THERE are lots of things that I struggle to understand – the continued popularity of Michael Buble, Fabio Cannavaro’s World Cup punditry, cloud computing - the list goes on.

After this week’s announcement you can add the Government’s devolution strategy to the stuff that gives me a sleepless night.

The first thing I want to say is congratulations to the people in our region who won pledges of support from the growth deals announced on Monday. From Houghall College near Durham City to CPI in the heart of the Teesside chemicals industry, the government recognised some genuinely innovative and exciting projects.

The area's three Local Enterprise Partnerships deserve credit for helping to secure funding for what they claim could create up to 9,000 jobs, and make crucial improvements to transport links and skills training.

This is all undeniably good news and a cause for celebration.

Former deputy prime minister Lord Heseltine - whose growth review last year led to the creation of the local growth fund - hailed the announcement as “a giant step in the re-balancing of our economy.”

This is where I start to get confused.

Rebalancing the economy is about preventing all of the wealth, talent and opportunity in our country from being sucked towards London and the South East. On pretty much every economic measure – jobs, house prices, salaries, infrastructure investment etc. the capital outstrips the regions by a huge margin. Policy makers fear that unless something is done to redress the balance then the country will become perilously uneven – if it isn’t already.

So, if the growth fund was about rebalancing the economy why did London get the second biggest pay-out, and the South-East more than the combined sum given to Tees Valley and North Yorkshire?

A total of £22.9m was allocated to the Tees Valley area in the first year of the fund from 2015 to 2016; £34.2m to York and North Yorkshire and £111.7m in the rest of the North-East.

London was handed £151m, and the South-East got £84m.

It would be as if the Premier League announced plans to hand the lion’s share of its earnings to smaller clubs, in a bid to make the competition more equitable, and then promptly gave some of the biggest pay-outs to Manchester City and Chelsea.

The growth fund is at the heart of the Coalition’s claim that it wants to wrest spending powers from Whitehall and place them in the hands of local decision makers. It is fundamental to ministers' claims that they are determined to rebalance the economy.

But the ongoing support for projects in London and the South-East suggests that rebalancing the economy is just another buzz phrase aimed at shoring up voter support in the regions rather than a serious attempt to tackle the systemic problems that fuel inequalities.