Metro Mayors, Combined Authorities, English Votes for English Laws, Regional Inequality, and the Governance of a Nation Within a Nation
England: The Largest Nation in the UK, With the Least Coherent Governance Arrangements
When the 1997 Labour government devolved powers to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, it created a constitutional asymmetry that has been generating awkward questions ever since: England — home to 84% of the UK’s population and the source of approximately 85% of its GDP — received no equivalent devolved body. The English question — how to govern England within a devolved UK — has been answered with a series of partial, incremental, geographically inconsistent experiments that have collectively produced something that could charitably be described as “emerging” and more accurately described as “still being decided.”
The result is a governance landscape of extraordinary complexity: some areas have directly elected metro mayors with significant powers over transport, planning, and economic development; others have combined authorities without mayors; others have legacy county and district council structures that predate the internet; and London has a directly elected Mayor and Assembly operating under a framework that is itself different from every other metropolitan arrangement. The principle governing this diversity is not a principle. It is the accumulated outcome of individual deals between the Treasury and local areas that have been struck when the political moment was right and declined when it was not.
Metro Mayors: The Reform That Worked Better Than Expected and Spread Further Than Planned
The directly elected metro mayor — pioneered by London in 2000 — has become the dominant model for English city region governance. Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, Liverpool City Region, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, Tees Valley, the West of England, and others now have elected mayors with powers over transport, skills, economic development, planning, and in some cases policing and housing. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority under Andy Burnham has become the most visible example of what metro governance can achieve — and an illustration of both the model’s potential and its limits.
The limits are real: metro mayors have responsibility for economic development but limited tax-raising powers; they have strategic planning authority but cannot override local planning decisions without the agreement of constituent councils; they have transport powers but the funding settlement for major infrastructure requires Treasury approval that has been inconsistent. The model has worked well enough to generate demand for expansion and inadequately enough to generate persistent demands for more fiscal devolution — demands that the Treasury has consistently found reasons to defer.
Levelling Up: The Ambition That Outlasted the Funding
The Johnson government’s levelling up agenda — reducing regional economic inequality between London and the South East and the rest of England — was the most explicitly spatial domestic policy commitment in recent British political history. The Levelling Up White Paper of 2022, co-authored by Andy Haldane and Michael Gove, was a serious analytical document identifying the UK’s regional inequalities as a structural economic problem requiring sustained policy attention and setting twelve “missions” to be achieved by 2030.
The funding attached to the missions was considerably less serious. The Levelling Up Fund, the UK Shared Prosperity Fund, and various other pots distributed through competitive bidding processes produced individually welcome investments and collectively insufficient scale to address inequalities that had been accumulating for forty years. The towns and cities that most needed systematic investment had, in many cases, the least capacity to bid competitively for project-specific funds. The areas that won the most money were not always the most deprived. The bidding process itself consumed local authority resource that smaller councils could ill afford.
Levelling up was cancelled as a framework by the incoming Labour government, which replaced it with a focus on strategic economic growth through combined authorities and an industrial strategy. The underlying regional inequality it addressed has not been cancelled and shows no signs of self-resolution.
Regional Inequality: The Numbers Behind the Politics
The regional economic divide in the UK is among the sharpest in the developed world. London’s GDP per capita is approximately 70% higher than the UK average. Wales, the North East, and Yorkshire and the Humber are the lowest-performing regions, with productivity levels substantially below the national average. This is not a recent phenomenon — the regional gap has been persistent since deindustrialisation in the 1980s — but it has widened since 2010 and has become the most reliable predictor of political behaviour: areas with lower productivity, lower wages, and higher unemployment voted more heavily for Brexit in 2016 and have shown greater support for populist parties subsequently.
The policy toolkit for addressing regional inequality is well-understood: investment in transport infrastructure connecting regions to labour markets, skills development, place-based industrial strategy, and devolution of powers to allow regional leaders to respond to local economic conditions. The political constraint is that each of these interventions requires sustained multi-decade commitment and the British political cycle operates on five-year terms with policy reversals at most changes of government. The regions that need long-term investment have experienced policy churn. The regions that do not need it have experienced continuity. This is not a coincidence.
The Governance of England: What Comes Next
The question of whether England should have its own parliament — a body equivalent to Holyrood or the Senedd governing English domestic affairs — has been raised periodically and consistently rejected on the grounds that an English Parliament would represent 84% of the UK population and thereby dominate the UK’s federal institutions to the point of rendering them redundant. An English Parliament would not solve the West Lothian Question; it would dissolve it by making the English-UK distinction sufficiently explicit that the UK’s continuation becomes the question rather than its internal governance arrangements.
The alternative — deepened regional devolution through metro mayors and combined authorities — addresses English governance through a sub-national lens that avoids the English Parliament question while producing its own asymmetries. Not every area wants a metro mayor. Not every area has the urban density or political conditions for combined authority governance. Rural England, in particular, sits outside the metro mayor model without a clear governance alternative that offers the accountability and capacity of a devolved assembly.
The English question, like most questions in British constitutional life, is being managed through incremental pragmatism in the reasonable hope that the underlying issues resolve themselves or at least become someone else’s problem. This strategy has worked before. Whether it works for regional inequality — which is structural, persistent, and generating measurable political consequences — is less certain.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
English devolution has proceeded asymmetrically since 1997, with no equivalent to the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Senedd, or Northern Ireland Assembly for England as a whole. Directly elected metro mayors operate in London, Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Liverpool City Region, and several other combined authority areas. The Levelling Up White Paper (2022) identified twelve missions to reduce regional inequality by 2030; the framework was discontinued by the incoming Labour government in 2024. The West Lothian Question — whether non-English MPs should vote on English-only matters — remains unresolved following the abolition of English Votes for English Laws in 2021. The UK has among the highest regional economic inequality of any comparable developed economy.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
