Policy ‘R&D’,capacity and advocacy in English Combined Authorities

Abstract

City regions and Mayoral Combined Authorities are at the heart of the devolution policy agenda in England. This article assesses and compares the policy and research capabilities of Combined Authorities in England, drawing on elite interviews with officials in four diverse Combined Authorities and their wider sub-regional policy and research communities. There are significant inequalities between the policy and research capabilities of the Combined Authorities reflecting institutional histories, as well as differences in size and functional responsibilities. Those with already greater capabilities and infrastructure appear likely to continue to benefit from greater opportunities in the future, widening existing inequalities.

Introduction

Unlike other advanced capitalist democracies, the United Kingdom (UK) lacks an intermediate tier between national and local governments, and local authorities have relatively limited autonomy (Hambleton, 2017, 2020). The governance of England, in particular, is highly centralised, top-down and place-blind (McCann, 2016; Bentley et al., 2017; Berry and Giovannini, 2018). With the exception of the Greater London Authority, the extensive devolution of power and resources to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by the Labour government elected in 1997 was not matched by devolution within England. The attempt to create a regional tier of government in the 2000s was largely a failure and after the Coalition government was elected in 2010, Regional Development Agencies and Government Offices for the Regions were abolished. Henceforth, a constitutional approach to the ‘English question’ was spurned in favour of casting ‘devolution more as a functionally efficient means to achieve agreed policy outcomes’ (Ayres et al., 2018: 855).

In the 2010s, the key focus of policy shifted to city-regions, driven in part by the emergence of a policy discourse that promoted metropolitan urban conglomerations as the appropriate scale for the pursuit of economic competitiveness (Rodiquez-Pose, 2008) and for tackling city-based and regional challenges (Albrechts and Balducci, 2013). Proximities of knowledge-based industry and services with higher education institutions were understood to provide the significant agglomeration and clustering benefits favoured by a globalised economy. City-regions would perform as ‘engines’ of national economic growth and wealth generation (Glaeser, 2011), and, as such, the prosperity of the peripheral regions or hinterlands was dependent upon their city regions (Davoudi, 2008; Rodiquez-Pose, 2008). The city was also seen as having an integral role as an ‘ideapolis’ for the new ‘knowledge economy’ (Williams et al., 2006; Headlam, 2014).

The new emphasis on cities in UK government strategy manifested itself in two waves of negotiations between central government and local actors. New ‘city deals’ were signed with local authorities (Marlow, 2019), and additional governance reform saw the emergence of Mayoral Combined Authorities, typically at city-region level. It was these bodies that would receive devolved powers over economic development, housing, planning, transport and (where co-terminous with police force areas) policing (Sandford, 2019). The UK government made the introduction of ‘Metro Mayors’ a prerequisite before any substantial allocation of powers or additional budgets to Combined Authorities. Mayors were intended to provide a single point of accountability for decision making and for negotiation with central government. English devolution policy was to be city-centric focused and driven primarily by economic priorities, rather than democratic engagement or constitutional reform (Tomaney, 2016; Waite and Morgan, 2018; Sandford, 2020b; Newman and Kenny, 2023). This was buttressed by a narrative that championed the ‘triumph of the city’ (Glaeser, 2011).

In addition to the Greater London Mayor and Assembly, there are now 10 Combined Authorities in England, 9 of which have directly elected Mayors, and plans have been agreed for four more Mayors – in Cornwall (a unitary council with an existing devolution deal), the East Midlands, York and North Yorkshire and the North East of England. The government’s White Paper, Levelling Up the United Kingdom (DLUHC, 2022), sets out plans for ‘Trailblazer’ deals to extend further powers to Greater Manchester and the West Midlands and a three-tier framework for strengthening devolution to other Mayoral Combined Authorities and Counties (Level 3), and devolving progressively lower levels of responsibility and power to non-Mayoral Combined Authorities and County Councils (Level 2) or collaborations between local authorities (Level 1). Since 2019, the government’s policy focus has shifted to extending devolution beyond the city-regions and embraces a wider ‘levelling up’ rationale for addressing regional economic and social disparities. Nonetheless, the city-regions remain at the core of the devolution policy agenda and its development, particularly Greater Manchester and the West Midlands.

In this article, based on a set of elite interviews in four Combined Authorities, we address the research question of whether devolution within England has created new sources of policy ideas and agency in the Combined Authorities, commensurate with a substantial transfer of power and responsibility from the central state, or instead whether the policy research and development capacities in sub-national English government are limited and largely technocratic in nature, reflecting functional devolution of discrete policy responsibilities and a transactional relationship to central government. Utilising insights from historical institutionalism (Mahoney and Thelen, 2010) and the literature on English governance (Ayers et al., 2018; Kenny et al., 2018), we expect to see only incremental development of policy capacities in Combined Authorities and marked inequalities between those authorities with established histories of policy planning and delivery, such as over urban transport, and those without. We also expect to see inequalities in policy capacities and agency between those authorities with strong city-regional political and cultural identities and those in areas with more diffuse and disparate forms of local or regional identity.

The article is structured as follows. Following this introduction, we provide an overview of key literature that has focused on Combined Authorities and devolution of powers in England. We then describe the methods we used to select the Combined Authorities included in the research and the elite interview approach that the study was based on. In ‘research findings’, we describe the policy, research and development functions and capacities within a select group of Combined Authorities and their wider sub-regional communities of think-tanks, universities and civil society institutions engaged in policy development and public debate. We illustrate these findings with extracts from our interviews and the literature. We conclude by arguing that the significant inequalities between the policy development and R&D capacities of the English Combined Authorities are reflective of their institutional histories and that those Combined Authorities that did not inherit such capacities and related research infrastructure are more likely to struggle to develop them now and in the future.

Literature overview

Existing scholarship on Combined Authorities has focused on why they were established and the interplay of institutions and agency in their formation (Lowndes and Lemprière 2018; Roberts, 2020), how the formation process was undertaken, both at local and central levels (Tomaney, 2016) and on examination of the evolution of centre-periphery relations (Ayers et al., 2018). Among these studies the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) features heavily, principally due to its vanguard position in city-regional devolution in England. Other studies have critically appraised the UK government’s approach to devolution, including, inter alia, the haphazard, piecemeal, ‘local-led’ approach to Combined Authority formation and lack of joined-up, systematic English devolution policy; the limited nature of English fiscal devolution and ‘power hoarding’ in the Treasury; and the lack of clarity as to the relationship among the Combined Authorities, new meso-regional level initiatives, Local Enterprise Partnerships and local authorities (Hambleton, 2017; Sandford, 2019, 2020a; Shutt and Liddle, 2019; Pike et al., 2016; Diamond et al., 2023).

These critical studies have, in their different ways, reinforced the argument that Combined Authorities risk developing into ‘grant coalitions’ due to the limitations of fiscal devolution – that is, public authorities that are forced into the role of policy takers rather than policy makers. The creation of Combined Authorities would thus replicate long-standing features of Westminster statecraft and English devolution, in which local elites are co-opted and control is retained at the centre (Richards and Smith, 2015). More recently, however, a number of studies have attempted to assess the impact of Mayors on local leadership and public engagement and to examine their utilisation of soft power – or the ‘power of place’ – to advance new policy agendas (Bradley, 2019; Giovannini, 2021; Sandford, 2020b; Roberts, 2020). The development of new forms of city and pan-regional identity – particularly in the North of England – coupled with strong advocacy of regional interests during the COVID pandemic, lend some credence to the argument that a new dynamic of devolution may be underway, one in which city-region Mayors in England articulate, advocate for and secure new powers and policies (Ayers et al., 2018; Giovannini, 2021).

In its own extensive literature review of the drivers of geographic inequalities, the government’s Levelling Up the United Kingdom White Paper identifies ‘institutional capital and leadership’ as important factors in explaining economic disparities. Strong local institutions – both political and civic – contain capacities for innovation and consistent leadership which help drive economic development. Conversely, the loss of institutional memory and capacity reduces local ability to design and deliver change (DLUHC, 2022: 46-7). To the best of our knowledge, however, there has not hitherto been any systematic study of the policy formation, research and development (R&D) and policy advocacy capacities of Combined Authorities in England nor of their relationship to the wider civic institutions of research and policy development in their regions. Although Sandford (2019) notes the limited staff and institutional capacity of Combined Authorities, this has not been elaborated in further research, and the relationship of Mayors and their Combined Authorities to the wider ‘ecosystems’ and ‘territorial policy communities’ (Keating et al., 2009) of ideas, policy debate and policy advocacy in their regions remains unexplored.

Methodology

Our findings in this article are drawn from in-depth qualitative interviews with critical actors. We used an elite interviewing approach, suitable for research interviews with individuals in senior roles with influence within and outside of their organisation. The approach is largely similar to other forms of qualitative interviewing but recognises and seeks to account for challenges in interviewing elite actors, including the power dynamics between researcher and interviewee, the expectations of elites for the interview and researcher and the need for a more flexible and personalised interview (Solarino and Aguinis, 2020). Thorough preparation by researchers is critical to understand interviewee positionality, such as through detailed background briefs on interviewee and organisations (Richards, 1996). A high level of professionalism throughout and having senior members of the research team lead interviews can help demonstrate credibility, gain trust and reduce the impact of power imbalances (Scally et al., 2021; Harvey et al., 2011). Offering flexibility in how questions are asked and answered can help to maintain engagement and empower elite actors to share their knowledge (Richards, 1996; Solarino and Aguinis, 2020).

Our purposive sample was informed by desk-based searches, through the existing networks of the research team, and a snowballing approach whereby contacts were asked to identify suitable participants in their networks. To address our research question specifically, we selected participants who could offer insights on the research capacities and policy responsibilities of the Combined Authorities and their Mayors and how they engage with regional and national research and policy institutions. We sought to include Combined Authorities that represented different geographical regions, population sizes, urban–rural locations and level of devolved powers. We examined the ten Combined Authorities and selected four that met these criteria and, in particular, represented between them two ends of the spectrum of the powers, size and institutional maturity in England: Cambridge and Peterborough Combined Authority (CPCA) and West of England Combined Authority (WECA), are contrasted against the mature trailblazers such as Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA), and West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA). We included senior staff in each of these four Combined Authorities and in research and policy organisations including think-tanks, consultancies, universities and civil society organisations within the Combined Authority area and at a national level. In addition to their current roles, participants had experience in a range of policy roles including within local and regional authorities and in Whitehall.

Pre-determined interview questions were designed to examine the research and analytical capacities of the Combined Authorities, their partnerships with regional research organisations, how ideas and policies are developed and relationships with Whitehall actors. Following an elite interviewing approach, the researchers based each interview around these core questions but allowed participants to lead the conversation into related areas and to discuss issues that they thought important to the topic. A briefing note on the background of each participant and the work of their organisation was prepared in advance of each interview.

In total, 15 interviews were conducted on-line between May and June 2022 and lasted between 40 and 60 min. All interviews were led by a senior researcher. Informed consent from all interviewees was obtained, and interviews were electronically recorded and transcribed verbatim for analysis. Participants were assured of their confidentiality, and identifiable or politically sensitive data was removed from transcripts. Following familiarisation with all transcripts, one researcher coded data into the following categories that related to our research question and study aims: research capacities; relationships with Westminster and Whitehall; power, local and regional policymaking; influences on policy; relationships with academia; public engagement; and ‘other’. We analysed data within and across these categories to identify themes and extracted key illustrative quotes.

Research findings

Our research findings are reported in four sections. In the first section, we examine the policy development and research capacities of the Combined Authorities, how these differ and why they do so. In the second and third sections, we look at the relationship between Combined Authorities and regional think-tanks and universities, respectively. In the fourth section we examine citizen engagement, or the lack of it, in city-regional policy development and the relationship between Combined Authorities and Whitehall and Westminster.

Policy and R&D capacities in the Combined Authorities

Mayoral Combined Authorities typically have powers over transport, spatial planning, housing and regeneration funds, business support services and adult education and skills. Nearly 80% of their funding comes from central government grants, with the rest accruing variously from Mayoral precepts, transport and waste levies on local authorities, and business rate retention. In contrast to the devolved governments of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, discretion over expenditure is extremely limited, budgets cannot be pooled and authorities have no powers to vary taxes or raise new ones (Paun et al., 2022). The difference in size, functional responsibilities and expenditure between Combined Authorities is marked. GMCA has 10 constituent local authorities alongside the Mayor, covering a population of 2.85 million people. It has responsibility for transport, housing investment and spatial planning, adult skills, waste management, policing and fire and rescue services. It has revenue expenditure of over £1.95 billion a year and a staff of over 2,000, costing £97m (2020/21). WMCA covers a population of nearly three million people, with seven local authorities as full members, and a similar set of functions to GMCA, but without policing, fire and rescue and other public services. It has expenditure of £453 million and a staff of 466, costing nearly £25m (2020/21). Most newer authorities are smaller, with more limited functions and resources. CPCA has seven constituent local authorities (of which three are district councils), responsibilities for business support, planning, skills and local transport and expenditure of £156 million in 2020/21. It covers a population of 859,000 people, with a staff of 51. It is of similar size and responsibilities to WECA, which has three constituent local authorities, expenditure of £102 million and a staff of 71, costing £3 million in 2020/1 (all figures from Sandford, 2023: 15).

These differences are reflected in much of the commentary on Mayoral Combined Authorities, which distinguishes between the relatively advanced development of powers and capacities of GMCA and WMCA and the rest of the Combined Authorities. These two city-regions have the status of ‘Trailblazers’ and have been granted additional powers and responsibilities in recent devolution deals with HM Government (DLUHC, 2023a, 2023b). Our interviewees endorsed this perception, one noting, for example, that ‘…there’s a big difference I would say between the most established combined authorities, particularly in Manchester and then the West Midlands, and everyone else’.

Size, longevity and political leadership help to explain this hierarchy, but institutional history matters too. In particular, Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, Merseyside and Tyneside have had Passenger Transport Executives (PTEs) since the 1968 Transport Act, with powers over buses, trams and local rail services. The continuous existence of PTEs since the late 1960s – despite changes in nomenclature, boundaries and accountability – has endowed their Mayoral Combined authorities with significant staffing and capacity over policy planning, research and development, data analysis and public consultation. As one interviewee put it, ‘that immediately gives you a sort of critical mass’. Running major urban transport systems provides not merely policy development, finance and managerial capacities but also large data and data analytical functions that can be drawn on by the wider Combined Authority. As one official noted, ‘we’re recognized nationally as having absolutely brilliant capability on that front, that team of people who have access to GIS systems and so on that we can now make available to the wider Combined Authority’.

A number of the larger Combined Authorities also draw directly on the legacy of Metropolitan County Councils that were created in the mid-1970s and subsequently abolished in 1986. In Greater Manchester, key transport, police, fire and rescue and waste services provided by the Metropolitan County Council passed to joint boards of local authorities, coordinated by the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities, after the abolition of the Greater Manchester County Council. This association provided the nucleus for the Combined Authority formed in 2011. It was also a forum for institutional collaboration between the public and private sectors and would become the institutional basis from which the city-region’s elite would articulate a vision for Greater Manchester and press its demands for devolution to the Treasury in London (Lemprière and Lowndes, 2019).

Some Combined Authorities also ‘chose to effectively safeguard part of the of the knowledge and capability that had previously been in Regional Development Agencies by pulling them into new structures’ as one of our interviewees noted. GMCA built on a legacy of investment in policy research by the city in its own R&D and policy capacity, New Economy Commission, while WMCA had existing economic policy and research capacities from the Black Country Consortium and the University of Birmingham City-REDI unit to draw on. As one official in GMCA noted, because of what ‘came into the Combined Authority we started with quite a big analytical function and it’s now about 40 staff across …] across an organization of maybe 400ish’. These capacities stand in stark contrast to the numbers of staff working on policy, research and data in the newer and smaller Combined Authorities, particularly those that do not have institutional experience of running urban transport systems. As a report from Metro Dynamics to the Economic and Social Research Council noted (Metro Dynamics, 2022: 23):

In general, analytical capacity, funding, and partnership activity is strongest in large cities in England. This can create a ‘Matthew effect’, whereby places that are (comparatively) well-funded are able to develop stronger evidence bases, which in turn make them better equipped to bid for other Government funding and research funding - thus perpetuating a divide between urban areas with stronger analytical capacity, and more rural places and smaller towns with weaker capacity for analysis.

Smaller Combined Authorities have responded to this lack of policy and R&D capacity by creating independent policy commissions, such as the Independent Commission on Climate created by CPCA, or by commissioning discrete pieces of policy analysis from consultancies and academics. These can support strategy development and medium-term planning and help plug gaps in policy capability. But the lack of in-house capacity can undermine the ability of Combined Authorities to operate effectively. For example, the Department of Levelling Up, Communities and Housing suspended payment of the 2022/23 Mayoral Capacity Funding and 2022/23 Local Enterprise Partnership Core Funding to the CPCA due to concerns regarding governance and leadership capacity. Although specific factors were at work in this instance, the high staff turnover in Combined Authorities who have not inherited significant knowledge or capacity is indicative of a persistent struggle to build and maintain analytical, policy and operational capacities from the ground up.

These differences notwithstanding, officials in our study pointed to the asymmetry in capacity between Whitehall and the Combined Authorities as the most important inequality:

‘There’s vast amounts of capacity, but it’s all in the centre. And it needs to be really clear because this government has got obsessed with decentralizing departments and functions all around the country. That is not devolution, that is essentially just moving central government functions to parts of the region. … all of this distribution of functions around the country isn’t building our capacity at all’.

Despite, then, the inequalities in staffing and capacities between the Combined Authorities, and the historical path dependencies these reflect, the larger picture is one of limited research and policy development capacity when compared to central government. Staff working on research, data analysis and policy development are overwhelmingly focused on the delivery of functions devolved from Whitehall, according to the budgets, timescales and outcomes determined in negotiation with central government. They lack the resources, discretion and responsibility of their counterparts in the devolved governments. As one official noted:

‘where there’s actually money changing hands…our flexibility is very restricted. Transport funding, the city single transport settlements in theory were “right here’s a dollop of capital funding… Go and sort it out,” but then the Treasury step in saying, “…Why are you funding that particular stop?” Or “are you sure you want the bus lanes going down there?” You know there’s a proper level of detailed interference in that…’

The conditional nature of funding from central government can also lead to policies being abandoned by Combined Authorities. For instance, problems delivering a housing energy efficiency project in the required timeframes resulted in the CPCA returning over £50 million to central government. The lack of flexibility in current funding models does not account for local barriers to policy delivery, with one official noting:

‘there’s an awful lot of projects that slip and they might slip for a range of reasons. They might slip for over optimism bias in the first place, but they might also slip for, you know, just trying to get agreement across the different areas just takes longer….’

Criticism of competitive bidding processes for local government economic growth and regeneration funding and the funding pots is longstanding (National Audit Office, 2022). These processes are criticised for their transactional costs, the limited sustainability of the projects and programmes they fund and the fact that they create relationships of dependency between local government and Whitehall departments, rather than developing the institutional autonomy and capabilities of local authorities (Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, 2022). Combined Authority Mayors have recently echoed these concerns. In an effort to address these issues, the recently announced two ‘trailblazer devolution deals’ for GMCA and WMCA created departmental-style ‘single pots’ of spending for these authorities, giving them discretion to allocate resources within a unified framework of accountability (DLUHC, 2023a, 2023b).

This is an important reform, which signals a significant development in the process of fiscal devolution to sub-national English government, albeit one that does not involve transfers of powers over taxation or the retention at the city-region level of a proportion of tax revenues. Capacities for research, policy development and implementation within the Combined Authorities will need to expand, and the focus of a number of staff shifts away from routinised transactional negotiation with Whitehall departments. However, it has arguably once more reinforced the advanced status of GMCA and WMCA and the ‘Matthew Effect’ of increased powers and funding flowing to these two major conurbations.

Combined Authorities and regional policy think-tanks

In the UK, the devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland since 1997 has stimulated the creation of independent think-tanks located in these nations and focused on their affairs, among others, Reform Scotland, IPPR Scotland, the Institute of Welsh Affairs and the Bevan Foundation. In England, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) established IPPR North in 2004, to research public policy in the North of England and advocate for its interests, and in similar fashion, the Centre for London was set up in 2011. As well as IPPR North, GMCA is also home to the Northern Powerhouse Partnership, a business membership organisation that researches and campaigns on behalf of the North of England’s economic and civic interests, chaired by former Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne; and to the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, a national think-tank and consultancy dedicated to localist, community wealth building policies. Other UK-wide think-tanks and independent research institutes, such as the Institute for Government and the Centre for Cities, have particular remits to examine sub-regional economics, governance or policy.

Think-tanks vary considerably in their structure, funding, purposes and political orientations (Kelstrup, 2016) but share core functions in researching public policy issues, hosting public debate, developing policy agendas and advocating for policy ideas, and they are often highly visible in the political media. It is therefore important to consider their role in the policy ecosystems and territorial policy communities of the Combined Authorities in England.

A number of our interviewees remarked on the importance of relationships among the Combined Authority, Mayor and think-tanks, and of the way think-tanks combine research, policy debate and advocacy:

‘… ultimately if you want to influence policy, you also have to make a public case that whatever you’re arguing for is actually a necessity. And so this combination of producing good quality research, territorial focus and leading the debate also in the public spheres, on media, for example, and also with policymakers, is something that makes this relationship very, very fruitful’.

For some officials, having a regional think-tank, like IPPR North or the Centre for London, devoted to policy and advocacy was important. Regional think-tanks can generate public debate on the issues of concern to the city-region in the national media, raise the profile of policy challenges and ‘demands’ and provide an autonomous capability for policy development in the region, alongside but outside of official structures. As independent bodies, think-tanks can ‘outride’ for Combined Authority Mayors, incubate new ideas and advocate for greater power and responsibility to be devolved from Whitehall. They are also often called up to give expert testimony to Select Committees and All-Party Parliamentary Groups:

‘IPPR North is regularly invited to give evidence or to be part of the work of these bodies (Parliamentary committees and all-party Parliamentary groups) precisely because it is trusted to produce reliable data and information on these debates’.

For other officials in Combined Authorities, however, engaging with national think-tanks in London was a route to lobbying and influence in Whitehall:

‘Some of it is almost a lobbying thing as well. You know, if you need a platform in Westminster or a way of influencing government, yeah, we’re engaging with Onward [a centre-right think-tank] because partly we get some ideas… but partly if we can get our messages delivered through Onward, there’s much more chance of a Conservative Minister listening’.

Think-tanks can also help foster the development of regional and national political identities, by providing fora in which political leaders can shape and rehearse their agendas and giving them a platform to publicly express regional demands. The work of IPPR North and the Northern Powerhouse Partnership are particularly instructive in this regard, having championed, not just the case for devolution, and specific policy ‘asks’, but also the imagined interests of a pan-Northern public. Where Mayoral Combined Authorities can draw up on resources of historical identity and meaning, whether for a city or a wider pan-regional identity, the ability of a Mayor to exercise the ‘power of place’ is enhanced.

Local and Combined Authorities also commission specialist pieces of research and analysis from leading consultancies like SQW and Metro Dynamics, as well as national think-tanks like the Centre for Cities and the Resolution Foundation – for example, on local labour markets or regional economic growth. But others argue that interest from think-tanks in their regions is limited and that they have to make up for lack of engagement from think-tanks in policy ideas in their own work. One official noted the lack of think-tanks in their city-region, arguing ‘it’s not great for new policy thinking and I do feel there’s quite an onus on me personally and my recruitment decisions if you see what I mean, to bring people in that can help with that’. This reflects the fact that policy think-tanks in the UK are for the most part concentrated in London and that there has been relatively little development of them outside of London, Edinburgh and Cardiff. Within English regions, almost all of the growth of think-tanks has taken place in Greater Manchester, where IPPR North and the Northern Powerhouse Partnership provide important research, policy development and advocacy for the North of England. Think-tanks are also attracted to sites of power by virtue of the funding available, and the networks and relationships that can be forged in proximity to political decision-making, and they therefore tend to cluster in capital cities. A particular effort has to be made to establish them outside of these locations, and in the cases cited this has required funding commitment from regionally based businesses and trusts and foundations and tacit local or regional political support.

Universities

In contrast to think-tanks, the centrality of higher education institutions, and science and innovation to regional economic growth is well established in public policy. Universities are considered local ‘anchor institutions’, key civic partners, drivers of local economic demand and sources of leading-edge research and development (Birch et al., 2013; Goddard et al., 2014). The governance requirements for civic engagement are well understood as is the balance between academic freedom and the ‘third role’ of universities (Kantanen, 2005). Nonetheless, the role of universities in local and regional public policymaking in England has until recently remained relatively under-developed and resourced. New developments include the growth of dedicated public policy institutes in the universities, national funding streams for policy-related research, support for knowledge-transfer to public authorities and specific targets for devolving research and innovation funding outside of London and the South-East, including through the creation of local policy innovation partnerships (Metro Dynamics, 2022). In some regions, these partnerships have become formalised, for example, the London Research and Policy Partnership, which aims to promote joint working between London's academic research community and policy community. Important co-investments have also been made in data hubs and policy observatories, such as the West Midlands Regional Economic Development Institute. The trailblazer deals for GMCA and WMCA extend data sharing and data partnerships and give the Combined Authorities new rights to articulate their priorities for regional research and innovation spending (DLUHC, 2023a, 2023b).

Our interviews highlighted a continuum of effective engagement between universities and Combined Authorities. In the smaller, newer Combined Authorities, such as WECA, engagement on policy development was sporadic and uneven. CPCA is an exception, where there have been strong spill-over effects of the independent actions of Cambridge University and the local business community in setting up a forum for research and policy analysis, Cambridge Ahead, resulting in benefits for the Combined Authority. This ‘free rider’ effect from the Cambridge Ahead programme could be considered an idiosyncratic impact of the unique economic geography and circumstances of the region.

In the larger Combined Authorities, the relationship between the regional governmental bodies and the universities is more effective. As one interviewee noted for their region:

‘….there is a fairly sophisticated relationship with the universities and I’ve just commissioned - not externally, but just internally - a little review on universities and where we’re up to with all our different relationships, just as a kind of mapping, because there’s so many links ... So we’re trying to just map that at the moment just to understand precisely the nature of those relationships’.

The capacity of a university to engage with Combined Authorities must also be taken into account, which means that larger institutions tend to be best placed to collaborate:

‘we have pretty good links with all the universities, in Greater Manchester. So obviously probably the biggest links are with the University Manchester because it’s the biggest university’.

Despite progress in the area of civic engagement, there continues to be cultural, administrative, budgetary and governance constraints that exist between universities and Combined Authorities. As a consequence, in many cases these partnerships are driven by individuals. As one interviewee stated:

‘But in terms of the partnership with academics, it’s much more driven by the academic themselves so in both cases they approached us and said, “Hey, I might be able to kind of wrangle something with my university”’.

While partnerships between universities and public authorities have developed, there are also disconnects between university and community research priorities (Harris, 2021). This is apparent in the slow process of developing engagement:

‘So there is an issue on the stakeholder sides because they still can’t work together or they’re still in the process of learning how to work together. And so they do commission work from the university that feeds into …debate but is a bit disjointed’.

Ultimately, however, officials in all the Combined Authorities in our research understood that universities are a necessary condition for innovation and economic development in their regions. As one official interviewed made clear:

‘So we recognize that the universities play a very strong part of the ecosystem in terms of developing innovation, economic growth, research and development, where we can seed or co-invest in those activities’.

Citizen engagement and relationships with Whitehall and Westminster

In the Combined Authorities studied in this research, there has been little if any development of the deliberative or participatory democratic institutions increasingly used in local government in England, and by cities and sub-national governments around the world (OECD, 2023). None had convened a Citizens’ Assembly or engaged residents in participatory budgeting, for example. Only WMCA appears to have taken a systematic approach to developing structured forms of community engagement in policymaking, beyond standard consultation exercises and stakeholder panels. While the recent Trailblazer deals committed WMCA and GMCA mayors to attending regular ‘Question Time’ sessions answering public questions and to be held to account by regional MPs in specially convened House of Commons committees, these forms of accountability do not extend participatory or deliberative democracy.

In part, this reflects the political culture of institutional leaders. In Greater Manchester, for example, one interviewee remarked that there ‘doesn’t seem much appetite locally, particularly from politicians for the sorts of citizens’ forum approach to things. I think if I’m honest…there’s a view of “we’re elected to take those decisions. That’s our job…not handing it over to some other group of citizens”… That’s how they put it’. Another factor is that constituent local authorities in the Combined Authorities see citizen engagement as their core responsibility, or as one expert interviewee put it, ‘there was some resistance in the local authorities themselves to the idea that the Combined Authority should be, for example making lots of decisions that have a kind of day-to-day impact on their own citizens, because the councils …should be doing that, so they should be doing the deliberative democracy, the localized decision making about community budgets and so on’.

Since Combined Authorities have relatively little policy discretion and focus primarily on delivery of programmes and budgets determined in negotiation with Whitehall, the scope for citizen-led determination of policy objectives is significantly constrained. However, the lack of structured processes for citizen engagement may also bear testimony to the institutional histories of the creation of Combined Authorities, which involved elite decision-making processes between city leaders and politicians and civil servants in London, with very little public consultation or involvement (Lowndes and Lemprière, 2018). The original ‘devolution deals’ were largely negotiated behind closed doors (Richards and Smith, 2015). In their lack of local democratic innovation, Combined Authorities arguably replicate this approach to governance.

Conversely, relationships between Combined Authority officials and Whitehall departments are regular and highly structured. One GMCA official noted that there are ‘literally, everyday conversations happening with them’ and ‘it feels a bit, sometimes in a good way, we’re part of the same team with them, and we’re trying to sort out Greater Manchester and they’re trying to sort out the government end’. Each of the Combined Authorities had established mechanisms in place for liaising and negotiating with Whitehall, while in both WMCA and GMCA officials noted how the relocation of officials outside London had created opportunities for networking and mutual learning.

Nonetheless, as one expert interviewee noted, in a centralised system of governance, it will become increasingly difficult for Whitehall officials to manage the necessary levels of interaction with a growing number of Combined Authorities: ‘obviously government finds it easier to deal with a fewer number of places. And so I guess one obvious question for them will be, whilst logically it might make sense to have a more, to have a framework that covers all of the country…, the problem with that in a very centralized system, unless the centralized system really substantially changes is that Whitehall would find it a lot harder to engage with you know, thirty places than it will with five or six. There will be a kind of a Premier League and sort of Championship League as you were of devolved areas’. To this end, the Trailblazer deals promised more resources for Mayoral scrutiny and audit committees.

Discussion and conclusion

Our study has found significant inequalities between the policy development and R&D capacities of the English Combined Authorities, reflecting institutional histories, as well as differences in size and functional responsibilities consistent with the understanding of path dependency and economies of scale. Policy and R&D are stronger where the Combined Authority inherited capacities and infrastructures from PTEs and Metropolitan County Councils. Combined Authorities that have not inherited such capacities struggle to create it. Some utilise external research and policy support, but their links to universities are often weaker than in the larger and better resourced Combined Authorities. This is not aided by the relative infancy of research budget devolution and the creation of policy support funding by the Research Councils. Independent think-tanks play an important role in developing new policy agendas, advocating for regional interests and providing a public platform for Mayors to advance their ‘power of place’, but they are concentrated in capital cities of the UK’s nations and Greater Manchester, reinforcing a pronounced ‘Matthew Effect’ by which to those that have more, more shall be given.

Our research evidence is limited to a descriptive assessment of these inequalities in capacity, and further research is needed on how policy R&D capacity and advocacy are marshalled into effective capabilities and impact. Yet it is readily apparent that, even among the success stories of the devolution vanguard, such as Greater Manchester, the need for greater capacity, commensurate with strong devolved government, is evident. Officials in these authorities remain largely engaged in transactional policy development and delivery with Whitehall departments, often on a siloed basis. English devolution remains highly circumscribed, and powers are still largely concentrated at the centre, particularly in the Treasury (Brown, 2022). The traditions of ‘power hoarding’ and centralised statecraft of the English state remain unchanged. These traditions are reflected in the governance of Combined Authorities themselves – participatory citizen engagement or deliberative democracy is almost entirely absent, and policy development takes place with Whitehall Ministers and their officials behind closed doors.

Notwithstanding these conclusions, there are discernible vectors for change. Some Mayors have used their soft power and advocacy roles to exploit emergent forms of democratic and civic identity in their city-regions. Their visibility has allowed them to take root in the public imagination. Meanwhile, the extension of devolution across England, and the shift to single settlement funding for some Combined Authorities, may presage a more consistent shift in power and resources than hitherto imagined possible. This offers the potential for improved policy capacities to translate into a stronger devolved government, rather than greater capacity for transacting with Whitehall.

The ability to harness new forms of city and pan-regional identity and to articulate the claims of defined territories also depends on whether Mayors can draw upon historical sources of meaning and belonging in England, as well as craft expressions of emergent public and civic cultures. This task of political leadership is made harder when the boundaries of a Combined Authority bear little resemblance to historic local identities, or indeed cut across these, and where political divisions make the forging of unifying civic identity difficult – as is often the case in mixed urban and rural Combined Authorities. Government policy recognises the tension here, arguing that new devolution deals should be based on ‘geographies that are locally recognisable in terms of identity, place and community, as well as being sensible economic areas that join up where people live and work’ (DLUHC, 2022: 137). But in practice, that means that devolution to Combined Authorities – and the ability of Metro Mayors to articulate new forms of political and civic identity to harness the opportunities it brings – will be asymmetrically distributed between city-regions with clear functional economic areas and strong civic identities and local areas where economics, politics and identity pull in different directions.

This is a long-standing problem with proposals for English devolution: a functional and coherent division of the country into standardised regions, as was attempted in the 1990s, cuts against both city- or county-based forms of identity and attachment and sensible economic geographies, yet a more pragmatic, politically driven policy framework risks incoherence, coordination problems and political instability (Diamond et al., 2023). Our study draws attention to the inequalities of policy capacity and advocacy in the existing Combined Authority areas; the wider, longer-term challenge is how an incremental and asymmetric approach to devolved governance in England can overcome geographic and economic inequalities, rather than cementing them.