City region (United Kingdom)

A city region is the functional region around a city, consisting of several areas of local government and smaller than the already existing regions of England. During the 2000s there were proposals to officially designate city regions and for there to be directly elected mayors. The policy that resulted from this was the creation of combined authorities in England with committee-based leadership.

City region is a concept used by economists and urban planners to denote a metropolitan area and its hinterland, usually divided administratively but with shared resources and markets. It originated in a British policy context through Derek Senior's Memorandum of Dissent in the 1969 Redcliffe-Maud Report. Tightly defined areas around major cities became metropolitan counties in 1974, but the elected county governance was abolished in 1986 and replaced with indirectly elected structures such as passenger transport authorities.

In 2004 plans for Regional Assemblies in England were rejected in a referendum by voters in North East England.

The concept of city regions and their development features heavily in The Northern Way, a collaborative development plan between the three northernmost English regional development agencies. Major cities started to collaborate through the Core Cities Group.

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