Re:Think 8 May, 2025

Beyond Whitehall Conference: three takeaways

Growth is the Government’s number one mission — not least as mission failure here means likely failure against the other missions (hard to spread opportunity if you’re not creating good jobs, hard to fix the NHS or make our streets safer without creating the wealth to pay for it, hard to achieve Net Zero without massive private investment and technological innovation…). But the Government is also clear that success against the mission means more money in people’s pockets; not just some people’s pockets, but everyone’s all across the country. And so the growth mission is very much tied to that other ambitious programme: devolution.

Yesterday we brought public and private leaders together at the Treasury’s Darlington Economic Campus to explore how central and local government can work hand in glove to drive growth and deliver better outcomes for citizens.

Here are three key takeaways.

• Devolution or decentralisation?

The Places for Growth model and the establishment of strategic authorities under the devolution agenda share the same broad ambition of shifting power away from SW1. This can foster strong local partnerships, bringing together central and local policymaking. Civil servants at the Sheffield Policy Campus – home to the largest number of policy civil servants outside of London – now engage routinely with both Sheffield City Council and South Yorkshire Combined Authority. This interaction has yielded more responsive policy design involving central and local government perspectives. Similarly, emerging collaborations between the Darlington Economic Campus, Darlington Borough Council and Tees Valley Combined Authority demonstrate how relocating central government civil servants can underpin regional strategies and outcomes. Nevertheless, participants cautioned that if civil service relocation merely reproduces centralised decision making in a different locality, the result will be decentralisation rather than genuine devolution. To secure lasting benefits, the policymaking process itself needs to change.

• Which means co-location has to be just the beginning.

Positively, Ravi Chand, who leads the Places for Growth programme in the Cabinet Office, was quick to reject the idea that the creation of Civil Service campuses outside London is "just" decentralisation, but an opportunity to do policy work in a completely different way — and produce lessons for the rest of the system. But doing this, as the whole panel agreed, means developing a whole new culture, with deep collaboration beyond the walls of the campus and into local government; meaningful engagement with citizens and civil society and business; an openness to testing and failing and innovating; and an acceptance that officials don’t always know best.

• Giving businesses policy certainty is crucial.

In our second panel, speakers reflected on the importance of boosting business confidence by giving them certainty about the direction of public policy. Tom Bryant, Chief Executive of Tees Valley Combined Authority, shared his experience that brokering inward investment from large companies is often easier at a local level, rather than drawing together threads from multiple different government departments in Whitehall to craft a strategy. On the flip side, the panel discussed how devolution could result in larger businesses having to navigate a more complicated map of local leaders, each with a different approach. But panellists felt that the fundamentals of what local leaders need to do to partner with business — infrastructure, construction and skills — are widely understood and prioritised across regions.