Summary: English devolution and the future of subnational government

As part of the Campaign for Social Science’s series on devolution, we were delighted to attend a roundtable session at the Political Studies Association 2026 conference held on 30 March 2026. The session was organised and chaired by Dr Peter Eckersley (Nottingham Trent University) and featured contributions from four panel members: Professor Arianna Giovannini, Professor Janice Morphet FAcSS, Dr Joanie Willett, and Dr Mark Sandford.

Below is a summary of their remarks.

Mark, who is Senior Research Analyst at the House of Commons Library, gave his perspective from his standpoint working in the UK Parliament and also as someone with expertise on the devolution of power in England and local government finance. He argued that there will come a point during this Parliament where there will be a reckoning between the current UK Government’s commitment to devolution, and Whitehall’s traditional resistance to giving power away. The 21 existing or soon-to-exist mayoral authorities fulfil a rare role in England outside of Whitehall, in that they are autonomous, strategic, policy-making bodies – but their capacity to carry out that role at scale is largely untested as yet. He argued that local government reorganisation would have been made easier if devolution to regional authorities had been completed first, and people could see the new bodies and powers and the duplication which meant the lower tier could be scrapped. Doing the processes in parallel was a bold move, but it has to be seen through now it has started. Regional devolution is where the action and the political attention is, whereas there is less focus on local government outside of the current reorganisation. But there is a sense of “cities and hinterlands” being seen as the default position for how policy gets delivered at a regional level, which is a cultural policy change from the past. Meanwhile, the obligation for all new unitary authorities to have neighbourhood committees indicates that the UK Government does not see the creation of new parish councils as the main or only option for neighbourhood governance.

Janice, who is Visiting Professor at UCL, drew on her experience in local government as a Chief Executive and in urban and rural local authorities to set out her view that the rise in devolution has not been matched by a step-change in central government thinking. We see this in areas like housing policy, where the UK Government retains power of the purse strings on areas which are nominally devolved. Integrated settlements comprise over 90 different previous budget lines, with the boards overseeing them being chaired by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), meaning that control still rests with Whitehall, much like the old Government Offices for the Regions. In her view, “the dog that hasn’t barked” in the current round of regional devolution is why strategic authorities in England haven’t been more closely modelled on the template of London’s authorities which have quite integrated and well-understood power-sharing between councils and the mayor.

Janice also argued, from the perspective of someone who had taken a local authority through a reorganisation (from district to unitary), that whilst local government reorganisation is necessary for public understanding and proper democratic accountability, it has the potential to distract attention away from the important transfer of powers to regional combined authorities and mayors which will have bigger and longer-term consequences.

Joanie, who is co-director of the Institute of Cornish Studies at the University of Exeter, provided a perspective from a more rural part of England, and spoke passionately about the imbalance of power between rural and urban upper-tier authorities. In her view, cities tend to set the devolution agenda whilst rural economies (and their rich, varied, and unique contributions to UK plc) are sidelined as contributors to city economies, rather than as having value in their own right, entrenching the urban/rural divide, and failing to address the UK’s serious regional inequalities. Linked to this is Joanie’s own work showing that local authorities which are prioritising nature recovery struggle to get that issue onto the agenda within combined authority structures because of a dominant focus on more urban issues. In her view, the needs and differences of rural areas are much less discussed amidst the current round of devolution than was the case under the early part of the New Labour era; cities are very much at the heart of the debate rather than the rural areas around them.

Finally, we heard from Arianna, who is Professor of Political Sociology at the University of Urbino (Italy) and former Director of IPPR North and Deputy Director of the Local Governance Research Centre (LGRC) at De Montfort University. She argued that the government diagnosis of the problems which English devolution can address is right, but the prescription of solutions is more problematic. The architecture of devolution has been substantially expanded by the current government, but the fiscal and constitutional constraints that need to be removed to achieve genuine devolution remain largely intact. Even if devolution is now the default choice of the UK Government, they still control the rules of the game.

She added that there is a paradox underpinning the government approach to devolution: on the one hand, they promise more devolution across England, but at the same time local government reform towards large unitaries has been imposed from above as part of the agenda, essentially taking ‘the local’ out of local government.  The English Devolution Bill is an important step, but it is not likely to “settle” the issue once and for all. Embracing ‘devolution by default’ would require a radical reset of centre-local relations, setting them in statute. And while the Chancellor has hinted to deliver ‘a roadmap for fiscal devolution’ in her Mais Lecture, we will have to wait until the next autumn budget to understand what this will actually involve. Finally, Arianna also argued that shifting the dial on devolution requires not just institutional but also cultural change, especially at the centre. Recalling Martin Smith’s seminal work on the core executive, she suggested that as governance institutions and structures have and are still changing, the value system governing those structures should adapt to the new scenario – so far, this has not happened, and this remains a huge obstacle for the English devolution agenda.

From four different standpoints, there were several emerging areas of consensus:

• There was a feeling amongst the majority of the panel that there should be a consideration of, and moves towards, further fiscal devolution as England’s devolution architecture develops further.
• As devolution begins to be extended to more and different parts of the country, there will need to be ever-more flexibility to allow regions to adapt to differing local circumstances (geographic, social, demographic etc).
• Doing local government reorganisation at the same time as large regional devolution has thrown a lot of structural change up into the air at once, but it must be seen through to completion, as the chance is unlikely to come around again quickly.

The Campaign for Social Science is grateful to all the panellists for their excellent contributions, and to the Political Studies Association for allowing us to record and report on proceedings.

The Campaign for Social Science Devolution Hub showcases research and evidence-led insights from leading social scientists, through written contributions and events, to shine a light on devolved and sub-national government in the UK, including how the different polities across the UK might learn from each other, and whether the inconsistencies of the UK’s devolution map are an inherent strength or a challenge for a harmonious union of regions and nations. Explore the hub for more.