The restructuring of the regional and sub-regional state and the accompanying embrace of a more widely felt shift from government to governance during this period has been criticised for being both democratically unaccountable (Sharpe, 1991, 1997; Williams, 1999; Tickell et al, 1993) and for putting into place an institutional and policy environment whose fragmented nature and complexity made cooperative working between local bodies difficult (Audit Commission, 1989) and resulted in an uncoordinated and sectorally splintered approach (Lawless, 1991; Robson et al, 1994).Bounds (1994) attests that, while the need for local government to work collaboratively with other local bodies as a means towards more effective governance was by this time established, the pattern of local governance in England by the mid-1990s was not the result of a strategic attempt to account
for such an impetus but rather constituted the product of a series of disconnected, ad hoc decisions taken without reference to an overarching search for the most effective way of governing. This negation has resulted from the absence of politicians or appointees who would be in a position to conduct such a search within a governance framework in which power had been distributed from local government to central government and local executive agencies. Given the limited time in office for government ministers and the limited remit of local executive agencies, within
metropolitan counties that by now lacking a level of government at that scale, only the metropolitan districts carried the longevity and continuity to take responsibility for local areas, yet lacked the means to exercise this.
A paradox generated by the fracturing of local and regional governance through reforms such as those associated with the New Public Management is thus that the range of bodies active in governance are required to work in partnership in order to provide a measure of coordination that has become increasingly lacking over the course of their proliferation (McQuaid, 2000; Bounds, 1994). The degree of success achievable through coordination by partnership has been cast into doubt, however, given that inter-agency relationships within partnerships can range from those in which levels of trust are high and where short-term benefits are deferred by partners in order that long-term shared goals might be achieved, to those in which self-interest predominates at the expense of the long-term success of the partnership (McQuaid, 2000). Where trust relations are weak, fragile consensus is seen to lead to the avoidance of difficult decisions such that, while partnership activities are based around lobbying for funds, issuing bland mission statements and conducting marketing exercises, partnerships function effectively, but once decisions around setting investment priorities and locations for activities arise, they may break down (Bassett, 1996).
In addition to its use as a means to coordinate separate agencies, partnership is said to confer benefits over hierarchical public sector bureaucracy through the securing of additional resources for a particular project, purpose or area; the generation of synergies through the joint working of different bodies; the introduction of new ways of working (ibid); and the achievement of a degree of bottom-up political self-determination through the introduction of horizontal networks of
interaction into the governance of places (Davies, 2002). The extent to which the latter has led to strategic autonomy in the case of partnerships in the UK has been questioned, however, due to what is seen as the overwhelming regulatory influence of central government policy initiatives that have created a template for local governance partnerships that reduces the possibility of local difference from which innovation and synergies might result (ibid). Indeed, Davies (ibid: 308) regards as the pre-eminent partnership form in Britain the ‘top-down bureaucratic structure, pre-occupied with
tailoring local political strategies to prescriptive funding criteria set by central government’. As such, partnerships in local governance do not represent a shift from hierarchical-vertical relations to network-horizontal relations but rather a re-ordering of central-local relations (ibid).
As well as reducing the potential benefits of partnership, this may lead to reduced levels of engagement among partners. Where the overall purpose and strategy adopted by a partnership comes from outside of the partnership itself, key stakeholders are seen to be less committed to the partnership, which may take the form of a ‘talking shop’ in which partners are not engaged in strategic issues (Carley, 2000).
Other criticisms of partnership are its tendency to focus on a narrow range of interests, aims and activities, such as property and place-marketing; doubts raised over the ‘staying power’ of business elites; that limited resources and remit may limit effectiveness, for instance TECs had resources within a narrow remit while BLTs had few resources but a wide remit (Bassett, 1996); that goals may be uncler; that there may be negative impacts on the ‘mainstream’ services of local government as partnership activities come to be seen as an alternative to improvements in or coordination of these; and that power may be unequally distributed and informally assigned (McQuaid, 2000). On the last point, the balance of power in partnerships may be resultant less from documents specifying how the partnership will function than from the underlying relationships between actors (ibid).
2.2.7.1 Top-down Coordination
Criticism of the ‘patchwork quilt of complexity and idiosyncrasy’ (Audit Commission, 1989: 1) that made up the range of remit- and, often, time-limited central government programmes for economic development prompted a partial reversal of government’s approach, as the policy of the Major governments turned towards coordination and cooperation in urban policy. Programmes such as Challenge Funding, City Pride and Single Regeneration Budget aimed to incorporate a strategic aspect to local economic development by enabling the combination and coordination of funds towards specific ends.
In the background to this was a shift in thought with regard to the ‘urban problem’ such that a holistic understanding of the problems of the inner city invalidated the single issue interventions used to date and looked to a more strategic approach (Hill, 1994). In response to this, the Government Offices for the Regions (GORs) had been set up to administer the operation of, originally, the departments of transport, industry, employment and the environment within each
region (for more on which see chapter four), representing an attempt at accounting for regional context in applying policy.
Nevertheless, GORs engaged in regional working not by fostering greater decentralisation of powers but by extending the reach of central government in the regions, while attempts to coordinate regeneration initiatives and organisations in the regions were regarded as insufficient to allow for a cohesive regeneration strategy to emerge, while failing to resolve the lack of transparency in the activities of government agencies (interview, senior local authority officer). Thus the introduction of GORs by the Major government and allocation of control of Single Regeneration Budget and
European Structural Funds to them rather than to local elected government has been seen as further evidence of this (Stewart, 1994), albeit couched in reforms that have the appearance of
decentralisation.
In land-use planning, too, a renewed, though limited, coordination in the regions took place. This resulted from an acknowledgement by central government that housing shortages, especially in the South East region, were a consequence of a failure to build due to pressure from ‘NIMBY’ (Not In My Backyard) groups on local authorities and that some form of regional coordination in this matter would relieve pressure from local elected members to restrict urban growth (Thornley, 1993). With the abolition of MCCs, the two tier planning system in the metropolitan counties was replaced by a system of Unitary Development Plans in metropolitan districts, which became unitary authorities. Replacing the metropolitan county structure plans was Strategic Planning Guidance (SPG) issued by the Department for the Environment following consultation with metropolitan district authorities. This change has been criticised as a removal of the strategic tier in those areas where strategic planning is arguably most necessary (Cullingworth and Nadin, 2006).
Following more than a decade of hiatus, planning at the regional tier was reintroduced in the form of Regional Planning Guidance (RPG), issued, in a similar fashion to SPG, by the DoE following
consultation with district and county authorities of each region. In contrast to SPG, however, regional groupings of local authorities existed only informally and inconsistently across the regions. The introduction of RPG thus required an increase in regional institutional activity and a cooperation over strategic planning that had been absent since the first Thatcher government came to power. While SPG is seen as having been limited in impact and having gained only limited commitment centrally and locally, RPG is regarded as having fostered a renewed consensus around planning and a commitment to joint-working at the regional scale (Williams, 1999).
2.2.7.2 Bottom-up Coordination
Voluntary regional governance arrangements had long existed in the form of ‘standing conferences’ of associations of local authorities working at the regional scale, which were set up to help to address the issue of the dispersion of population and industry from towns and cities in the years following the war. These were funded by their constituent local authorities and received support from these in the way of seconded officers, while their political legitimacy came from the local elected members who made up the conferences. The regional standing conferences grew in authority during the era of indicative regional planning of the 1960s and 1970s, representing the local authorities in the EPCs, yet declined or disappeared during the 1980s (Wannop and Cherry, 1994). It was the regional standing conferences which were reanimated or resurrected in order to write RPG and whose renewed activity and legitimacy contributed to a reinstitutionalisation at the regional scale.
Added to the need to coordinate economic development programmes and for a strategic tier of planning was the motivation for regional capacity-building provided by the introduction of the programmatic approach and the partnership principle in the allocation of European Structural Funds in the 1988 reforms to these. The former necessitated the production of regional development plans detailing how funds would be spent in order to coherently address regional deficiencies, while the latter required that these plans be produced by regional authorities. In the English case this meant that a regional presence would have to be constructed in order to take on this task. As well as the overt motivation of needing a regional institutional presence in order to access European funds was a perception that, following the Single European Act in 1992, the English regions would enter a more competitive Single European Market without the level of regional business support and inward investment structures that were present elsewhere in the EU (Bradbury and Mawson, 1997). Mawson (1996: 312) outlines the ‘consensus partnership model’ that can be observed in the Audit Commission’s (1989) advice to local authorities on the coordination of regeneration activities, the 1991 agreement between TECs, Chambers of Commerce and Enterprise Agencies, and in CBI and Business in the Community advice to Business Leadership Teams. This is held to encompass a construction of regional institutional capacity that is congruent with the particular configuration of institutions in each region, together with their strengths and competencies, which addresses the strengths and weaknesses of each region, and which is based on trust between corporate partners in order to facilitate partnership-working. Mawson (ibid) highlights, though, the lack of accountability in such approaches, their private sector dominance, and their potential to exclude disadvantaged groups and areas through their focus on economic development over other aims. Additionally, this
gradual bottom-up capacity-building in sub-national governance was, by its nature, highly
inconsistent both between regions and within them, as varying levels of cooperation and interest from different partners affected its success (Bradbury and Mawson, 1997).