE YORKSHIRE devolution proposal from Yorkshire LAs (Yorkshire Council Leaders, 2018), and a dispute over the powers of the Mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. Meanwhile Labour CA mayors have established a major voice in national debates, for example over railway matters, which may not be attractive to London.

There are a number of technical issues which in any case have met only partial solution from an otherwise ‘hands-off’ administration, even though it is abundantly clear that dropping the requirement for a mayor would make for lighter work in reviving some of the lapsed proposals for CAs with devolved powers. Clarification is needed as to (i) a minimum population size for a CA; (ii) a clear policy about the topology of establishing CAs; can an individual LA which is surrounded by LAs intending to join a CA stand out against incorporation? Conversely, can an LA which is not contiguous with, i.e. separated from, the body of a prospective CA join to form an exclave of the CA?; (iii) most fundamentally, can a second-tier district join a CA formed otherwise outwith its parent County?

Conclusions

Notwithstanding political issues, the major point is that the economic forces for re-combination can be strong, and now focus on urbanisation around medium-sized cities, by virtue of their strengthening travel-to-work and housing market areas and their putative potential economies of scale and of finance. The Cambridge and Peterborough CA, far from being an outlier, stands foursquare, in terms of size, among the obvious next candidates for CA status. With its 379,000 TTWA employees it would be fourth in Table 1, behind Leicester and Nottingham as well as the Luton TTWA in Table 1. This group would be followed by Southampton (unfortunately rejected as a longstanding CA proposal) and Guildford and Aldershot, Crawley (i.e. the Gatwick Airport nucleus), Reading and Oxford in an important, recognised belt of existing growth. Potential CAs tend to be more distinct and numerous in coastal TTWAs in general, and on the southern and south-west coasts in particular.

Geographically, however, many of these candidates tend to display the pattern, not of Unitary Boroughs adjoining each other which could easily combine, but, as latent new urban Unitary areas seeking alliance with adjoining districts in Conservative-held Counties. A striking feature at the time of writing has been that no working CA crosses extant county boundaries to take in some and not others among its component districts. Geographically, the observation of some longstanding county boundaries remains intact after the process of combination. This ‘Chesterfield problem’ is serious, because the ‘division of town and country’, dealt with in a ‘top-down’ approach by the Redcliffe-Maud Commission but often restored by the Banham Commission, is still crucially a major issue across the map of southern England and the East Midlands, when it did not necessarily prevent the formation of successive MAAs and LEPs in their key areas.

While local government was pleased that further devolution was mentioned at all in the last Conservative manifesto, complex re-organisation looks unlikely before the next general election, due to the extra problem that individual MPs have more bargaining power to block proposals when the government has a small parliamentary majority. On the other hand, austerity and severe council financial issues are pushing more and more county areas, not just the prominent case of Northamptonshire, to look at mergers of second-tier districts into Unitary Authorities, diverting effort and attention from the possibilities of higher order CAs, and indeed losing some economies of scale when upper-tier services are divided up. If CAs are at all valuable to their council and business tax payers, it is inequitable that some areas of England are left without the benefits they offer because of incidental problems in aligning members of different councils at a particular time.