The UK today exhibits one of the world’s most centralised governance systems while at the same time also exhibiting amongst the highest interregional productivity and income inequalities of any industrialised country. It is this combination of centralised governance and unbalanced productivity growth which has given rise to the Levelling Up agenda, because centralised policy making has so far largely undermined efforts to foster appropriate structural changes to the UK’s city and regional economies, especially in England (McCann 2016; Travers 2018). These realities are at odds with the patterns evident in most other advanced economies, and especially in contrast to other large and industrialised countries, where governance systems tend to be much more decentralised and devolved and interregional productivity imbalances consequently are much lower. There is now a large OECD-wide literature that points to the fact that decentralised sub-central governance systems are largely conducive to stronger and more balanced interregional growth and development processes and less economic dominance by any particular city-region than are highly centralised governance systems (Carrascal-Incera et al. 2020). In the light of this literature, the UK appears to be an extreme outlier, and there is now a large body of evidence that the UK’s governance system itself partly accounts for the UK’s regional imbalances (McCann 2016; Carrascal-Incera et al. 2020). Indeed, it is this link between governance centralisation and regional imbalances which underpins that argument that the UK’s over-centralised or hyper-centralised system needs to be significantly devolved to levels akin to competitor countries in order to foster stronger and more inclusive productivity growth.