The new Prime Minister is expected to turbocharge devolution. But to fulfil its promise, strategic authorities — led by mayors across England — must operate at scale. In this blog, Jack Shaw argues that many existing or planned strategic authorities are currently too small, and that the Government will need to work with them to build institutions capable of operating across larger regional and pan-regional economic geographies, enabling them to drive growth across boundaries and compete more effectively for investment at home and abroad.
Over the past half century, the UK Government’s approach to collaboration has undergone significant change. The Regional Economic Planning Councils of the 1960s were intended to produce “effective machinery” but served largely advisory functions without having executive powers. By contrast, the Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) established in the late 1990s were endowed with substantial powers, including responsibility for trade promotion and economic growth. The Deputy Prime Minister in the 2000s, John Prescott, even instigated pan-regional collaboration between RDAs, such as The Northern Way.
Pan-Regional Partnerships (PRPs), such as the Northern Powerhouse Partnership (2014), Midlands Engine (2015), Western Gateway (2019) and the Oxford–Cambridge Partnership (2023), have also been introduced since the Coalition Government. Although typically operating with far fewer formal powers than the RDAs, some have evolved over time helping seed institutions such as Transport for the North.
Whitehall has taken the view that this domain is not its responsibility, preferring an organic “bottom-up” model set out in the English Devolution White Paper (2024) and later encoded in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act as a “duty to cooperate.” This decision also saw the Starmer administration withdrawing financial support for regional and pan-regional collaboration just as devolution was accelerating, leading to some PRPs ceasing to function. While their inability to secure alternative funding suggests these bodies were not universally valued, the UK Government’s decision to abandon funding altogether is misplaced. Pan-regional collaboration remains a necessary, if underdeveloped, component of England’s evolving institutional architecture.
Despite the withdrawal of central funding, new arrangements have now emerged in the last 18 months, such as the Great North, the Midlands Compact, and the White Rose Agreement. While welcome, these initiatives operate at different scales and serve different purposes. Indeed, Yorkshire authorities participate in both the White Rose Agreement and the Great North, apart from Hull and East Yorkshire Combined Authority, which has subsequently withdrawn from the latter. Without structure, the Government’s abdication of responsibility can create a piecemeal approach to collaboration.
While the Government should not impose new regional or pan-regional institutions on strategic authorities, it does have a responsibility to broker their development to ensure balance. Simply stepping back from institution-building risks creating fragmented and uneven governance geographies, where some areas benefit from established networks of collaboration (particularly in mature strategic authorities) while others remain excluded.
Lincolnshire illustrates this problem. It sits on the boundary between the White Rose and Great North partnerships without an obvious place in either, while the bilateral Compact between the Midlands’ strategic authorities has already been established to the west of Greater Lincolnshire, with no equivalent pan-regional structure that exists to the south of it. Lincolnshire has no natural home for collaboration.
Perversely, Whitehall has not only paused investment, but also created alternative forums, in an ad hoc fashion, to somewhat compensate. The Office for Investment has established its own pan-regional forum for strategic authorities, effectively replicating a function previously performed by PRPs and, in the process, creating a more complex institutional landscape.
This fragmentation also has a further consequence: the ownership of large-scale growth strategies articulated by the then Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, in her Mais Lecture (March 2026) remains centralised. Initiatives such as the Oxford–Cambridge Growth Corridor and the Northern Growth Strategy are consequently being led and delivered through central government. While this may provide short-term clarity, it risks reinforcing central control over agendas that are inherently both place-specific and require scale across more than one city or administrative boundary — precisely the types of challenges that pan-regional institutions are best designed to address.
Ox-Cam, for example, brings together major investments in housing, transport, science, and tourism, from the New Towns Programme and East West Rail to the development of Universal Studios’ first European theme park. Ironically, despite the scale and complexity of this agenda, the Oxford–Cambridge PRP – the latest in a long line of initiatives to take forward development in this area – was disbanded less than a year ago. Moreover, the Government deprioritised the creation of the South Midlands strategic authority, which could add coherence and consistency to this picture. What remains is a patchwork of institutions—such as the government-run Cambridge Growth Company and the Ox-Cam Supercluster Board, resulting in fragmented oversight across a region that urgently needs integration. Meanwhile, the Oxford Growth Commission is considering new Opportunity Areas and delivery vehicles to support local regeneration, potentially driving the picture into further incoherence.
Scale
Regional and pan-regional institutions can also play a role in filling the gaps in England’s governance arrangements. The abolition of the RDAs and the closure of some PRPs have created an absence of regional or pan-regional structures across England. Strategic authorities are generally smaller than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, and England lacks the intermediate tier of governance found in federal systems or the ‘meso-level’ of governance found in countries such as France. The result is a larger number of strategic authorities operating at a smaller scale, increasing both the complexity and the cost of coordination.
As Philip McCann argued, this small-scale risks constraining effectiveness and the ability to drive growth. More likely to lack capacity and capability, the voices of smaller institutions may be overlooked by Government, especially if the new administration pursues the most convenient route and creates Foundation Strategic Authorities along the existing geographies of county authorities. In that context, and as a consequence of weak institutional design, the priorities of London (and Greater Manchester) are more likely to dominate. Regional and pan-regional structures are therefore necessary mechanisms for giving strategic authorities the ability to tackle those issues that cross administrative boundaries.
There is also an important international dimension. As strategic authorities build overseas relationships, pan-regional structures are needed to match global scale. Currently, individual authorities operate at a city level, such as South Yorkshire’s links with Pittsburgh and Chengdu. However, a pan-regional body like the Great North, representing 16 million people, can engage directly at state or provincial scale with Pennsylvania or Sichuan. Speaking with a united voice allows the region to build cross-boundary investment pipelines, an approach to test on the Great North’s first joint mission to India later this year.
Recommendations
This is not an argument for simply reinstating PRPs in their previous form. Rather, it is a case for a more deliberate and durable approach to building regional and pan-regional structures: one that recognises the need for institutions to operate at appropriate scale to support cross-boundary growth, large-scale infrastructure, international investment, and the tourism economy.
The Government should work with strategic authorities to identify appropriate regional and pan-regional geographies with clear support from their constituent members. In the case of the Great North, the Government may simply need to sponsor strategic authorities to build on its progress. In other cases, such as where there is a patchwork of strategic authorities, the Government would need to broker or identify the appropriate geographies for regional and pan-regional collaboration.
This is not alien to the Government. Through local government reorganisation and the Devolution Priority Programme, Whitehall has already taken a structured and prescriptive approach to institutional design, reflecting a clear view that without guardrails, structural reform risks becoming fragmented and inconsistent.
The Government should then invest in building the capacity and capability of those structures across appropriate geographies, ensuring they are equipped to deliver in areas such as international investment promotion, the development of investable project pipelines and the articulation of a coherent regional and pan-regional offer to global markets.
Properly constituted, pan-regional institutions would not compete with strategic authorities, but complement them, providing the scale and co-ordination to realise the full potential of initiatives such as the Northern Growth Corridor and the Oxford–Cambridge Corridor. If devolution is to succeed, it cannot rely on strategic authorities alone. It must also be underpinned by effective collaboration at the regional and pan-regional level, a gap that has persisted since the abolition of the Regional Development Agencies.
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett School of Public Policy.
