Arrogant Prescott ignores scathing regions report

...and even his own office says he has got it wrong on the regions
By Brendan Carlin, Political Correspondent
Daily Telegraph
(Filed: 25/03/2006)

The Deputy Prime Minister's dream of regional government has been severely criticised by a report from his own department, it was disclosed last night.
John Prescott's cherished hope of creating elected assemblies across England was destroyed in 2004 when a referendum in the North-East overwhelmingly rejected the idea. Now a report commissioned by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister has issued a damning verdict of the remaining tier of unelected regional assemblies and other agencies.

The Tories claimed the embarrassing report had been "quietly slipped out" just before the Budget but was proof that "John Prescott's wasteful and unwanted regional empires must be scrapped".

The study, English Regional Governance in 2004, suggested that the existence of regional development agencies made no real impact on the North/South economic divide.
"The recent strengthening of regional governance arrangements and the proliferation of regional strategies and programmes appeared to have made no discernible difference to long-run patterns of uneven regional development in England," the study reported.

Mr Prescott, who was badly bruised by the scale of the rejection of an elected body in the North-East, was also told that there was no real public enthusiasm for the rest of the regional apparatus.
"Existing regional agencies were found to have achieved very little visibility, credibility or legitimacy in the eyes of a representative sample of regional electorates. At the same time, there was little confidence that an ERA [elected regional assembly] would make a substantial difference," said the report, overseen by Salford University.

The study also hinted at an explanation for lack of public enthusiasm, disclosing that it had "found a bewildering variety of programmes, each with their own sponsors, funding regimes, time-scales, key partners, delivery arrangements, targets and procedures for monitoring, auditing and evaluation".
The ODPM said last night that the report was outdated and indicated that Mr Prescott's enthusiasm for devolving power from Whitehall was undiminished.
"The field work undertaken for this research is now two years old," said a spokesman. "The world has moved on since then."

Too right it has ... there is now even less support, if that were at all possible!