Deal or no deal: English Devolution, a top-down approach

Abstract

A new legislative framework for devolution has been introduced into England marking a potentially significant step towards addressing the unfinished business of Labour’s devolution settlement. What promised to be a bespoke and bottom-up commitment to devolution for English local government has manifested into a top-down, prescriptive and inconsistent process of agreeing the decentralisation of functions and finances to groups of principal local authorities. The paper reports on the progress of the new wave of devolution in England to date, through a review of agreed devolution deals and assesses the extent to which the current ‘devolution revolution’ represents the beginning of a shift away from a centralised system built from the bottom up, or looks set to result in another typically top-down reform to local government. The paper presents the initial findings of early research, which will be used to develop key research questions for a further long-term research project.