One Region

We (all councillors) had a briefing about the creation of a North East Combined Authority, which was then approved by the seven councils involved* and announced this week.

In a region which overwhelmingly rejected regional government this must raise questions.

The answer is that the plan is not to create another tier of government but instead the seven councils are combining their economic and transport roles. The reason for doing this is to benefit from scale, to avoid teh adjacent councils wasting money and effort competing against each oother for resources and most importantly to benefit from the Government's intention to proviude funding at a regional level to promote growth. Other parts of the country have either formed such a Combined Authority - Manchester - or are planning to - Leeds and Sheffield.

The Authority will not (at least initially) have a central staff or process. It will be run by the Chief Executives and Leaders of the seven councils and they will focus on the detailed Independent Economic Review of the NE chaired by Lord Adonis, which contained some relevant and helpful ideas. The economic and transport agenda will work in partnership with the Local Enterprise Partnership, a group largely run by business.

This is one of those things that everyone thinks is A Good Thing: all parties supported it. Northumberland and Durham have an effective opt out from local transport issues - transport funding will continue to be largely detrimined by the County, but we will have input into strategic issues which should help given the importance of the Newcastle hub. But I think there are two problems with the structure:
- can you think of another sensible, small scale group set up by Governments to benefit from economies of scale? And yet which over the years developed its own infrastructure and grew beyond the ability of the individual entities to control it? Yes, the EU. It would be easy for this to develop into something beyond democratic control.
- and this risk is made by the fact that there's no ability to leave the authority without the whole thing being wound up. It's always a mistake to start soemthing without thinking about how it can be stopped.

So overall, I think in the short to medium term this will be a good thing that will improve economic growth, But I suspect in the long term we'll regret it.


* Northumberland, Durham, Newcastle, Gateshead, S Tyneside, N Tyneside and Sunderland