Before the promise of local and regional devolution and integrated funding settlements, when money came in competitive pots with the criteria written in Whitehall, the shape of your programme was somebody else’s fault and the honest appraisal was somebody else’s job.

When the money arrives as a block and your own authority decides what goes where, the shape of your programme and appraisal of success or failure become yours.

Funnily enough, the decision making stages and criteria are the same – what the market failure is, what happens if nothing changes, why this function performs better at strategic authority scale than at departmental scale in London.

Here is the uncomfortable part. Nothing on the devolution timetable makes anyone better at the job of project and service design, and importantly – delivery.

A date when the integrated settlement pot goes live does not improve an appraisal. Merging eleven councils into two does not teach a team to read its own labour market, or to hold a developer to a delivery date, or to tell an investment that would have happened anyway from one that would not.

We have been here before, twice, and recently. The regional development agencies were abolished in 2012. Local enterprise partnerships were wound up and their functions absorbed into local government in 2024. Each time the architecture changed. Each time the knowledge held by the people inside it was scattered rather than transferred. This is the third rebuild in fifteen years and – again – nobody has budgeted for the handover.

So if the intent is genuinely transformational, the work is at the boring end.

First, establish precisely which of the key ED competences your authority actually holds and which it doesn’t but needs.

Second, build the capability to write a request to Whitehall before you need to write one.

Third, treat institutional memory as an asset during reorganisation. Honestly folks – the kinds of capabilities and knowledge combined authorities need now – I used to work in agencies that developed and built them in the 1990s and early 2000s.

None of that will appear in a restructuring plan. All of it determines whether the new structures do anything the old ones could not.

Read more about the handbook at www.lredhandbook.com

UK Paperback edition out now on The Great British Bookshop September Promo Edition (use coupon code 44710-SEPT20) 20% off the retail price! see https://shop.bookvault.app/cart/?add-to-cart=186622

EBOOK EDITION OUT NOW (£20)! See https://members.economicdevelopment.world/books for more details.

#EconomicDevelopment #LocalGovernment #Devolution #PublicPolicy #Leadership