Published: 06 October 2015

Key recommendations of the report include:

1. We recommend that Government should champion devolution to Key Cities to help reconceive the relationship between large and small cities and support the latter’s case for a different kind of economic role. The diversity and agility of medium sized cities enables them to do things more quickly and flexibly than larger cities and allows a wider range of approaches to be developed and trialled.
2. Key Cities should be allowed greater freedoms and flexibilities, supported by national policies – for example to scale up and broaden the existing ‘Catapult’ model for accelerated research and development into wider supply chain creation – to maximise their distinct assets, to pursue effective local economic strategies, and to collaborate across shared sectors in different locations (for example Nissan in Sunderland and Rolls Royce in Derby) to help foster an environment conducive to growing similar sectors in different towns. This linkage by sector could make a valuable economic contribution to the cities that specialise in comparable areas (like advanced automotive manufacture or bio-sciences) and the UK.
3. The new Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill should allow the flexibility for devolution on varying scales and footprints but should not link the quanta of devolution to the size of recipient.
4. Key Cities should seek to combine with neighbouring authorities on the basis of boundaries which correspond with present patterns of human activity and according to a robust understanding of their functional economic market area, including travel to work patterns, housing markets, and the extent to which the supply chains for major industrial sectors form a coherent ecosystem. This will test the degree to which Key Cities are ‘self-contained’.
5. Key Cities that are also part of large city regions should seek to work as part of these metro structures, especially with regard to issues relating to the region’s wider economic footprint and where decision making and functional activity tend towards coordination at a higher spatial level. But for some public services (schools, children’s services, health and social care) where these matters more likely speak to the city or even the lower neighbourhood level we recommend that Key Cities should seek greater levels of control, negotiating the most significant devolution deals possible.
6. Key Cities that do not form part of large major metro areas should seek to establish linkages with their nearest conurbations. Even the smallest, most geographically isolated or most self-contained of Key Cities should ‘reach out’ and develop stronger linkages with their nearest neighbouring places.
7. Governance structures should reflect economic geography and Key Cities should commit to strengthening local governance and accountability with the options to create combined authorities and directly elected Mayors, or alternative models here appropriate. This should include greater freedom for some Key Cities to work across a wide range of administrative boundaries and governance structures – district, county, region – according to the relative functions of the city to its wider geography and patterns of human activity.
8. Government should allow cities the facility to fashion alternative governance models not currently on the statute books, and the Cities and Local Government Devolution Bill should be amended to enable this.
9. The relationship of LEPs to Key Cities should be clarified and strengthened particularly the governance and accountability arrangements for LEPs as a possible conduit of future funding and investment.
10. Key Cities are called upon to look for more open and collaborative models that could complement and extend the traditional democratic structures that currently are insisted upon by government as a necessary corollary to city based devolution. Increasing popular participation is vital for city renewal.
11. Following the first Comprehensive Spending Review, Government should agree five year funding settlements with cities. This should be based on an initial core package of economic powers with the facility for cities to negotiate bespoke enhancements to their City Deals on an incremental basis.
12. To facilitate this process and to provide transparency and a joint framework between cities and central government departments, we support and call once more for the establishment of an independent devolutionary body, which we term a Devolution Agency. This agency could also become a site for the exchange of best practice and advice and co-ordination. Given the sums that could be saved by devolution – this body through transmitting best practice could save considerable sums of public money and make it available for re-investment.
13. Key Cities should commit to working with such a body in a co-ordinated and collaborative way, in effect to speak with one voice, if government can commit to the same.
14. Key Cities should be given a greater level of fiscal and spending control to incentivise economic growth and efficiency savings across all public services.
15. We call for the introduction of a ‘power to direct’, as recommended by the Elphicke-House Review, to make it easier for local government to bring other public land, including nationally held assets, into use.
16. A ‘Right to Challenge’, which currently exists in the Localism Act 2011 to challenge services provided by local authorities should also exist for those local authorities and their residents to challenge central services where they too fail. We believe citizens should have the right to petition for local authority takeover of failing central services, and competent authorities should also have the ability to initiate this process themselves. We would want to avoid needless conflict but the spirit of devolution should allow local government to ’yellow’ and ‘red card’ ineffective central public agencies and if the services failed to reform directly intervene in the direction, commissioning, and where appropriate, the delivery and integration of these services. This process should be judged by an independent agency.