A Decade of Decentralisation? Assessing the Role of the Government Offices for the English Regions

Steven Musson, Adam Tickell and Peter John
Additional contact information
Peter John: Department of Government, International Politics and Philosophy, The University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, England

Environment and Planning A, 2005, vol. 37, issue 8, 1395-1412

Abstract: The Government Offices for the English regions were established in 1994 to coordinate the regional activities of three central government departments. A decade on, regional government in England is greatly expanded, and two other institutions of regional governance, the Regional Development Agencies and the Regional Assemblies, have also been created. In 2002 the Labour government proposed that this ‘triad’ of regional governance should be further reformed and strengthened, in some places being brought to democratic account. In this paper, we argue that academic research on the English regions has generally focused on the Regional Development Agencies and to a lesser extent the Regional Assemblies, to the exclusion of the Government Offices. This focus has led some to overstate the extent to which regional government represents the real decentralisation of power. Focusing on the role of the Government Offices, we argue that central government retains a great deal of power over the ‘triad’ institutions, which in their current form may be unable to challenge the structure of power in the English state.

Date: 2005
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1068/a36253 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envira:v:37:y:2005:i:8:p:1395-1412

DOI: 10.1068/a36253

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning A
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().