Peter O'Brien

City Deals, Decentralisation and the Governance of Local Infrastructure Funding and Financing in the UK

This article reflects upon a comparative analysis of the 28 ‘City Deals’ agreed between UK government, Scottish government and city-regional groupings in England and Scotland since 2011. The City Deals have sought to incentivise local actors to identify and prioritise ‘asks’ of UK and devolved governments, fund, finance and deliver infrastructure and other economic development interventions, and to reform city/city-region governance structures to ‘unlock’ urban growth. Our analysis is based upon 32 in-depth interviews with lead actors in the City Deals, including elected officials from local government, central government officials and policy specialists from think tanks, as well as a secondary literature review. We find that City Deals are reworking the role of the UK state internally and through changed central-local and intra-local (city-regional) relations. Regional and urban public policy is being recast as a process of deal-making founded upon territorial competition and negotiation between central national and local actors unequally endowed with information and resources, leading to highly imbalanced and inequitable outcomes across the UK. As a template for public policymaking in an emergent and decentralising context, deal-making raises substantive and unresolved issues for governance in the UK that are especially pertinent as the new Conservative government at Westminster pledges to widen and broaden this approach as a central component of its future devolution strategy and policy.

Obstacles to participation in randomised cancer clinical trials: a systematic review of the literature

Accrual to clinical trials continues to be a problem in many countries including Australia despite its fundamental importance to the progress of evidence‐based medicine. This paper reviews the current literature addressing the obstacles to accrual excluding those related to protocol design. An electronic search of the literature identified publications in oncology specifically addressing the obstacles to participation in clinical trials. This search was supplemented by searches of key oncology journals. Obstacles fall into three main categories – clinician, patient and system; however, there are overlaps between categories. Clinician behaviour is the most important of these. Exclusion of patients for reasons other than defined eligibility criteria, concerns about increased time requirements, and suboptimal communication with patients all affect accrual. Risk management strategies for clinical trials need to be individualised to address the obstacles most likely to negatively impact on accrual. Communication between clinician and patient appears to be a greater issue than previously recognised. Time concerns need to be addressed as generational change affects the expectations of the medical workforce.

Austerity states, institutional dismantling and the governance of sub-national economic development: the demise of the regional development agencies in England

ABSTRACT Austerity states, institutional dismantling and the governance of sub-national economic development: the demise of the regional development agencies in England. Territory, Politics, Governance. Contributing to interpretations of the governance geographies of austerity, the paper explains how, why and in what forms austerity states are constructed by actors in particular political-economic contexts and geographical and temporal settings, how and by whom they are articulated and pursued, and how they are worked through public policy and institutional and territorial architectures. Empirically, the focus is explaining the UK Government and its abolition and closure of the regional development agencies in England. First, a more qualitative and plural conception of austerity states is developed to question singular and/or monolithic notions of state types and their transitions, and to better reflect the particularities of how state projects are configured and unfolded by actors within political-economic variegations of capitalism. Second, a more geographically sensitive approach and appreciation of (re)scaling are detailed to incorporate and extend beyond the predominantly national frame and decentralizing narratives deployed in current accounts. Last, a historically literate interpretation of institutional dismantling is advanced better to explain the politics and restructuring of institutional landscapes by actors within austerity states.

Trade Unions in Local and Regional Development and Governance: The Northern Trades Union Congress in North East England

From a position of relative isolation, trade unions have become increasingly important agents in local and regional development and governance in the UK since the election of the New Labour government in 1997. Analysis of the experience of the Northern Trades Union Congress (NTUC) suggests that devolution and regionalisation are exerting increasing pressures upon trade union federations to adopt a multi-level approach to organisation across a range of scales—local, sub-regional, regional, sub-national, national and international—to connect with the evolving multi-layered governance structures of the UK political economy. Strategic multi-level organisation suggests the decentralisation of power, authority and resources within the labour movement—challenging the national and centralised legacy of its collective bargaining history—and a division of labour and set of priorities at the different scales to build the links between local and regional engagement and trade union renewal.

The TUC and New Labour's ‘Regional Fix’

Abstract This article contributes to the growing literature on ‘labour geography’ by exploring the engagement of trade unions in regional development and governance. The context is New Labours ‘re-scaling’ of governance in the UK and the parallel drive to encourage socio-institutional partnerships’, ‘networks’ and ‘coalitions’ to deliver local and regional policy. Through a detailed appraisal of the British Trades Union Congress (TUC), the article illustrates how labour cultures and traditions, working within emergent regional institutional space, acts as an enabler and constraint on union capacity to intervene in broader economic, social and political praxis. As a consequence, the TUCs response to devolution and regionalisation has, to date, been uneven. The article suggests that the British trade union movement wilt have to sanction further re-scaling of TUC structure and activity if trade unions are to develop an influential role within the UKs evolving and multi-level economy, society and polity.