Regional and territorial development policy after the 2016 EU referendum – Initial reflections and some tentative scenarios

Abstract

European regional policy evolved partly as a response to the distinctive needs of the UK following its accession to the then European Economic Community in the 1970s and remains a key and well-regarded ‘British contribution’ to the present-day European Union. Inspired by this rarely acknowledged reality and the aftermath of the UK’s European Union referendum in 2016, this paper first reflects on the position of regional policy within the wider ‘European Project’. It then outlines the material, symbolic and political impacts that European regional policy has had on Britain and its deprived regions and communities over the past four decades. The outcome of the UK’s 2016 European Union referendum is then reviewed from a territorial perspective, and some of the key spatial and placed-based contradictions which it embodies are unpacked. A reflection on the prospects for place-based policy in a post-European Union Britain then follows emphasising that the new context invites a reappraisal of the purposes and forms of regional development policy. Five tentative scenarios of the UK’s future relationship with European Union territorial development policy are then presented. The conclusion recalls the crucial role that European Union regional policy has played in UK regions and communities and calls for close attention to be paid over the coming years to the distributional territorial impacts of leaving the European Union.

Post-geography worlds, new dominions, left behind regions, and ‘other’ places: unpacking some spatial imaginaries of the UK’s ‘Brexit’ debate

“…less uneven) development of the EU (as captured by Kunzmann and Wegener's imaginary of the 'Bunch of Grapes' - Figure 4); a more competitive EU; more coherent alignment of EU policies and programmes in territorial terms; and, a cleaner and greener Europe (Abrahams, 2013;Waterhout, 2007). Yet despite the UK's role in establishing, and experience of, European regional policy (Sykes & Schulze-Bäing, 2017), Hague (2016) writing in the aftermath of the EU referendum, commented -'I doubt that the phrase "territorial cohesion" was ever uttered in the thousands of speeches and pamphlets' during the EU referendum.…”

“…As Rosamond notes 'The Anglo-liberal growth model arguably fell into crisis long before Brexit emerged as the dominant issue in British politics' (2018, p. 4) and uneven development has been one of the persistent manifestations of this. The potential loss of the EEC/EU's regional support structures, whose emergence partly reflected the needs of the 'left behind' parts of Britain and the UK's own traditions (from the 1930s onwards until the end of the 1970s) of regional policy (Sykes & Schulze-Bäing, 2017), gives an added inflexion to such issues.…”

Variegated Europeanization and urban policy: Dynamics of policy transfer in France, Italy, Spain and the UK

“…There is an inherent tension in the post-Brexit governance landscape in relation to urban policy. The three-way relations between cities, the national government and the EU that characterize EU Cohesion Policy will be severed, and power relations will realign between different scales of governance and territorial administrations, which will introduce new power asymmetries into urban policy (Sykes and Schulze Bäing, 2017). Research suggests that socio-spatial inequalities in the UK are set to worsen after Brexit, particularly in already declining areas that are less resilient in the face of economic shocks (Billing, McCann, and Ortega-Argilés, 2019).…”

The scale of the century? – the new city regionalism in England and some experiences from Liverpool

“…The 'great majority of available evidence suggests that Brexit is likely to make the UK's interregional inequalities worse than they already are' (Billing, McCann, and Ortega-Argilés 2019, 757). It also modifies the opportunity structures of place-based policy, given the large role that the EU has played in regional policy in the UK over the past 40 years (Sykes and Schulze-Bäing 2017).…”