Between 1994 and 2011, all nine regions had partly devolved functions; they no longer fulfil this role, continuing to be used for limited statistical purposes.
After about 500 AD, England comprised seven Anglo-Saxon territories—Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex—often referred to as the heptarchy.
[4] Proposals for administrative regions within England were mooted by the British government prior to the First World War.
On 12 September the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, gave a speech in which he proposed 10 or 12 regional parliaments for the United Kingdom.
[5][6] While the creation of regional parliaments never became official policy, it was for a while widely anticipated and various schemes for dividing England devised.
[7][8] By the 1930s, several competing systems of regions were adopted by central government for such purposes as census of population, agriculture, electricity supply, civil defence and the regulation of road traffic.
[11] Creation of some form of provinces or regions for England was an intermittent theme of post-Second World War British governments.
The Redcliffe-Maud Report proposed the creation of eight provinces in England, which would see power devolved from central government.
Edward Heath's administration in the 1970s did not create a regional structure in the Local Government Act 1972, waiting for the Royal Commission on the Constitution, after which government efforts were concentrated on a constitutional settlement in Scotland and Wales for the rest of the decade.
[11] In April 1994, the John Major ministry created a set of ten Government Office Regions for England.
[15] Following the Labour Party's victory in the 1997 general election, the government created regional development agencies.
Since 1 July 2006, there have also been ten strategic health authorities, each of which corresponds to a region, except for South East England, which is divided into western and eastern parts.
A referendum was held in North East England on 4 November 2004, but the proposal for an elected assembly was rejected.
In 2007, a Treasury Review for new Prime Minister Gordon Brown recommended that greater powers should be given to local authorities and that the Regional Chambers should be phased out of existence by 2010.
[22] The assemblies were effectively replaced by smaller local authority leaders' boards between 2008 and 2010, and formally abolished on 31 March 2010, as part of a "Sub-National Review of Economic Development and Regeneration".
The boards in most cases continue to exist as voluntary associations of council leaders, funded by the local authorities themselves.
Between 1994 and 2011, the nine regions had an administrative role in the implementation of UK Government policy, and as the areas covered by (mostly indirectly) elected bodies.