On 31st March regional assemblies will be abolished. There will probably be neither bang nor whimper.

I will be sad. This was one of the projects of New Labour that nearly took wings. And it leaves a void in both regional governance and in our own party’s thinking on what we do about devolution.

In the longer term there are also questions about the viability of the Union – if Scotland, Wales and to a much lesser extent London are allowed (if that is the right verb) to run themselves, why can’t the rest of England? More to the point, why must the rest of England be governed by those who are from parts of the UK which have devolved administrations?

The last meeting of my own regional assembly was on the morning I was due to leave for Party Conference. I had been its deputy chair for the best part of ten years and leader of the Lib Dem group until 2008. It was therefore a wrench to choose to attend the localism consultation session in Birmingham rather than the regional obsequies in Norwich.

The assembly had some sound achievements under its belt. Councils talked and worked together. The voting rights were determined by proportional representation and the counties were not allowed to bully the districts or unitaries. A genuine regional view was taken not least on European funding and on major highways priorities. A regional spatial strategy was developed. The development agency was held (on occasion) to account.

It is not clear when the rot set in. The transfer of structure planning powers upwards from counties to the regional assembly suggested that devolution was not necessarily on the agenda. The North East referendum confirmed it.

Meanwhile the first past the post system was delivering more and more Conservative controlled councils anxious to throw their weight around. Once the Government made it clear that it preferred to reform local government in favour of counties rather than districts, the county councils could remove their masks and seize the agenda: the new leaders’ forum which sort of replaces the regional assembly is little more than an annexe of Central Office.

So where do we stand now? Is this a failed experiment that we should not revisit? Would it ever have worked as a vehicle for devolution? Or do we say that local government is fully competent to take powers from Whitehall, including most infrastructure planning, education policy and the NHS?

In many ways that is now our position – even though some of the units of local government are clearly too small to take on such a wide sweep of powers. That said, Essex – for instance – has a larger population than a number of EU member states.

But we’ll need to do something about the voting system for county and city councils if the new powers are going to be exercised with any political credibility.