Government plans for regional devolution will do little to bridge the North-South divide, a report has claimed.

The study, published by Catalyst, argued that the only means of tackling regional equality would be to disperse the civil service across the country, ending the concentration of British politics in London.

Geographers Ash Amin, Doreen Massey and Nigel Thrift warned that the government's plans for "downward" devolution and "bottom-up" regeneration "fail to grasp the fact that regional disadvantage is the product of a long history of imbalanced inter-regional relations and the profound spatial concentration of power".

"The new economic regionalism will not be effective without a serious attack on the centre-periphery structure of British politics," they argued in the report.

"Such a change requires more than a simple devolution of power, but a radically new way of imagining the spaciality of the nation; no longer the norm of a centred nation with tributary obligations, but the promise of a multinodal nation.

"This amounts to a cultural shift that, within the regions recognises the deficiencies of supplicant politics, and within the nation at large worries about the utter abnormality of national power and control so centralised in and near London."

The Treasury is already examining proposals to move 20,000 of its civil servants out of Whitehall, where the ministry is currently heavily concentrated.