Why Cooperate in City (Region) Deals? Local Government Cooperation in England After 2010

In response to the high levels of centralisation in England, the coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats launched the City Deal and City Region Deal initiative in 2010. The initiative was framed as an offer for more local autonomy and decision-making powers for local governments and councils. The offer includes access to additional funding from the central government, the transfer of planning and spending powers in areas such as transport, infrastructure or skills training as well as the opportunity to retain income generated from economic growth and business rates. In exchange, local authorities interested in signing a City Deal are required to improve accountability in the form of joined up governance between local councils and for City Region Deals to form a Combined Authority with a directly elected metro-mayor. In consequence, local authorities have to cooperate with each other in order to sign a City Deal, agree on spending priorities collectively for the covered territory and population as well as take spending decisions jointly under the remit of the deal. The access to additional funding also comes at the price of signing up to the Conservative Government’s goal of private sector growth and efficient and effective governance. Ten years later, one third of the 326 local authorities in England are part of a city deal and ten combined authorities have been created, eight of them with a directly elected metro-mayor for the region. On the one hand, local governments are offered the opportunity to draft city deal proposal based on local needs, priorities and economic circumstances. At the same time, they have to agree to give up some autonomy when creating jointly managed boards for future decision-making, spending, service delivery and implementation monitoring. This paper takes local authorities as unit of analysis and asks: What explains the participation of local authorities in the offered city deals or city regions deals? What makes local governments opt against joining in a deal or for participating in a combined authority? We argue that party politics is less useful for explaining the participation than a history of cooperation experiences. The analysis raises questions about path dependency of cooperation, the role of economic factors and the innovative potential of these new deals.