The incoming Prime Minister wants us to believe that the salvation of the British state lies in a map of combined authorities, regional mayors, and decentralized budgets. The political class has fallen head over heels for Manchesterism—the theory that if you take power out of SW1 and drop it into regional hubs, public services will suddenly work, and economic growth will magically distribute itself across the postcodes.
It is a comforting narrative. It is also entirely wrong.
What is being sold as a democratic revolution is actually the ultimate bureaucratic shell game. Devolution does not dismantle the over-centralized state; it replicates its worst habits on a local level. It replaces one unaccountable Treasury-obsessed elite in London with a dozen regional elites, each running their own miniature fiefdoms with even less scrutiny, worse economies of scale, and a total lack of national coordination.
We are about to spend billions of pounds restructuring the machinery of Whitehall to build a network of regional assemblies, and the result will not be regional renewal. The result will be administrative paralysis.
The Mirage of the Bee Network
Proponents of this regional approach point to Greater Manchester’s Bee Network as the ultimate proof of concept. They tell us that bringing buses back under local control and capping fares at £2 is a triumph of local public ownership.
But let us look at the math.
Local bus regulation did not succeed because of some mystical "place-based" magic. It succeeded because central government poured hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayer money into transitional funding to prop it up. When you subsidize a service heavily enough, it looks like a triumph. But as a national blueprint, it is completely unsustainable.
If every combined authority in the country attempts to run its own regulated transport system, we end up with:
- A fragmented transport system where ticketing systems do not talk to each other across regional borders.
- Twelve different regional procurement teams bidding against each other for the same limited supply of electric buses and rolling stock, driving up prices for everyone.
- Billion-pound shortfalls that local tax bases cannot support, leading to inevitable bailouts funded by the national taxpayer.
The efficiency of a national network comes from standardization. France’s national rail system and Germany’s integrated transit networks do not work because every tiny municipality has total control over its own standards. They work because they have national scale and coherent central planning. Burnham’s model promises the exact opposite: an expensive, balkanized patchwork.
The Great Accountability Vacuum
The deepest flaw in this theory of government is the assumption that local politicians are inherently more accountable to local people. Having spent two decades advising local authorities on infrastructure delivery, I can tell you the reality is far uglier.
In a national parliament, a minister is subjected to daily select committees, intense national media scrutiny, and a formal opposition. In a regional combined authority, the mayor operates in a media vacuum. Local newspapers have been hollowed out. There are no regional equivalent committees with the teeth to actually hold a metro-mayor to account.
Consider how regional authorities actually make decisions. They do not hold massive participatory town halls. They rely on hand-picked cabinets of local council leaders who swap favors behind closed doors. You back my bypass project, and I will back your housing development. It is municipal logrolling masquerading as "double devolution".
If you think Westminster is a closed shop, look at how regional authorities award contracts. The lack of national oversight makes local government uniquely vulnerable to capture by regional developer monopolies and local political donors. By stripping away national procurement standards, we are not empowering local people—we are empowering local elites.
Dismantling the Fallacy of Place-Based Growth
The core economic premise of Manchesterism is that local control over housing, energy, and skills is a prerequisite for economic growth. The theory suggests that local leaders know their economies best and can target investment far more precisely than a clerk in Whitehall.
This sounds plausible until you analyze how modern economies actually grow.
Major economic drivers—frontier technologies, artificial intelligence compute, grid infrastructure, deep-tech research, and global supply chains—do not operate on a municipal scale. They require massive, long-term capital investments that no single regional authority can underwrite.
When a global tech firm looks to build a multi-billion-pound data center, they do not care about a local mayor's ten-year spatial development strategy. They care about:
- Grid Capacity: Can the national grid deliver hundreds of megawatts of power to this specific site?
- National Regulation: Is the regulatory framework for data privacy and security stable?
- National Skills Pipelines: Does the country produce enough high-level software engineers to support the site?
Under a devolved model, we expect local authorities to solve these massive coordination problems individually. A local mayor cannot upgrade the national electricity grid. A local mayor cannot negotiate international trade and technology standards.
When we force frontier technology firms to negotiate with regional mayors instead of a single national framework, we simply add layers of friction. Instead of one national planning system, companies must now navigate twelve different regional authorities, each with their own unique "spatial development strategies" and local pet projects. It is a recipe for stagnation, not growth.
The Danger of Localizing Public Services
The devolution agenda does not stop at transport and planning; its advocates want to decentralize essential public services like skills training and healthcare.
This is where the model becomes actively dangerous. Ceding control of skills training to regional authorities sounds highly democratic, but in practice, it creates a post-code lottery for basic qualifications. If a worker in Sunderland receives skills training tailored strictly to the needs of the local automotive cluster, what happens if that cluster downsizes? That worker is left with highly localized, non-transferable skills that make it incredibly difficult to move to another part of the country for work.
A national economy requires a mobile, adaptable workforce. It requires national standards for education, national standards for professional qualifications, and national standards for healthcare delivery.
When we fragment these systems into regional silos, we make it harder for people to move, harder for businesses to hire nationally, and harder to maintain basic standards of public safety. The NHS has enough administrative bloat as it is; the last thing it needs is to have its funding and governance fractured across dozens of devolved authorities, each trying to run their own independent procurement and recruitment systems.
The Treasury is Not the Enemy—It is the Scapegoat
A favorite target of the devolution lobby is HM Treasury. We are told that the Treasury’s strict fiscal rules and centralized control over spending are the primary obstacles to regional growth.
This is a classic case of blaming the thermometer for the fever.
The Treasury’s obsession with controlling public spending exists because the UK has a structural fiscal deficit and a massive debt burden. Giving regional mayors the power to borrow money or levy local taxes does not magically create new wealth. It simply shifts the burden of debt.
If regional authorities are given borrowing powers, one of two things will happen:
- They will borrow excessively to fund short-term, politically popular projects, leading to local government bankruptcies (as we have already seen with numerous councils across the country).
- The national taxpayer will ultimately have to step in to bail them out, meaning the Treasury will have to re-impose central controls anyway.
The idea that we can bypass the realities of national fiscal discipline by letting regional politicians write their own checks is a fantasy. It ignores the fundamental rules of public finance.
Rebuilding the Center Instead of Abandoning It
The solution to Westminster's dysfunction is not to dismantle the state and hand the pieces to regional mayors. The solution is to make the central state work.
We do not need more regional politicians, more local assemblies, or more devolved budgets. We need a competent, highly capable central administration that can make long-term decisions on infrastructure, planning, and industrial strategy without getting bogged down in localized nimbyism.
True national renewal requires:
- National Planning Reform: Stripping local planning authorities of their power to block critical national infrastructure, from wind farms to housing developments.
- Standardized Procurement: Consolidating public purchasing into highly professional, centralized national agencies to drive down costs and ensure quality.
- A Unified Industrial Strategy: Focusing national investment on a few key sectors where the UK can genuinely compete globally, rather than spreading funding thinly across every single region to appease local mayors.
The devolution experiment has run its course. It has given us grandstanding mayors, bloated regional bureaucracies, and a fragmented public sector. It is time to stop pretending that localizing our problems is the same thing as solving them. We need a strong, centralized state that actually knows how to govern, not a balkanized nation of ten competing fiefdoms.
