As a journalist, I have specialised in Wales, Welsh politics and devolution for the past 10 years. Devolution, in particular, could be considered a bit niche as subjects go. But suddenly, everyone wants to talk about itbecause Andy Burnham is making it front and centre of his offer as prime minister. MPs have been falling over themselves saying how great devolution is. I feel like a volcanologist after the Eyjafjallajökull eruption shut down air travel in 2010 – everyone is now talking about the thing I know about. But sudden interest among the general population does not necessarily equal expertise.
Further and more rationalised devolution is an incredible opportunity for the UK. It is the most fiscally centralised country in the G7 – twice as much as the next most centralised country, Italy. In an international context, it is bizarre that more than 90% of UK tax revenue is collected and controlled by the central government in Westminster. In the US, about half of government spending is by individual states. In the UK, the majority is by the central government. What is even stranger about the UK is that the prime minister is also the equivalent of the first minister of England. It’s like having the governor of Texas also be the US president.
But while devolution is a great opportunity, we need to get it right. In the more than a quarter of a century since Wales got its own parliament, there have been some big lessons that we now ignore at our peril.
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First, you can’t just devolve responsibilities, you have to devolve tools. In Wales, devolution is set up to fail. For example, the Welsh government has responsibility for economic development, but many of the key levers for driving economic growth are in Westminster.
If Wales wants to invest, it has very little borrowing capacity. In fact, it has less than a council. Local authorities in the UK have prudential borrowing powers that enable them to fund capital expenditure without direct central government consent. The Welsh government, by contrast, has hard limits. This has led to the bizarre situation where it has been forced to rely on local authorities to do its borrowing for it (such as a school-building programme). Even worse, Wales’s limited borrowing capacity was frozen from 2016 to 2026 (unlike Scotland, whose increased with inflation), meaning it could actually borrow less in real terms every year.
Wales also gets only about 2% of the UK’s research and development funding, despite making up 5% of the population. Add to this that key infrastructure such as rail isn’t devolved (this has robbed Wales of billions) and you can see the problem. How can you possibly boost the Welsh economy when Wales can hardly borrow any money, gets shafted on R&D funding (which is a huge driver of growth) and isn’t even able to properly develop its transport network?
Don’t get me wrong: I am not giving successive Welsh governments a free pass on a pretty woeful record (one previous minister actually said: “We don’t really know what we’re doing on the economy”). Devolution in Wales is the equivalent of giving someone a brand new electric car without any capacity to charge it. If devolution is to work in Wales, Scotland and England, it has to be designed to do so.
This leads me to point two – stop balking at the cost. Governance costs money to do well. One of the big criticisms of further devolution will be that it will “add more bureaucracy”. I suspect that those who most bleat about the expense will totally miss the irony that the current centre of political gravity in the UK is a mouse-infested palace that is costing taxpayers up to £40bn to renovate, with a single door costing £9.6m (and it still didn’t work correctly). As an aside, £40bn would, by my calculations, cover the annual running cost of the (expanded) Welsh Senedd for 390 years.
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My third point is that devolution means different things in different places. In Wales and Scotland, it is more than an administrative framework – it is an expression of nationhood. It is an acknowledgment that the UK is made up of four distinct nations. You can’t treat these nations merely as the equivalent of regions of England.
A cookie-cutter approach to devolution is not appropriate. There were some early concerning signs from Burnham only a few weeks ago. His team submitted guest articles to publications in London, Scotland and Wales, outlining his vision for devolution in those places. Embarrassingly, these were in essence the same article, but he substituted Newham for Merthyr, Tottenham for the Valleys and Barking for Wrexham. He also erroneously made commitments in areas where the UK government has no power, on areas such as housing, water and apprenticeships.
There was fury in Welsh Labour at this, with one source telling me it was a “gift to Plaid Cymru”. Burnham then published another column where he was more categorical about his support for the current devolution settlement. But the point is that if you believe devolution is a good thing because different places have different challenges and could require different solutions, then don’t treat them all the same.
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The final point: you have to make sure you safeguard devolution so it can survive the administration that brought it in. Welsh democracy and the existence of our Senedd were brought in and strengthened after two referendums in Wales. Yet it can be abolished simply by a majority vote in Westminster. Even if every Welsh MP votes against it and all the Senedd members oppose the Welsh parliament’s abolition, it could, in theory, be consigned to history by a simple act of parliament in London.
You can’t give people a voice then remove it without their approval.
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At a time where the only thing everyone seems to agree on is that the system doesn’t work, a radical change to how we deliver policy and governance is not just an opportunity, it is vital. But doing it well is just as important as doing it at all.
So we need to learn the lessons from the devolution that has gone before, what works and what doesn’t. To do anything less would be to squander one of those rare occasions when our arcane and tradition-filled political system seems open to change.
