Go big: the need for Provinces
Director of Policy and Research
Researcher
Things are still moving fast in the world of local government policy.
Last week’s English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill doubled down on the Government’s aim to ‘complete the map’: a crucial objective given the barriers that patchwork-devolution has erected against the deeper decentralisation of powers. Among other things, the Bill standardises a framework for Strategic Authorities (SAs), reintroduces supplementary voting for mayors, strengthens planning and transport functions, and empowers mayors to fast‑track development via Mayoral Development Orders.
Yet even as it builds the foundations for England-wide devolution, the Bill stops short of removing the next barrier: asymmetric institutions. The Government’s approach will allow single-authority or basic Foundation Strategic Authorities to emerge. The result will be a new kind of patchwork: a mix of powerful metropolitan subregions, centred on big cities, with populations of around 3 million people… alongside a range of county-sized SAs, some of which will struggle to take steps toward electing a Mayor or achieving ‘Established’ status in order to access more advanced devolved powers. In some places, these SAs may not even have the same guideline population as a unitary local authority (half a million).
In rural and polycentric places (that is, places not dominated by a single urban core), this risks entrenching fragmented, underpowered authorities with insufficient scale to respond to strategic challenges like transport connectivity, investment attraction, or labour market coordination.
Under these plans, SAs will need to work together on a pan-regional basis to coordinate their efforts.
The idea in our latest paper, Go big or go home, is simple. Let SAs emerge everywhere – and let them be basic ‘foundation’ agreements wherever that is best. Let them form the stepping-stone to a system of much larger devolved jurisdictions: Provinces.
These would not simply be larger versions of SAs. Provinces would carry distinct governance systems with directly-elected Governors, new specialised Provincial Development Funds, statutory spatial plans, transport oversight, and service integration: all arranged over the grand geographies that would make public service delivery, infrastructure development, and economic planning operate effectively over region-sized populations. This opens the door to a next-level vision of devolution which would always remain out of reach to smaller SAs, including fiscal devolution.
In our report, we propose a staged sequence. First, allow SAs to form under the Bill’s framework. Second, support emerging regional partnerships across those SAs. Third, establish definitive pan-regional geographies and legislate for a Province tier to enshrine collaborative capacity and coherence within place.
Critically, these larger structures would allow for greater respect of the local and hyper-local sense of place, identity, and belonging that is present throughout England. Provinces wouldn’t be a replacement for this sense of place, but a way to legitimately represent the interests of whole regions and co-ordinate the economic complementarity that is essential in polycentric systems.
The Governors of these Provinces would provide a crucial counterweight to the powerful Mayors of England’s largest cities – and to Whitehall power too. In our report, we even set out a ‘for instance’ map of 11 large English Provinces, and a sense of how they can be used to capitalise on the distinctive advantages present in each part of the country.
This is a radical idea for the future of devolution in England, but hardly an unprecedented one. Provinces were imagined as part of the Redcliffe-Maud report decades ago. In the early years of New Labour, large-scale Regional Assemblies were at the heart of an English devolution plan which was intended to mirror the national devolution of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. And in practically every other comparable country, a genuinely regional tier isn’t only normal – it is a ‘no-brainer’ part of the structure of the State.
The subregional model we have ended up with is a compromise. In some places, it will work well. But rural and lower-density parts of England should not be short-changed. To deliver the ‘devolution revolution’, our recommendation is: go big.