Re:View 18 July 2025
Director of Policy and Research
Quote of the week
"We will have failed if we ‘just’ do projects, and don’t also change things at the centre.”
Georgia Gould MP, Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office, commenting on the Government's 'Test, Learn and Grow' programme.
Hello, and welcome back to another Re:View, where we look back over the last week of UK policy with an eye to important developments from beyond the headlines.
This week: welcome to the devolution theory of everything.
The Government published its English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill last week. This is a big one, with provisions for electoral reform in mayoral elections, a new statutory footing and framework for Combined Authorities, a new push for community governance, new ministerial powers to force devolution and reorganisation if local places drag their feet … and more.
This week, a bevy of announcements – not limited to the Ministry of Housing, Communities, and Local Government – make clear that devolution and decentralisation are a remain a massive theme for this Parliament. But the risk is, with so much going on, if various Whitehall departments aren’t coordinating their efforts properly, the devolution revolution could be stillborn.
Just this week:
- DCMS published its new approach to ‘Civil Society Covenants’ to “reset the relationship” between Government and the third sector, with an explicit focus on achieving change across every tier of the State, including a local ‘Task and Finish’ group to promote place-based partnerships.
- Speaking of place-based partnerships: the Cabinet Office announced the ten-place
-list for its burgeoning ‘test, grow, and learn’ programme. This will see central and local government working together to develop locally-attuned services, iterate them, and share the findings to inspire new approaches to public services elsewhere. - And from MHCLG, we had updates on its Devolution Priority Programme – a crucial test of the Government’s ability to see through its ambition of establishing Strategic Authorities in every part of England. Two of those areas – including a Cumbrian Strategic Authority which will weigh in at under 500,000 people – are delaying their first mayoral elections to 2027.
This issue – that establishing a comprehensive ‘strategic’ tier will necessarily involve a huge range of sizes and competencies – is something that we discuss in our latest report (‘Go big or go home', published yesterday) And it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
There is a version of this programme which would see the parallel efforts across Government – with devolution and coterminosity featuring in the NHS ’10 Year Plan’, local growth at the heart of the Industrial Strategy, as well as the big place-based pushes mentioned above – aligning perfectly. But, like the patchy attempts to establish cross-cutting Missions as the motive force in Whitehall – coordination is always the biggest challenge.
Getting the whole machine on board with the ‘devolution revolution’ would be an achievement; getting it to do the work without replicating effort or contradicting itself would be a miracle. That’s why a transformed Whitehall system would be one of the pre-conditions for a system that is significantly less synchronised.
Read of the week
…this week, for a change of pace (but still very much in the theme of whether government can join up sufficiently to get big things done), I’d suggest looking at the Government’s new Life Sciences Sector Plan. Re:State bangs the drum on this pretty frequently, but it’s still notable that few recognise the significance of this sector for the country’s economic growth potential, or its status as an innovative “science superpower”. This new plan intersects with the recent NHS ’10 Year Plan’ and the broader Industrial Strategy, setting out a ten-year vision that includes regulatory reform, enabling “low-friction” procurement, and accelerating patient access to new medicines and medical technologies so that the UK becomes one of the “top three” in Europe. The devil will, as ever, be in the delivery.