Devolution in the North East

In May, the North East Mayoral Combined Authority will elect its first metro mayor, creating one of the largest, and potentially most important, devolved authorities in England. This is taking place 20 years on from the failure of the last Labour government to get local people in the North East to agree to its plans for a new model of regional government. This time around, a modest system of devolved administration – in the North East and some other parts of England – will be in place should Labour win the upcoming general election (as current polling suggests it will). How the party understands and responds to the challenges that its predecessors failed to surmount will say much about its competence and strategic priorities in relation to the grand challenge of English devolution.

Reflecting on the long history of regional policymaking in relation to the North East, helps us to understand the factors that have made the establishment of an effective and legitimate model of government in this area so difficult. A sense of this history also alerts us to the challenges associated with extending devolution across England more generally.

Three key factors have long shaped the North East's distinctive political culture: an entrenched pattern of economic underperformance relative to England's more affluent South East; a widely felt sense of disillusionment with the prevailing model and outcomes of the UK's parliamentary government; and a historically ingrained sense of pan-regional identity, which has long sat in tension with strong local attachments to the key cities within its jurisdiction, and rivalries between them.

The rooted and distinctive sense of identity can ultimately be traced back to the medieval Kingdom of Northumbria – itself an unusually semi-autonomous entity within a relatively centralised English polity.1 A strong sense of affiliation to this geographical area was passed into the industrial era and maintained too by a distinctive local dialect and the relative geographical isolation of the area.2

However, over the past century, the North East's economic prospects have steadily deteriorated, so that the region is now, on many different metrics, rated as one of the poorest parts of the UK. These failings are rooted in the notable underperformance of its main cities, Newcastle and Sunderland, on metrics such as productivity, businesses per capita and wages, all of which are below the national average.3 Economic geographers often refer to the damaging impact of the poor economic performance of the UK's ‘second tier’ cities, and those in the North East sit at the bottom end of that category – generating remarkably few spillover benefits for those towns that sit on their edges.4 This economic divergence between the North East and wealthier parts of the UK has become a live political issue in recent years. Support for Brexit was marked, as 58% of the population, the third highest regional total, voted to leave the EU in 2016 and, in 2019, the Conservative party won 10 out of 29 seats in the region, a striking result in an area that, in recent decades, Labour considered a stronghold.

The widespread appeal of Euroscepticism in the North East, and the apparent break in the history of Labour's political hegemony in 2019, are in part reflections of a deep sense of disenchantment with the UK's system of centralised government and the outcomes it has generated for this region. Various polls have highlighted the profound emotional distance that exists from the politics and culture of metropolitan London, which has served to bolster the collective self-identity of the ‘Geordie Nation’ and entrench a contrarian political culture that is sceptical of grand plans that emerge from the UK centre (exemplified by the high-profile ‘metric martyrs’ campaign and the election of Hartlepool United football club's monkey mascot as town's mayor in 2002).5

It is striking that a strong sense of distinctive identity, industrial decline and a growing disillusionment with central government were also some of the key ingredients in the establishment of devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales. But in the North East, there has been no comparable drive towards self-government. The story here is of repeated failures by the British state to establish institutions that represent the region's political and economic interests in ways that are seen as legitimate and coherent from below.

Proposals for the establishment of a North East assembly date back as far as 1912, with the regional Labour party a long-term supporter of such a project.6 Central government focused on the North East as a distinct region in the interwar years, and the North East Development Board was established in 1935 – an initiative that was designed to bring various local authorities together to help develop proposals for economic growth.7 The existence of this body, and the various regional development organisations that were established in subsequent decades, reflected a continuous concern at Westminster about the fate and future of the North East economy.8 However, regional policies before and after the Second World War were developed in Whitehall without recourse to the idea of devolving power and decision-making to the region or its main cities.

The next major chapter of local administration began with the establishment of the Tyne and Wear County Council (TWCC) in 1972, which aimed to coordinate the metropolitan councils of Gateshead, Newcastle Upon Tyne, North Tyneside, South Tyneside and Sunderland, and was part of a wider move to establish a suite of middle-tier governance in England's key cities. With few policy levers available to them, these councils functioned in effect as ‘conurbation-level strategic authorities’.9 Throughout its short history, the TWCC was hamstrung by what many regarded as its incoherent geography and deep-seated convictions that it was skewed towards the interests of Tyneside.10 The TWCC, and its counterparts elsewhere, were abolished by the Thatcher government in 1986.

There were different attempts to establish some form of region-wide governance in the decade that followed. The Campaign for a Northern Assembly (CNA) – a grassroots, anti-Thatcher movement, which sought greater decentralisation for the area – emerged in the early 1990s and was soon followed by the more technocratic North East Constitutional Convention (NECC), which sought to make the economic case for a regional assembly.11 These organisations were aligned with the new political tailwinds, as leading figures in the New Labour governments (particularly Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott) were keen proponents of devolution to the English regions. The establishment of Regional Development Agencies, business-led boards with the aim of boosting regional economies, was viewed at the time as the opening salvo of a wider regionalist drive, a project that was also influenced by EU policy in the 1990s.

The intended conclusion of this agenda was the establishment of directly elected regional assemblies. These bodies would not have been analogous to those established in Scotland and Wales and would have possessed significantly fewer responsibilities and less control over spending.12 The idea was for popular referendums to be held to legitimate their establishment, and the North East was chosen by the government as the first place where one should be held, on the assumption that its cohesive identity and Labour orientation would guarantee success in a popular vote.13 These plans were spectacularly derailed as the vote was lost by 78 per cent to 22 per cent. The most credible explanations of this result reference concerns about the potential costs of the new assembly and an ingrained scepticism towards the idea of another layer of politicians being established – sentiments that were cannily mobilised by the small band of campaigners who made up the ‘North East Says No’ campaign, including a young Dominic Cummings.14

The onset of a lengthy period of Conservative-led government after 2010 meant the dismantling of Labour's regionalist agenda and the emergence of a different model of devolved governance, which focused on functional economic geographies around city-regions, and a firm belief in the merits of directly elected mayors.15 But, until now, the North East has proved stubbornly resistant to this agenda. Proposals for a North East Combined Authority (not including Tees Valley, which was granted its own body) collapsed in 2016 following disagreements between various local authorities, leading to the establishment of a North of Tyne Combined Authority (composed of Newcastle, North Tyneside and Northumberland) that did not easily cohere as either a functional economic area or a jurisdiction that related to a sense of geographical identity (although its administration has some notable achievements to its name).16

Against this backdrop, the announcement in December 2022 of a new North East Mayoral Combined Authority (NEMCA) is striking, and a source of optimism in a region that needed the Johnson government's now-defunct levelling-up agenda more than most. Covering a population of almost 2 million people, and with an estimated annual spend in 2024/25 of £388 million, NEMCA will have significant responsibilities for transport infrastructure, skills provision and housing regeneration.17 The recent announcement that additional powers and funding will soon be passed to it, as the third ‘trailblazer’ authority announced by central government, reflects the hope among the governing party that this authority will quickly be seen to make a difference to the lives of its citizens.18

The failure to establish a model of regional governance for the North East, and the seemingly endless churn of policies associated with this task, have both had significant consequences for the region. These factors have been apparent in relation to other areas too, and have greatly inhibited the prospects of the development of long-term strategies for economic renewal in places outside London and the South East that might have been informed by a better understanding of local conditions and needs than has been available to Whitehall. Three other lessons can also be drawn from the North East experience.