Devolution and Cornwall: When One Size Doesn’t Fit All
The current round of devolution launched in the 2025 Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill is to be welcomed. However, it follows an unbending ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach which has little sympathy for parts of the country for which shoehorning themselves into the available structures would be harmful. Devolution policy has a history of such inflexibility.
In 2014, along with Arianna Giovannini, I explained why Devolution outside of Scotland and Wales had stalled in the early 2000’s. The key tension, also discussed by Mark Sandford, was that whilst the North-East of England as a governance region were being given a referendum about whether the area wanted devolution, Cornwall, a peninsular in the far South-West of the UK had been actively petitioning for a Cornish Assembly.
The wider context for Cornwall was that following great efforts throughout most of the 1990’s it had finally been successfully disentangled from the neighbouring County of Devon for statistical gathering purposes. It took more than a decade of campaigning to finally make the case that rather than making the region stronger, joining forces with Devon meant that Cornwall’s social and economic characteristics became obscured by larger and more populous Devon. This meant that Cornwall did not get the targeted investment that it should have.
The same problem occurred when the two regions joined forces for governance purposes. Whilst the Local Authorities had remained distinct, many services were amalgamated – for example, into a Devon and Cornwall Police Service, and a Devon and Cornwall Fire Service. This process was so disliked outside of local government decision makers that it earned its own name and oppositional political campaign – DevonWall.
Part of the problem was that Devon’s bigger size and much closer proximity to London – and therefore to the centre of power in a highly centralised Britain – meant that combined Devon and Cornwall services always left Cornwall, to become headquartered in Exeter. However Exeter is an hour’s drive from Launceston, the nearest Cornish town and at least two and a half hours from Penzance at the far West of Cornwall. Although some campaigners pointed out that Cornwall and Devon share many similar characteristics, much scholarship at the time was clear that governance distance meant that people were making decisions about Cornwall with little awareness of and sympathy with, the specific issues that were faced on the ground.
This situation was exacerbated by the South-West layer of governance that had been growing in power over both New Labour and the previous Conservative governments of the early 1990’s. By the early 2000’s, New Labour hoped that Regional Development Agencies and regional Government Offices would be joined by elected Regional Assemblies. For the South-West region – which included Cornwall – the governance base was in Bristol, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Launceston and four hours from Penzance.
Fears that the distance of new centres of devolved governance from Cornwall would lead to even greater ignorance of and attention to Cornish issues received confirmation by the ways in which regional bodies often lacked any basic understanding of the local socio-economy, leading to continued under-investment. In short, the experiences of the 1980’s, 90’s, and early 2000’s left Cornish civil society from the wider public through to strategic decision makers convinced that only devolved governance could stem policy neglect of this region which had become increasingly peripheralized consequently.
Support for devolution went from a fringe position to the Cornish mainstream. Local government in Cornwall has spent at least since the turn of the Millenium setting itself up institutionally to be ready to take on more responsibility when government has granted it. The Upper Tier Authority became a Unitary Authority in 2009, with claims (not universally accepted), that this streamlined structure would help towards readiness for a Cornish Assembly. Regardless, the new Cornwall Council was able to lose the word ‘county’ from its former Cornwall County Councils name, which also spoke to Cornwall’s status as a nation of the UK with its own language and distinct heritage.
When Devolution came back onto the political agenda in 2015 with the Coalition Government, Cornwall was ready to accept the challenge and became the second area – after Manchester – to receive a Devolution Deal. Uniquely, Cornwall was able to avoid the strictures placed on other localities to have a Mayor because the newly devolved authority was (also uniquely) not a made up of several different Councils. Because it was not a Combined Authority, it needed no additional institution to bring together different Councils.
The downside of this was that successive Conservative governments refused to grant Cornwall additional devolved powers. In 2023, there was an offer from Government to Cornwall Council that Cornwall could receive a stronger devolution deal if it agreed to having a Mayor. Whilst the Council considered this option, the wider community was very clear in the consultation process that they wanted devolution – just not with a Mayor.
Why does this matter to the Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, and the current round of local government reforms happening in Council? Because this Bill mandates that the highest levels of devolution can only be achieved by Mayoral Combined Authorities. In other words, if your geography (let alone identity) means that it is not rationally feasible to become a Combined Authority with another Upper Tier Authority, then the Council will be ineligible for the highest levels of devolved government.
As we have seen from the back-story above, civil society and decision-makers in Cornwall have been very clear on this. As a peninsular, the only option on the table is for Cornwall to become a combined authority with neighbouring Devon. However, this creates an unwieldy governance geography that does not work well for Cornwall. It also completely ignores cultural and heritage boundaries and Cornish is recognised as a National Minority by the European Framework Convention on Human Rights, and the Cornish language – one of only two globally to have been considered as successfully revived. It has also been recognised under Part III of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.
In November 2024, the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter launched the Cornish Devolution Report which drew on research a few months earlier to explore what voters in Cornwall wanted in terms of government. This report was backed by all six of Cornwall’s Members of Parliament (four Labour and two Liberal Democrat), calling for meaningful devolution for Cornwall. Instead, in November 2025 the government conceded that Cornwall could become a Single Local Authority Foundation Strategic Authority (SLAFSA), with powers that are much more limited than Combined Mayoral Strategic Authorities (CMSA’s). Whilst the former decision was launched with much fanfare, the latter technical detail received very little attention.
What does this mean for the Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill? To pursue it in its current form might work well for some regions – but there are many others for whom its rigidity will be harmful to local economies, communities, and polities. If Labour are serious about creating a fairer Britain, it needs to tackle geographical inequalities differently and with much greater sensitivity than is currently the case. We also know that Labour’s previous devolution attempts unravelled because of this inflexibility. There is no shame in revisiting unworkable positions, especially if it will create a form of governance that works better for all.
About the author
Joanie Willett is Associate Professor in Politics and co-director of the Institute of Cornish Studies. Her research focusses on the co-evolutionary relationship between people, communities, and geologies, geographies, and ecologies. Joanie is a former trustee of the Political Studies Association (PSA), co-convenor of the PSA Local Government and Politics specialist group, and she helps to coordinate EdgeNet, a Regional Studies Association network which explores questions of peripheral and rural development.
Photo Credit: Darren Tolley on Unsplash