local government structure

ESRC: The Government’s commitment to ‘localism’ is likely to fail unless Whitehall departments can shed a deep-rooted culture of centralism, a new study suggests

The Regional Funding Allocations (RFAs) were introduced to enable English regions to have more control over spending decisions and to co-ordinate key policies better. The scheme failed to deliver the flexibility regional economies need to become more competitive the evidence, based on research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) at Bristol University, shows. However, the experience of RFAs can help Government understand the barriers to the current ‘localism’ agenda.