Devolution in Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region: The first mayoral term

By Georgina Blakeley and Brendan Evans

Greater Manchester and Liverpool were among the first areas of England to undergo urban devolution. Under the leadership of metro-mayors Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram, they were in the forefront of attempts to ‘level up’ the north and to address the problem of regional inequalities. This book looks at how the metro-mayors evolved their office, examining the fields of economic development, transport, skills, health, housing and spatial reform and the environment. In the case of Greater Manchester, it also explores health and the reform of public services. Addressing the crucial issues of power, resources, partnerships, central-local relations and local democracy, the book concludes with an assessment of the future prospects for a deeper and more fundamental change in the character of the English state.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526133595

Georgina Blakeley

Brendan Evans is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Huddersfield

Book preview

Devolution in Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region

Devolution in Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region

The first mayoral term

Georgina Blakeley and Brendan Evans

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Georgina Blakeley and Brendan Evans 2023

The right of Georgina Blakeley and Brendan Evans to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 3357 1 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover design: Abbey Akanbi, Manchester University Press

Cover credit: Steve Rotheram and Andy Burnham, Manchester, 2016. Getty Images/Christopher Furlong.

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by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire

This book is dedicated to Levi and Luka, the next inspirational generation

Contents

List of figures

List of tables

Acknowledgements

List of acronyms and abbreviations

1Introduction

Part I Setting the scene

2The missing middle

3Defining the office

Part II Policy areas

4Economic development and inclusive growth

5Transport policy

6Skills policy

7Public services reform and health and social care

8Housing, spatial strategies and rough sleeping

9The environment

Part III Political analysis

10 Who governs in Greater Manchester and the Liverpool City Region?

11 Doing politics differently?

12 Whither (what) devolution?

Appendix: list of interviewees

References

Index

Figures

4.1 Main funding sources for Greater Manchester Combined Authority

4.2 Main funding sources for Liverpool City Region Combined Authority

5.1 Transport policy: actors and scalar levels

7.1 Greater Manchester model of unified public services (Source: GMCA, 2019a, p. 85)

8.1 Rough sleeping snapshot count in Liverpool City Region, 2010–20 (Sources: www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rough-sleeping-snapshot-in-england-autumn-2019 ; www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rough-sleeping-snapshot-in-england-autumn-2020/rough-sleeping-snapshot-in-england-autumn-2020 )

8.2 Rough sleeping snapshot count in Greater Manchester, 2010–20 (Sources: www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rough-sleeping-snapshot-in-england-autumn-2019 ; www.gov.uk/government/statistics/rough-sleeping-snapshot-in-england-autumn-2020/rough-sleeping-snapshot-in-england-autumn-2020 )

10.1 Framing the political space for place-based governance (Source: Hambleton, 2015 , p. 114)

10.2 The realms of place-based leadership (Source: Hambleton, 2015 , p. 127)

12.1 Spectrum of possible outcomes

Tables

3.1 Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region City Deals

3.2 Greater Manchester devolution 2014–15

3.3 Greater Manchester devolution 2015

3.4 Greater Manchester devolution 2016–17

3.5 Devolution deals in Liverpool City Region

4.1 Most multiply deprived neighbourhoods in England

11.1 Female councillors within Greater Manchester councils

11.2 Female councillors within Liverpool City Region councils

11.3 Combined authority women’s representation, 2021 and 2017

11.4 Greater Manchester and Liverpool City Region BAME representation

11.5 Combined authority BAME representation, 2021

Acknowledgements

We are most grateful for the assistance we have received from the many elected and unelected officials in Greater Manchester and the Liverpool City Region whom we interviewed at length both in person and virtually. It is unfair to discriminate in our thanks but we must mention the time given to us by Mayors Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram, plus many leading councillors such as Sir Richard Leese in Manchester and Liam Robinson in Liverpool. We also spoke to many others involved in a range of organisations, including the Local Enterprise Partnerships and Peel Holdings and many others which are listed elsewhere in the book. We were particularly inspired by the aptly named Inspire Women’s Group in Oldham.

We used extensive documentation in the libraries at the University of Huddersfield and the Open University and at the Manchester Central Library. We were generously received at council meetings and other public events in the two city-regions, which were highly informative. For a period in 2017, Dr Neil Pye supported us in our research by his participant observation in the first metro-mayoral elections. The University of Huddersfield also enabled Professor Blakeley to work on the book despite her full-time role there as Associate Dean Teaching and Learning and gave some financial support to Professor Evans who worked on the project during his retirement. Our thanks are also due to academic institutions who invited us to share some preliminary findings at seminars, in chapters and through blogs such as the University of Sheffield’s Political and Economic Research Institute and Birmingham City University. Rob Byron and Alun Richards at Manchester University Press also guided us encouragingly so that we were able to complete the book. Finally, we would like to pay special tribute to the late Professor Mick Moran, formerly at the University of Manchester, who encouraged us and with whom we had the privilege to discuss our plans.

Finally, we are grateful to our families for having to share their time with the considerable attention that we have devoted to the two great northern city-regions of Manchester and Liverpool and their people.

Acronyms and abbreviations

1

Introduction

The issue of English devolution has been rising on the political agenda for over a decade, and the process has accelerated with the mounting attention to levelling up. The two issues have become inextricably interlinked. There are varied attitudes to devolution and even advocates have differing views about how it should be designed. These views are often both speculative and normative. Our purpose in this book is different.

We focus on the two city-regions of Greater Manchester (GM) and the Liverpool City Region (LCR) in order to study the implementation of devolution in the north-west of England, which is a distinctive and important region. Devolution occurs at the level of both the British and the English state. Much has been written on the cases of Scotland and Wales but there is a dearth of detailed and comprehensive case studies of the experiences of devolved English regions which is our purpose. Ostensibly the two cities at the heart of these regions present a shared political and economic history but their differences as well as similarities are worthy of examination. Both are post-industrial although there are particular aspects of the impact of this on their specific economies. Both city-regions are considered functional economic areas but the political expression of this shared characteristic has differed given the pioneering efforts in GM to develop co-operative governing structures. As a result the LCR was compelled to play ‘catch up’ in becoming a Mayoral Combined Authority (MCA) which made the narrative concerning the challenges of the mayoral first terms necessarily distinct. This distinctiveness is intensified by a history of competition and rivalry between the two areas. Both share an antipathy to Conservatism but while prima facie Manchester Labour has a pragmatic approach to policy-making, Liverpool has been affected by a stronger tradition of militancy suggesting that some nuanced differences in the style of politics are significant points of comparison. The LCR also brings the distinct issue of seeking to incorporate a strong mayor in the core city which could affect relationships. In sacrificing breadth for depth we avoid the pitfall of a singular case study, which might prove sui generis particularly in the case of GM, so often described as a blueprint for devolution, by comparing it with an alternative newer political test case. Together these two great northern cities and their hinterlands serve as political laboratories from which lessons can be deduced.

Methodology and approach

We focus on the evolution of policy in various fields and they highlight what can be achieved within the remits that the two combined authorities (CAs) and their directly elected metro-mayors were awarded. Policy activity is crucial to evolving the office of the metro-mayors, moving it from its formal description as laid out in the devolution deals to its operational reality. Our definition of policy is simplified: it is a course of action with the intention of achieving specific outcomes and metro-mayors are participants in co-creating these aims.

We used a mixed methods approach in our examination of policy areas. Semi-structured elite interviews were conducted in both city-regions during a seven-year period from 2015 to 2022. Our interviewees comprised elected officials, including both metro-mayors, council leaders, chief executives and public and private officials. We conducted participant observation at election hustings (in both 2017 and 2021) and various CA meetings and regularly attended metro-mayoral Question Times throughout the same seven-year period. We also conducted focus groups with various local organisations. Our attendance was largely in person apart from during lockdowns when our attendance was perforce online. Documentary analysis was comprehensive and included policy documents, strategies and MCA minutes.

Our focus is on the first mayoral terms of office of Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram from 2017 to 2021 as they provide a controlled period for analysis, and they accepted that a complete term would provide a distinct trial period. To extend our narrative to the moment of publication would be a complication, leaving issues in a state of flux. Burnham and Rotheram as Labour mayors brought political and social values to the role and were early exponents of the process of levelling up to address regional economic imbalances.

It is apparent from the structure of the book that our method is that of a predominantly empirical analysis grounded in a detailed examination of the two city-regions yet we also frame our narrative theoretically by examining questions of power, resources, partnerships, central–local relations and local democracy. It is on this basis that we discuss the prospects for future devolution and more fundamental changes to the British state.

Research questions and structure

Our central research question is how far CAs, with the addition of directly elected metro-mayors, provided a critical juncture in modern urban governance capable of altering relationships to bring about enduring strategic sub-national government. To answer this, we pose a second question of what the activities and experiences of the MCAs during their first four-year terms of office amount to.

The book is divided into three parts. Part I sets the scene. Chapter 2 starts with the general conundrum of ‘the missing middle’ in English politics. Chapter 3 continues this theme but with a particular focus on early attempts to address this problem within GM and the LCR.

Part II comprises chapters examining specific policy areas. Chapters 4 and 5 deal with economic development and transport respectively as the two main policy fields the MCAs were tasked with directing. Chapter 6 explores skills as a policy field closely related to economic development. Public service reform and health and social care devolution follow in Chapter 7. Public service reform was another raison d’être underpinning the establishment of the MCAs. Chapter 8 on housing and spatial development and Chapter 9 on the environment conclude Part II.

In these policy chapters, we note where manifesto promises have been fulfilled and comment where we consider a judgement can be made. We also cite reflections by individuals on specific matters but not necessarily to endorse those statements. Our purpose is not to undertake a rigorous evaluation of the performance and outcomes of the first four years of the MCAs, whether issue by issue or generally. Central government, supported by such bodies as the National Audit Office, will undertake evaluations of the performance of the MCAs who themselves use various evaluative tools such as dashboards in different policy areas. Alongside such formal evaluation, other actors will form their own judgement of the performance of MCAs; these include their partners in the locality such as voluntary sector organisations. Last, but not least, voters have their say, although political accountability is not identical to evaluation.

There are generic dilemmas in evaluating processes in political life. Political and social issues can never be entirely distanced from value judgements. There are many stakeholders involved in governmental projects and each can arrive at different conclusions influenced by diverse values, even in responding to the same factual evidence. There is no ontology of a single objective reality (Guba and Lincoln, 1989).

Among the many evaluative problems, the most obvious is the difficulty of disentangling what would have happened in any event if a particular project had not been put in place; that is, eliminating ‘deadweight’. The economic performance of MCAs, for example, is affected by national and global policies more potent than the limited powers and resources at their disposal. Events also complicate evaluation. It was common for observers to note that as a result of Covid-19, the entire political universe was upended. We contest, however, the claim that this suggests a complete bifurcation of the period, warranting two differentiated evaluations. Instead, we argue that there were other important junctures such as Brexit and changes in government. Temporal considerations are also important. In March 2020, it seemed as if Covid would be a political watershed. Yet, by March 2021, continuity was as remarkable as change in light of the pandemic.

The final part of the book moves to the underpinning conceptual and theoretical framework. Chapter 10 attempts to answer the perennial political question of ‘Who governs?’ by focusing on questions of power and relationships. Chapter 11 examines the extent to which the metro-mayors lived up to their promise to ‘do politics differently’ and thus examines core democratic questions of representation, diversity and participation. Chapter 12 concludes the book through an examination of the nature of devolution as it has evolved in Greater Manchester and the Liverpool City Region and links this to the question of its future trajectory.

Part I

Setting the scene

2

The missing middle

This chapter charts the evolution of national government attempts to alter the relationship between central and local government. It shows how each attempt to devolve power, however well intentioned, tends to result, at worst, in an increase in centralisation or, at best, in no diminution of central power. Furthermore, there is a yo-yo effect whereby one central government tries to devolve power only to be followed by another – often of the same political allegiance – that claws power back in the face of party and/or central government interests. This chapter sets out the background to the latest attempt at solving the ‘missing middle’ in English politics – the CAs led by directly elected metro-mayors – and thus contextualises the central research question of whether this is yet another bounce of the yo-yo or a more lasting change to central–local relations.

After providing a brief historical overview of central–local relations and the emergence of the CAs and the Northern Powerhouse, this chapter outlines the theoretical framework we draw on to better understand this empirical analysis: New Institutionalism (NI) and the related concepts of path dependency and the issue-attention cycle (IAC).

Central–local relations: a brief overview

Since the 1990s there has been a desire to re-examine the nature of central–local relations in the British state in light of mounting frustrations over the previous tendency merely to graft on running repairs to the local state machinery. As one GM politician noted, the British elite has never had a clear idea of what it wants local government to do (Interview GM24, 16 June 2017). This reflects the reality that the United Kingdom is a chronically centralised state, particularly by western European standards, and there is ample evidence that the English are not content with the way that they are currently governed (Kenny et al., 2018). A consequence has been a desire to create intermediate institutions between the central state and established local government structures (Hildreth and Bailey, 2014). Scottish and Welsh devolution after 1997 left the English Question unresolved. While establishing an English parliament may prima facie solve that problem, it fails to confront ‘the fundamental difficulty’ of the size of England, its demographic and economic strength. An English parliament would still represent a form of over-centralised governance for 85 per cent of the people covering two-thirds of the land mass of the United Kingdom (Hazell, 2006; Kenny et al., 2018).

The role of local government in the state depends less upon structures and geographical boundaries than it does upon powers and resources, but structures also matter as they ‘have an impact on institutional capacity’ (Wilson and Game, 1998). Since the 1980s there has been an uneven process of addressing over-centralisation through local government reforms to enhance the local state, accompanied by pieties about the inherent merits of localism, but they have never escaped the demands of short-term central government policy goals (Kelly, 2007: 323). Recent attempts to strengthen local government can be traced back to the major reform of local government structures undertaken by the Heath government in 1974, broadly based upon the Redcliffe-Maud Report of 1968. When it was implemented it was conceived as an attempt to make a modern rational system of local government. The creation of two-tier municipal authorities in urban metropolitan areas, with an upper tier constituting something resembling a city-region with a list of functions focusing on strategic issues, had the potential to signal a semi-conscious drift towards a form of regionalism. This was an early appreciation that major English conurbations were in effect city-regions and required more effective co-ordination and planning over a wider area than could be provided by local district councils. Even more of a precursor of city-regions in England and Wales was the minority view expressed in the Redcliffe-Maud Report by Derek Senior when he advocated the creation of city-regions (Harding, 2000: 71). He asserted that the strategic functions of sub-national government are best undertaken at a scale which corresponds with the ‘way of life in modern, complex societies’, by reflecting the movement of people to and from home, work, leisure and retail and the importance of transport hubs. The conception of entities called Greater Manchester and Merseyside was advanced, therefore, through the 1974 reorganisation. It should be noted that the dilemma of the relationships between the two tiers of district councils and metropolitan councils was resolved in the 1974 model by each possessing a discrete area of responsibility whereas the MCAs and the individual borough councils under the current arrangements require greater operational collaboration. This is demonstrated by the present incumbent council leaders in both city-regions simultaneously comprising the cabinets in the MCAs.

It was the technocratically minded government of Edward Heath which set up the metropolitan councils and it was the subsequent, more politically driven government of Margaret Thatcher which abolished them. No sooner had the metropolitan councils become embedded than they were uprooted in 1986. That action was not a deliberate rejection of city-regions but was motivated by the desire to remove the Greater London Authority under the leadership of Ken Livingstone; those in Merseyside and Greater Manchester under Labour control were simply abolished as collateral damage. This action demonstrated that the struggle to devise intermediate structures in the architecture of the state has always been led by the perceived need for the representation of Whitehall in the British regions and localities (Nurse, 2015). If these needs have not been satisfied then the ‘Empire sought to retain the capacity to strike back should circumstances require’ (Paun, 2018). The abolition of the metropolitan councils, because ‘the colonies’ were not sufficiently obedient to central government policy, was a classic illustration of this imperial metaphor.

Conservative governments have wavered little from the ideological purpose of ensuring value for money from the local state. The Major government sought to reduce the burden placed upon the central state by transferring duties to central semi-autonomous executive agencies. This was a step towards privatisation rather than decentralisation (Evans, 1991). Major did introduce a cautious form of administrative delegation to the regions with the creation of Regional Government Offices (RGOs) but there was little suggestion that political accountability was to accompany the new regional offices and the purpose was to improve the delivery of public services.

The New Labour government, elected in 1997, sought to alter central–local relations in a context in which there was growing demand to move from tinkering with structures to a more radical recognition by many – for example, the New Local Government Network (2000) – of the need to answer the question: Is there a ‘missing middle’ in English government? New Labour established Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) to promote economic growth but they failed to signify any trust in elected regionalism, and one chief executive dismissed the RDAs as ‘distributing sweets to local government’ (Interview GM13, 2 September 2016). Blair’s governments had a limited impact on enhancing local government autonomy as compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) was merely replaced by the similar ‘Best Value’ initiative. New Labour also retained caps on council tax expenditures, which replaced the rating system in the early 1990s, limits on council house building and Comprehensive Performance Assessments to scrutinise local government performance. More boldly, New Labour made an abortive attempt to address the ‘missing middle’ conundrum by holding a referendum in the north-east of England in 2004 about setting up a regional assembly, which the local electorate rejected. Its commitment to elected regionalism was never great, however, and it abandoned the experiment.

Yet the case for reform clearly remained. Even when a meso-level strategy seemed entirely off the agenda commentators during the 1990s suggested the need for an identifiable local political executive to provide a focus for public attention and effective leadership (Batley and Stoker, 1991). Others went a step further and considered executive mayors with limited powers who could possess ‘huge legitimacy and considerable influence’ and as ‘skilled orchestrators’ could create a city identity to ‘bring resources together across organisational boundaries’ (Goss, 2001: 207). The New Local Government Network report in 2000 advanced a similar case and pointed to progress in Europe as France, Italy and Spain had joined Germany in becoming regionalised (Harding, 2001). It proposed a devolution with ‘more effective co-ordination of the leadership within a range of functions linked to economic competitiveness’ rather than simply addressing ‘bread and butter service delivery’. There were two major options, namely elected regional government or elected urban-based regional government, with the latter implicitly pointing towards city-regions.

Yet the developments which led to CAs were evidence of some residual memory of metropolitan councils. A surrogate for nascent city-regions remained in existence after 1986 with Joint Boards enabling collaboration on such issues as fire and transport. They provided some continuity and chimed with the rise of city-region governance across Europe (Dlabac et al., 2018). The continuing relevance of Joint Boards and surrogate urban regional governance, and their success in providing strategic oversight and cross-conurbation services were brought home to ministers through advocacy of such policy institutes as the Centre for Cities (C4C), the Core Cities Group and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). Under New Labour, there was a policy shift towards endorsing city-region-based CAs as the appropriate level for a new form of directly elected local governance.

With the arrival of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition government in 2010, regionalism became ‘a dirty word’ (Blakeley and Evans, 2013), a situation that had been foreshadowed by research papers which described existing regional governance structures, such as GROs and RDAs, as remote. Shortly after assuming power the Conservative-led coalition government peremptorily abolished the RDAs and substituted sub-regional mechanisms such as Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and City Deals. The LEPs were based upon the desire of the new government to place business interests at the centre of local economic development and skills policy, but the City Deals were more obviously a political creation. Building upon an earlier New Labour innovation, they involved negotiations between the central state and local authorities. They subsequently evolved into CAs.

The impetus to form CAs was, in part, a recognition that the tinkering with the local state had left the essentials of the British state unchanged. Critics continued to echo the judgement of the Lyons Review of 2000 that, whatever the intentions, each of the initiatives since 1990 proved to ‘have often evolved into subtle instruments of control’ (Lyons, 2007: i). The problem was that local government was still ‘a utilitarian service provider’ rather than an ‘organic part of the community’ (Batley and Stoker, 1991: 38). Yet it was primarily the growing sensitivity in the Treasury to the economic under-performance of the north in the post-2008 economic crisis which brought English devolution to the forefront of the political agenda.

The arrival of CAs nevertheless marked a new stage in British devolution policy but, being based on city-regions, they were distinctly sub-regional not regional in character. They were mainly a structural reform but, like the preceding Local Area Agreements (LAAs) under New Labour, they increased local controls over service delivery functions but granted strategic powers on defined policy areas (Pugalis, 2010).

The significance of cities

The appeal of building new governance structures around core cities was assisted by a growing appreciation among political elites that cities had degenerated into ‘basket cases’ requiring urgent reform and by a consensus among economists that cities had the potential to become economic hubs to revive the national and regional economies, as well as by international exemplars. All three influences – the degeneration of cities, their potential to be economic hubs and international exemplars – must be considered.

The Thatcher governments were compelled in the 1980s to recognise that cities had become the locus of economic and social problems and centres of political opposition to government policy. In the summer of 1981, there were urban riots which were followed by the rise of oppositional Labour local governments in Manchester and most notably the Militant tendency–led Liverpool City Council. These upsurges in protest affected national electoral politics, with the Conservative Party, in an otherwise triumphant third successive general election victory in 1987, losing some inner-city constituencies, which in turn produced the comment by Thatcher on the night the election results were declared that ‘we must do something about those inner cities’.

The gradual response by the Conservative governments of both Thatcher before 1990 and John Major from 1990 to 1997 was to introduce episodic and recurring urban regeneration initiatives mainly with the intention of promoting economic growth and employment. Beginning in the autumn of 1981 there was the tour of Merseyside by the Secretary of State for the Environment, an experience which led him to conclude that the root of the problem was ‘a lack of leadership’ in Liverpool politics (Heseltine, 2018). Heseltine launched a series of central government–led urban regeneration initiatives such as Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) and City Challenge which proved to be stepping-stones towards the recent innovations in the governance of the city-regions.

The growth of advocacy by economists of the merits of agglomeration economics, or the concentration of investment and growth in cities and the consequent ‘trickle out’ of wealth to the surrounding hinterland, drew from such classic works as that by Jane Jacobs. She asserted that the performance of the national economy was best understood by a realisation that it is in cities that wealth is produced, jobs located and incomes spent (Jacobs, 1984). Support for this view was forthcoming from so many other writers that there emerged an ‘epistemic community’ of economists advocating the stimulating effects of promoting cities and city-regions. An epistemic community, a concept drawn from international relations theory, is defined as a transnational network of knowledge-based professionals offering technical expertise to policymakers about the problems that they face as well as promoting policy solutions (Haas, 1992). Other advocates included Florida (2014), who argued that the creative classes congregated around cities, and Gill (2010), who suggested that place-based developments were more fruitful than space-neutral approaches and more economically efficient.

A minority of economists dissented. Boland (2007) acknowledged that the enthusiasts for agglomeration economics have secured the ear of policymakers and think tanks, but he described these writers as city boosters who are part of an academic consultancy industry, specifying particularly Michael Parkinson of Liverpool University, and he charged them with the selective use of evidence. Boland deplored the neglect of the work of economic geographers who have shown that not all cities in practice support the theory of agglomeration economics. He urged the critical work of, for example, Martin (2015) and McCann (2016) who raise serious questions about the theoretical and policy assumptions of the benefits of proximity in city-based agglomeration theory. Other critics complained that the economic and political stress on cities meant that rural areas were left out (Harrison and Hoyler, 2014). This foreshadowed the complaint that city-regions neglect towns. Boland recognises, however, that city-based scalar solutions to advancing economic growth have prevailed in the policy agenda. It is these orthodoxies about the value of large-scale urban agglomerations which were the current wisdom when CAs and then MCAs were set up (Deas, 2014; Haughton et al., 2016).

There were more nuanced claims that city-based economic efforts were inappropriate for all cities. Free-market economists, for example, were unenthusiastic about political efforts to reverse the economic decline of post-industrial cities and regions and even advocated that those areas of decline should not be artificially kept alive. Yet many reformers across Europe were becoming convinced of the need for strong executive leadership in urban environments. Some European cities were content to create powerful executive boards, but in Britain the idea of strong executive leadership took hold following such other countries as Italy, Germany, Poland, Slovakia, Albania, Hungary and Croatia (Bussu, 2015; Denters and Rose, 2005). New Labour encouraged the election of directly elected city mayors in 2002 and local voters’ approval of the idea in some cities such as Bristol, Salford and, of course, Liverpool itself added impetus, although the idea was firmly rejected in Manchester. Ministers in the 2010 coalition government favoured strong mayors to enable CAs to achieve the shared priorities of the Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne with some CA leaders.

The corollary of the perception of the economic dynamism of cities was administrative reform. One economist asserted that the potential of city-based economic organisations must not be weakened by political practice and administrative convenience (Gardiner and Tyler, 2011). In a similar vein, the Northern Institute for Public Policy Research (NIPPR) stressed that the implication of city-region political devolution was city-region-based political structures. Yet the promotion of economic growth was paramount and was to be accomplished by incentivising CAs to deliver expansion and to generate even more substantial agglomerative effects by the development of a Northern Powerhouse.

The arrival of the Northern Powerhouse

The devolution of power and resources to the CAs and the creation of the Northern Powerhouse (NP) are distinct policy initiatives which have become ‘interconnected and … political projects’ (Giovannini and Mycock, 2016). The NP was, like the CAs, a response to the long-standing problems of economic decline and regional imbalance (Blakeley and Evans, 2018). While CAs were the product of a policy trajectory based upon the twin pressures to reform local government and to exploit the economic dynamism of cities, the NP sought to connect the two. The implication is that, while northern cities acting independently are strong, acting together they can count for more than the sum of their parts (Osborne, 2014).

Osborne’s