The real deal for left behind places in England: tracking asymmetric devolution and critical path of Combined Authorities and Metro Mayors

The question, of how best to configure sub-national economic development within England remains contested and unresolved since the Coalition Government’s dismantling of the regional tier in favour of Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs), City Deals, Combined Authorities and Metro Mayors. The deal-making process has been ad-hoc, incremental and sporadic, with 8 new English Combined Authorities with elected ‘Metro Mayors’ being agreed between 2014 and 2018 and West Yorkshire being added in 2020. A characteristic of emerging sub-regional arrangements in England is the rejection of a ‘one size fits all’ model in favour of an asymmetric approach to devolution. Our research focusses on the evolution of sub-national governance in northern metropolitan areas that may be characterized as lagging, or left-behind, compared to other metropolitan areas in the U.K.. The research explores the ‘critical path’ of deals and agreements that have emerged through a fluid and sometimes dynamic process where different permutations of powers, responsibilities and privileges have been agreed with different arrangements of local councils at different spatial scales. Our analysis charts the different paths and tempo that ‘left behind’ towns and cities have followed, to reveal some of the underling socio-political, economic and financial circumstances that have influenced the pathways to ‘real deals’, ‘raw deals’ or ‘no deal’ outcomes