Emancipation or emasculation? Which of these will be the future for the economic role and governance of key regional towns and cities?
The local government White Paper explicitly recognises the critical economic role played by successful towns and cities, large and small. 
For many of these, it offers real opportunities. For others, it threatens to create potentially-irreconcilable tensions and reduced economic performance. 
These are the towns and cities driving sub-regional economies across two-tier England – often historic centres of trade, commerce, education and governance, which have adapted in a visionary and successful way to become 21st century economic powerhouses.
Cities such as these have a sense of identity and place oozing out of their urban pores, and relish their role as the focus for an extensive rural hinterland. And despite the inherent constraints of working within the two-tier system, they have used their flexibility, strength, clarity of focus and vision, together with a genuine partnership ethos, to navigate their way to success.
But all this is poised to change. The White Paper offers a stark choice for cities including Exeter, Norwich, Ipswich and Oxford: seek to become a unitary council, or face the future of the ‘virtual county unitary' represented by the ‘new models of two-tier working'. 
The inherent challenges of the current two-tier system are well described in the White Paper – ambiguous leadership, blurred accountability, public confusion, duplication, and inefficiency. 
These are problematic enough, but a significant new factor is the relentless growth of the Local Area Agreement. LAAs are an inspired concept, ideally suited for the territory they were designed for – focused, coherent and significant ‘places' where a real common purpose and integrated, multi-agency working across a common area can really deliver – places such as London boroughs, metropolitan boroughs and unitary authorities. 
But in large counties, which can never be ‘local areas' or ‘places' and where multiple agencies and councils with non-aligned boundaries proliferate, they become dysfunctional, in terms of governance, bureaucracy and any sense of local relevance or ownership.
As more central funding streams are diverted to the county-wide pot, so local power, influence and accountability ebbs away. This is potentially damaging for any district, but for cities like Exeter, it will seriously undermine their ability to do what they do best – deal with the complexity of uniquely urban issues and drive economic growth for the wider region. 
What, for example, if the local authority business growth incentive or the planning delivery grant were to be redirected to the LAA, as could very likely happen? 
For Exeter, that would remove a key social,  economic and organisational development resource, and totally undermine the incentivising purpose of such grants.
Of all the pre-White Paper issues, it is probably the LAA system which has most galvanised Exeter to seek unitary status. The White Paper's confirmation of the central and growing role of the LAA only adds to the pressure from Exeter's business community and all political parties on the city council to achieve unitary status and a city-based LAA – thereby regaining control for the city of its own economic, social and environmental agenda. 
But the two-tier system now also threatens a further governance deficit – a weakened city leadership governing alongside a strengthened county leadership, or even the countywide ‘single cadre of councillors' floated in the White Paper – taking any real sense of local control, leadership and accountability away from one of England's most successful regional cities. 
How could this possibly lead, in Exeter, to the achievement of the White Paper's aims of:

The case for unitary local government has always been a powerful one. The White Paper recognises this and will, in effect, bring it about across the country – in either ‘real' or ‘virtual' form.
Philip Bostock is chief executive of Exeter City Council