The UK Productivity-Governance Puzzle: Are the UK’s Governing Institutions Fit for Purpose in the 21st Century?

This research strand examines the ways in which UK governance institutions have changed over the last forty years. It critically engages with the nature and balance in central-local governing arrangements, asking whether the latter has the appropriate tools and resources to effectively integrate key policy responsibilities/resources in ways that would allow it to tackle particular local/regional or national productivity puzzles.

This is a key element of the Institutions and Governance theme and focuses on the principal claim that improvements in UK productivity are constrained, in part, by a range of governance pathologies: overcentralised decision-making; top-downism; short-termism; siloised policy-making; and the absence of effective joined-up government. It suggests that an essential element of tackling economic inequalities and uneven/low productivity requires the reform of an over-dominant centre, in conjunction with the development of a coherent, stable and adequately resourced institutional approach to local and regional government and to the devolved nations.

The project looks at how central government mitigates against the tackling of regional productivity; in particular, how the Treasury’s focus on financial control and macro-economic policy means that the variegated needs of localities and the particular requirements of regions are not properly accounted for.

Hence a key contention of the project is that regions do not have the means to develop integrated training and transport infrastructure necessary to tackle their particular productivity problems. The focus on a market driven trade and finance macro-economic policy has prevented the development of a locally based productivity drive adapted to the particular needs of regions.

Output

• Rebuilding local democracy: the accountability challenge in English devolution
• The accountability challenge in English devolution
• The challenges of Levelling Up: a critical examination of funding and governance
• Levelling Up the UK: If not the Conservatives, will Labour Learn the Lessons from Past Policy Failings?
• ‘Hyper-active incrementalism’ and the Westminster system of governance: Why spatial policy has failed over time
• The challenge of devolved English governance and the rise of political spatial inequality
• ‘Crisis what crisis?’ Understanding the recurring problems of the British state
• The asymmetric power model 20 years on
• Five ways the budget shows Rachel Reeves is thinking long-term more than the Tories ever did
• Labour’s first budget: redistribution away from the rich after over a decade of Conservative rule
• Change and Continuity in British Politics: Can the Starmer Government’s Approach to Governance Resolve the Crisis in the British State without Radical Reform?
• The intersection of productivity and governance capacity in spatial inequality: the case of England’s devolution periphery
• An end to the policy ‘merry-go-round’? Labour’s new industrial strategy and the pathologies of British policymaking
• ‘Wholesale privatisation and global competition’: The end of traditional steelmaking in Britain

Project leads Dave Richards, Andy Westwood (The University of Manchester), Michael Kenny (University of Cambridge), Patrick Diamond (Queen Mary University of London)

Collaborators Darcy Luke, Nathan Critch (The University of Manchester)

Former Collaborators Jack Newman, Sam Warner (University of Bristol)