The Tyne and Wear city region, made up of the five councils, is working together on economic and transport issues, with pretty limited success so far.
Despite that, you're still paying for it. It missed out on extra "London-style" powers last time they where handed out, but will be hoping to walk away with the top prizes next time.

Looking at the quality of the vast majority of councillors in the region I can see why there has been reluctance to hand over economic powers, and I know there are senior councillors of all parties who agree the quality available to them when picking an executive team is not always inspiring.

We have some very good councillors in the city-region, and we have many, many more councillors who have no real idea what is going on in their city.
Some, particularly on councils with a healthy majority representation, are more than happy to just trundle on without any real vision.

One way of changing this would be to make them a bit more, how shall I put this, American.
Over there, as we know, there are elected mayors with tax powers. Indeed, most people in the USA and Europe find it the norm to pay a significant per cent of their taxes locally. This would not work here, rightly so, unless national taxes came down in proportion.

With that in mind, when you see Gordon Brown telling you he is putting power into the hands of local people, remember to ask where the money is.