Does England’s regional economic rebalancing need a stronger centre and national policy?

Few people have chronicled the long arc of English regional development as assiduously as Peter Hetherington. Journalist, author, former Guardian Regional Affairs Editor, and past Chair of the Town & Country Planning Association (TCPA), Peter has spent decades documenting the widening chasm between Whitehall’s devolution rhetoric and the lived reality of England's towns and cities. In this episode, Peter offers a bracing assessment of a governance landscape in flux. He describes a nation grappling with the endemic regional inequalities, the glaring absence of a national spatial strategy, and a political timidity that keeps England trapped in cycles of incrementalism.

Whilst LED Confidential has tended towards welcoming the Starmer Government’s signature devolution policies, but tended to worry about commitment, consistency and longevity of delivery, Peter is much more sceptical. He sees radical reform of the national tier as a precondition to making a serious dent in endemic regional inequalities and to authentic devolution. It’s a controversial take, at odds with many of our episodes and perhaps our own perspectives. Have a look at these five key takeaways and let us know what you think.

1. Devolution requires a strong centre – not a centralised one: Peter advocates Treasury as a proper economic – rather than a fiscal department; a revamped MHCLG as an England Department of Regions; a new National Regeneration Agency with regional tasking and targets; with a generational (20-30 year) multi-party commitment, underpinned by national spatial and land use strategies, taking ‘bold interventionist bets on the North’…

   
   

2. Radical repurposing of local government – Peter sees detaching dominant Care financial demands from local government into integrated Health and Care Board. This will liberate LAs from Austerity 2.0 to focus on development and placemaking – with multi-layered, multi-tiered collaboration knitting different purposes and wider determinants agendas together.

   
   

3. Taking the politics out of regional and local fiscal transfers – He proposes a “Territorial Expenditure Board” to oversee sub-national transfers to intermediate and local tiers across the whole of England – ensuring the resources are available to deliver the priority regional outcomes and convergence sought.

   
   

4. Making better use of Crown Estates – a first for LED Confidential. Could the assets and capabilities of Crown Estates be deployed alongside Homes England as part of Peter’s new National Regeneration Agency?

   
   

5. Getting the optics and messaging of devolution much better – Peter is highly sceptical of Starmer and Treasury’s commitment to shifting powers and resources for authentic regional rebalancing out of London and the Greater South East. He points to progressing Lower Thames Crossing alongside delaying the West Yorkshire Metro, to championing a nationally led Oxford to Cambridge Growth Corridor whilst expecting Northern Mayors to find their own pathways to Northern reinvention. He bemoans the reluctance to bring Burnham back to Westminster as the first Minister of the new English Regions department as a genuine political heavyweight championing these agendas.

There is much more in this episode. Listen to Peter’s reflections on rural England, food security and climate crisis; to his anticipation of an updated prospectus and manifesto for regionalism from our colleagues in Newcastle and Cambridge – among many others.

Concluding remarks

Controversial and challenging, listening back to the episode, perhaps we should have questioned more vigorously Peter’s positivity about the pre-2010 sub-national architecture, his omissions of democratic deficits or fiscal devolution. However, as an alternative lens for a muscular strategy for regional rebalancing, there is a lot in this episode. And if we are going to argue against it, what are our big-ticket alternatives? And should we restrict our debates to delivering Starmer and Reeves’ asymmetric and incremental approaches better and quicker?

You tell us! Feedback welcome and particularly necessary.

Further reading

Work referenced in the episode

1. Fothergill, S. (2026). The Dismantling of British Regional Policy. Industrial Communities Alliance

2. Hetherington, P. (2025). The Crumbs from the South critique of UK infrastructure spending. The Guardian.

3. Hetherington, P. (2015). Whose land is our land? The use and abuse of UK’s forgotten acres, Policy Press  and Land Renewed: Reworking the countryside, Bristol University Press, 2021 – present Peter’s critiques of land use policies and practice

4. Ron Martin, Andy, Pike, John Tomaney et al. (2024), Lessons from the History of Regional Development Policy in the UK, British Academy

5. Town and Country Planning Association, 2006. Connecting England: Final Report of the Hetherington Commission – a summary of a more historical piece referenced in the podcast