This means Department for Education programmes including Sure Start, Connexions, Positive Activities for Young People and the 14 to 19 reforms will no longer be managed at regional level.

Regional performance management and support for children and young people’s services will also cease and it is widely thought Local Area Agreements could be scrapped.

Arrangements for the closures and for the transfer of any on-going functions will be made at the end of the comprehensive spending review in the autumn, so government office staff will have to wait several months to learn their fate.

Pickles claimed the abolition of the offices would reduce spending on bureaucracy, but protect frontline services.

"We should be clear. The government offices are not voices of the region in Whitehall," he said. "They have become agents of Whitehall to intervene and interfere in localities, and are a fundamental part of the ‘command and control’ apparatus of England’s over-centralised state."

Offices in the North East, North West, South West, South East, West Midlands, Yorkshire and the Humber, East Midlands and East of England will close.

Pickles announced earlier this year that the Government Office for London would also be scrapped.