This paper goes back to the effort of successive UK governments throughout the 2010s to ‘rebalance’ the economy across regions and sectors and narrow down regional productivity gaps, which had been perceived as a major cause behind the (very) low productivity growth of the UK. This effort was carried out by a ‘City Deals’ policy, a series of incentive-based devolution deals between central government and local governments (LGs) of low-productivity regions, that was launched in 2012. To narrow down regional productivity gaps, these deals incentivised private investment in growth potential sectors. Concurrently, the post-GFC macroeconomic policy of fiscal austerity and expansionary monetary policy, which sought to boost the UK’s rent-led growth model, pushed private investors away from patient capital investment, especially in underproductive regions. The paper follows the interaction between the UK's GM, its underpinning macroeconomic ideas and the city deal policy and ask how this policy affected the regional distributional patterns that the UK growth model routinely produce. I use this question to better understand the interrelationship between a given growth model and policy efforts to mitigate its distributional outcomes. Building on a constructivist approach to the GM theory I suggest that the interaction between the city deals policy, the macroeconomic framework of the 2010s UK and the rent-led GM pushed the expansion of rent-led investment to areas and regions that were not profitable for rentiers before and increased the dependency of devolved LGs on the interests of rentiers. I also suggest that since the policy did nothing to deal with the macroeconomic sources of rent-led expansion, it ended up increasing regional productivity gaps. To test my suggestions, and since data covering the distributional outcomes of city deals on a country level is not available, I use the rich regional data collected by the LGs of Manchester and Birmingham throughout the 2010s and systematically compare the distributional effects of the city deal in these two city-regions. I follow events up to the year of 2019 to isolate the effects of the policy from those of the pandemic of 2019-2022 and the energy crisis caused by the Ukrainian war.