In the news

Fair points but I think a federal system means that different regions are pitched against each other to ‘win’ money from the one pot.

The whole point of federalism is that there isn't just one pot. There's a local pot and a central one; the local pot doesn't need to be fought for and there's a formal basis for the fight over the central pot. In contrast, what we get is central government politicos lying about how much they spend on the regions and no proper measurement to show that one way or the other.

Also I have serious concerns over the competence and corruption of the people making policy at regional level.

Some countries with federal systems have failed at that, others have done well. The U.S. is a very mixed story. But this is not an endemic problem of federalism; it's a cultural problem in some countries. The problem you do actually have with federalism is consistency of administrative practices and standards across the whole country.

The idea you can't trust local authorities in this country and it's all better run from the centre is quite a Thatcherite one. She had an unwarranted reputation as a deregulator when what she mostly did was hugely centralise power in the U.K, removing power from local authorities, legislating to dictate how they spent their money, moving things like education and health from local to central control. At the end, we had a worse system and more corruption in both local and central government, not less, because there was much less accountability. Central control is not the anti-corruption panacea you seem to think it is.

Whitehall civil servants get a bashing but I’ve been one and hold those guys in high regard.

Nobody was bashing the civil service here.