The capacity to develop the whole territory: the machinery that lifts lagging regions, spreads productive capability beyond the primary city and holds the national economy together spatially.
The Capability Development Index tracks the events that move a capability — operational use, technical breakthroughs, procurement decisions and the industrial base behind them — and places each on the record with the date it happened.
Recent developments cover the current period. Historical developments are the inflection points that produced Regional & Place-Based Development as it stands today.
Interest in lifting lagging regions, particularly on the political Left, dates from at least the 1970s in the United Kingdom. This long-running concern provided the intellectual background for the later creation of formal regional agencies.
After Labour came to power in 1997, legislation established eight regional development agencies, formally created on 25 November 1998, one for each of England's NUTS level 1 regions. This gave England a dedicated institutional machinery for sub-national economic development. Comparable functions were exercised elsewhere in the UK by devolved and national bodies.
A London agency completed the coverage of England's regions, and the scope and powers of the RDAs were progressively extended in subsequent years. This marked the maturing of the regional tier of development administration.
The accountancy study assessed the economic return of the regional agencies, estimating parity in immediate local economic impact with a projected £4.50 return once infrastructure investments matured. The evidence became part of the debate over whether the regional tier justified its roughly £2 billion annual budget.
Citing deficit reduction, the government said the nine agencies would be replaced by local enterprise partnerships, smaller-scale bodies joining local authorities and businesses. This reversed a decade of regional-scale development machinery in favour of a more localised patchwork.
The nine RDAs ceased to exist on 31 March 2012. Local enterprise partnerships initially received no central government funding and local councils got no equivalent income transfer while being asked to make savings, so the capability for place-based development was substantially weakened rather than transferred.