Everyone seems to agree local government needs reform if it is to deliver decent housing, an effective transport system and a strong economy.
But they can't agree on what needs to change.
The Government plans to create city regions, which could transform the way we are governed.
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However, this isn't the only option on the table.
Rival proposals include Conservative promises to transfer powers right down to local council level.
There are also calls for a new English Parliament, which supporters say would eliminate the need for English regions.
And then there's the original proposal for regional government - abandoned by Labour but still attracting significant support.
Before anyone started talking about city regions, Labour was drawing up plans for elected regional assemblies.
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These would have given us a West Midland "parliament" similar to the Scottish Parliament established in 1999.
The driving force behind the policy was John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister. But for all his enthusiasm, he couldn't convince the public.
When a referendum was held in the North-east on whether to create an elected regional assembly, 696,519 voters opposed the plans and only 197,310 were in favour.
That was the end of that, as far as the Government was concerned. Ministers didn't feel able to introduce regional assemblies without referenda, and they didn't want to hold any more votes they were likely to lose.
But supporters of regional assemblies haven't gone away. In the West Midlands they call themselves the West Midlands Constitutional Convention, a body which includes senior councillors and academics.
One of the key differences between their proposal and a city region is that a regional assembly would cover a much larger area.
It would be based on the official Government region of the West Midlands, one of nine regions in England.
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That means it would include Shropshire, Staffordshire, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire as well as the urban area around Birmingham.
A city region, on the other hand, would be based on the area that once made up the West Midlands County Council - Birmingham, Coventry, Wolverhampton, Solihull, Dudley, Walsall and West Bromwich.
It might include one or two other places, such as Redditch, Bromsgrove or Lichfield, but there would be no room for the rolling countryside and radiant villages of the shires.
Staffordshire might even get a separate city region of its own, based around Stoke.
For supporters of a regional assembly, this would be a disaster. Anything which excludes rural areas is unfair, they say.
They oppose a city region on the grounds that it would allow cities and major towns to make their own decisions - but the people of Shropshire would continue to be ruled from London.
They also point out that public bodies which spend millions of pounds in the West Midlands every year cover the large, official government region.
There's only one Advantage West Midlands, for example. This is the Government body responsible for making a success of the local economy.
It covers the whole West Midlands region. So how could a city region - which only includes half the official region - claim any authority over it?
If we want genuine local democracy we need an elected assembly for the entire West Midlands, they say.
The fly in the ointment is that the public doesn't seem to like the idea.
But supporters of a regional assembly have two ideas for dealing with that.
First, they argue that the Government's original plans would have given the assembly too little real power.
If voters can see that it will make a difference to their lives they will be more inclined to support it, they say.
Second, they believe voters in the North-east were put off by the idea of creating a new group of politicians.
So they have suggested linking regional assemblies with House of Lords reform - a project Labour still hasn't completed after nine years in power.
The plan is to invite voters to elect "regional peers" who will represent the West Midlands at Westminster, and also form a regional assembly - possibly re-named a regional board - in their own right.
That's the proposal from the Constitutional Convention. But the whole idea of regional government is firmly opposed by another pressure group - the Campaign for an English Parliament.
They claim regions would lead to the "balkanisation" of England and abolish it as a nation.
They also say, perhaps with good reason, that attempts to create regional government in England are an attempt to compensate for the unfairness that was created when the Scots and the Welsh got their own assemblies.
But the real answer to this, they say, is not a West Midland assembly but an English assembly.
In this way, England could make its own decisions on issues such as health, education and policing, while staying in one piece and remaining part of the United Kingdom.
The Campaign for an English Parliament can always be relied upon to stand up for the right of an Englishman to celebrate St George's Day. But their ideas are unlikely ever to be put into practice. The same cannot be said of David Cameron's Conservative Party, which increasingly looks like a party capable of winning an election.
The Tories don't like regions at all. In a speech in Coventry earlier this year, Mr Cameron branded the Government's regional agenda "a disaster that will erode local identity".
Conservatives claim the idea of a city region is just a return to John Prescott's original plan for regional assemblies, with a few tweaks.
Their alternative is to devolve power directly down to councils.
The Tories say they would transfer control of planning, housing and transport, which are currently run partly by regional quangos, to local authorities.
However, they also argue that councils sometimes need to work together on issues which extend across local authority boundaries.
So they would create something called a "super area agreement" - a binding agreement councils are able to sign to work together on specific issues.
The key point for the Tories is that it would be up to individual councils whether they wanted to sign agreements with their neighbours or not.
Mr Cameron said: "They might want to form partnerships. But the job of government is to enable that to happen - not to demand it." The Conservative leader has also appointed former Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine to head a commission looking into how Britain's cities should be governed.
Lord Heseltine has not yet published his conclusions, but he is likely to call for elected mayors wherever local people want them.
In a recent speech he urged: "Great cities should elect great leaders".
The Government is also interested in mayors as a way of providing strong leadership for a city region.
But the Conservatives want to appoint mayors for individual cities, not for the region. Under their proposals Birmingham, Coventry and Wolverhampton would all have their own mayors.
Their local government spokeswoman is Caroline Spelman, the Meriden MP and member of the Shadow Cabinet.
She said: "Whitehall has local government in chains. It has stifled the scope councils have to innovate and diversify with the deadweight of CPA, Best Value and the other twelve inspection regimes.
"But we would free them from this. It is councils who would be best placed to deliver improvement where it's most needed."