Britain has been running the same experiment on its regional economies for forty years, and the results are in.

The institutional roll-call reads like a war memorial: development corporations, enterprise zones, urban programmes, TECs, Government Offices, RDAs, the Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, LEPs, the Regional Growth Fund, Growth Deals, City Deals, the Towns Fund, the Levelling Up Fund, the Shared Prosperity Fund. Each launched with conviction. Most are gone.

And the disparities they were set up to close remain among the widest in the developed world. Much of the UK population now lives in areas with living standards below those of the poorest American states.

If a medical treatment had this record, it would have been withdrawn decades ago.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: the reasons are not mysterious. Chronic misdiagnosis. Launching without deliberating. Under-resourcing so routine it amounts to a design principle. Funding fragmented into competitive pots. Institutions treated as consumables. And nobody ever accountable for the wreckage.

Every one of those reasons appears in evaluation reports going back decades – written, filed and ignored while the next initiative launched on the old pattern.

Do the same, get the same. The reasons for forty years of failure are documented, and they are mostly choices. I wrote a long report about it here https://lpiphub.bham.ac.uk/addressing-local-economic-disparities-learning-from-policy-failure-in-the-uk/

Different choices are available, and they start locally. This might help www.lredhandbook.com

This post is part of the prosperity in every postcode series. To deliver this – we need to be truly great at local and regional economic development. Follow me to get these posts prioritised in your LinkedIn newsfeed.

#EconomicDevelopment #RegionalDevelopment #UKEconomy #Devolution #PublicPolicy