Throughout the period in which devolution was introduced and implemented across the rest of the UK, England was also a focus for considering new structures of territorial government. A lot of academic analysis has been critical of the fact that reform in England was not more far-reaching, both for not decentralising power more and for not locating it within a coherent reform of the territorial constitution as a whole. However, the reality was that the prospects for finding an ideal reform outcome in England was at least as difficult as it was in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. For while, as we have seen, the other parts of the UK experienced significant contestation over ideal models of constitutional change which made agreeing outcomes very difficult, particularly in Northern Ireland, in England there were in fact no really cogent recipes for constitutional reform of English-wide government that attracted large scale support either during the 1980s and 1990s, or after 1999. Those who went looking for them tended to return frustrated (see, for example, Hazell, 2006a; 2006b). In this context, it was quite possible that there would have been no reform at all, or even for England to be governed in a more centralised manner than before. In trying to explain why some reform did occur and then how we should evaluate it, again it is more profitable to consider the constraints and interests in centre–periphery relations that were present, the options that were actually possible and the choices made by key actors in the context of the circumstances facing them. In such terms, we again can come to see how territorial structures in England were reformed in a manner that paralleled processes in the rest of the UK; that they were reformed as best they could be within terms set by English political debate at the time.

The chapter utilises the same analytical framework applied in the chapters on Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to consider the key dynamics of territorial reform in England up to 1999. First, the chapter considers the nature of the territorial strain, problem and resources for change present in England.