The Future of
Cultural Devolution
in the UK
Findings and recommendations from a major four nations research and open policy development programme
Picture a renewed United Kingdom based on better relationships between governments, communities, and citizens, and where culture, creativity and heritage are restored to their rightful place at the very heart of our local, regional and national life.
Culture Commons and 30 partners have just concluded a yearlong programme of active listening with stakeholders from right across the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem. Together, we’ve instigated a national dialogue about devolution and increased local decision making.
The UK Government and the devolved governments in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have all made commitments that will see the ‘devolution revolution’ ramp up at pace in the coming years. The implications are likely to be felt in all four nations and have far-reaching consequences in a great many policy areas.
This is why we launched an open policy development programme to begin thinking about the risks and opportunities devolution and increased local decision making might post to the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem. Importantly, we wanted this to be a radically open and transparent policy dialogue that could bring all parts of our ecosystem together.
Along with our programme partners, we’ve now amassed a new body of evidence that has enabled us to make a series of policy recommendations. We think these measures are sensible – proportionate to the obvious challenges of our time – but nonetheless seize the opportunity that full-throated commitments to increased local decision making provide us with.
It has become increasingly clear to us that we will need to depart from the status quo and apply some radical new thinking if we are to finally begin moving the dial on the entrenched inequalities that characterise parts of the ecosystem. With thoughtful policy interventions and a boldness of spirit from those already in positions of power, we can unlock the potential in people and places in all parts of the UK.
We hope this piece of work will be of interest to a wide variety of stakeholder groups – from sector practitioners to policymakers. As you move through the report – the fruits of Phase 1 – we invite you to think about how the findings and recommendations might be useful in your own context and consider working with us as we prepare to ramp up our activities as part of our Phase 2 rollout.
Most of all, we hope this report marks the beginning of a much wider and ongoing debate about how the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem might support and benefit from an increasingly devolved policy landscape. We do not think for a moment that this report is a final word, or a definitive answer – it’s simply where we’ve got to so far.
"Like the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates, devolution can be incremental and go unnoticed. But every now and then, these plates shift at breakneck speed and the landscape is changed forever."
Partners
Back in 2023, Culture Commons set out to build a ‘coalition of the willing’. We intended to run a small policy project that would help us begin to get a sense of how devolution might play out in the coming years.
In so doing, we wanted to get a sense of how the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem had featured in the story of devolution so far. We also wanted to see if we might be able to get ahead of the potential risks and opportunities that further devolution is likely to bring in the coming years.
As we began to tour the country searching for partners, something extraordinary happened. It quickly became apparent to us that the level of interest from stakeholders within the ecosystem was unlike anything we’d seen before. This would require a different approach entirely.
In response, we set about building a bespoke open policy development programme that could purposefully hold space for a diversity of people, places, practitioners, sector bodies, funders, research institutions and existing decision makers.
The final partnership of 30 brings a broad range of perspectives and objectives to the table.
Number of citizens represented by Place Partners
Place Partners
North East Combined Authority
Belfast City Council
Cardiff Council
Cambridgeshire & Peterborough
Durham County Council
Greater Manchester Combined Authority
Harlow District Council
Sheffield City Council via Sheffield Culture Collective
Wigan Council
South Yorkshire Combined Authority
Belfast City Council
District Council
Population:
348,005
Size:
132 km2
GDP per head at current market prices, pounds:
£49,821
Cambridgeshire & Peterborough
Combined authority made up of 7 Local Authorities.
Population:
896,800
Size:
3,400 km2
GDP per head at current market prices, pounds:
£38,001
Constituent Local Authorities:
2 upper tier local authorities: Cambridgeshire County Council, Peterborough City Council 5 District Councils: Cambridge City, East Cambridgeshire, South Cambridgeshire, Fenland, Huntingdonshire.
Cardiff Council
Combined authority made up of 7 Local Authorities.
Population:
383, 536
Size:
141 km2
GDP per head at current market prices, pounds:
£40,950
Durham County Council
Unitary authority
Population:
532,200
Size:
2,230 km2
GDP per head at current market prices, pounds:
£23,169
Greater Manchester Combined Authority
Combined authority made up of 10 Local Authorities
Population:
2,948,633
Size:
1,277 km2
GDP per head at current market prices, pounds:
£34,246
Constituent Local Authorities:
Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford and Wigan
North East Combined Authority
Combined authority made up of 7 Local Authorities
Population:
2,012,449
Size:
7,786 km2
GDP per head at current market prices, pounds:
£24,585
Constituent Local Authorities:
County Durham, Gateshead, Newcastle, North Tyneside, Northumberland, South Tyneside and Sunderland
Harlow District Council
District council
Population:
96,040
Size:
30.54 km2
GDP per head at current market prices, pounds:
£29,079
Sheffield City Council via Sheffield Culture Collective
Cultural Compact (metropolitan district based on Sheffied City Council juristiction)
Population:
573,252
Size:
368 km2
GDP per head at current market prices, pounds:
£30,896
South Yorkshire Combined Authority
Combined authority made up of 4 Local Authorities
Population:
1,407,072
Size:
3,484 km2
GDP per head at current market prices, pounds:
£26,485
Constituent Local Authorities:
Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster and Barnsley
Wigan Council
Metropolitan borough council
Population:
339,174
Size:
200 km2
GDP per head at current market prices, pounds:
£21,487
Sector Partners
Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales
Covering: Wales
Art Fund
Covering: UK
Association of Leading Visitor Attractions
Covering: UK
Centre for Cultural Value
Based in Leeds, England with UK reach
Creative Estuary
Covering: District council
Culture Counts
Covering: Scotland
Gulbenkian Foundation
Covering: UK (and international)
Hestletine Institute for Public Policy (University of Liverpool)
Covering: UK
Historic England
Covering: England
Libraries Connected
Covering: England, Wales and Northern Ireland
Paul Hamlyn Foundation
Covering: UK
University of Dundee
Based in Dundee, Scotland with UK reach
University of Kent
Based in Kent, England with UK reach
University of Leeds
Based in Leeds, England with UK reach
University of Warwick
Based in Warwick, England with UK reach
Observer Partners
Arts Council England
Covering: England
Creative Industries Council
Covering: UK
Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre
Covering: UK
Historic England
Covering: England
Local Government Association
Covering: England and Wales
RSA
Covering: UK
Place Partners
Click on a logo below to read more about each partner.
Sector Partners
Observer Partners
Our Mission
The partners set out to investigate devolution in more detail – what it means, how it works and why it has become a policy priority here in the UK.
In so doing, we wanted to get a sense of how the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem had featured in the story of devolution so far.
We also wanted to see if we might be able to get ahead of the potential risks and opportunities that further devolution is likely to bring in the coming years.
Early scoping for the programme saw the emergence of a headline policy challenge.
Unknown devolution policies are likely to be deployed at pace into an inequitable and unevenly distributed creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem.
As we will explore in more detail later in this report, the UK’s creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem is characterised by a series of disparities that manifest in a variety of ways in different parts of the country. These disparities are long-standing and complex in nature.
Inspired by the new UK Government’s mission-driven approach, we flipped our challenge into a high-level mission. This has helped us to stay focussed on the often systemic and knottier policy questions and identify areas of common cause across the coalition.
To harness the devolution revolution to tackle socio-economic and geographical injustice associated with the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem and unleash the full potential of the ecosystem in all parts of the country.
Our mission dovetails nicely with two of the UK Government’s own national missions, namely that of securing the highest sustained growth in the G7 and breaking down barriers to opportunity at every stage. This is because the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem is, when support appropriately, well placed to support both economic and social outcomes – a theme we will return to throughout this report.
Together, partners resolved to:
- Identify and articulate the challenges and opportunities that increased decision making responsibilities for local government might present to the creative, cultural life of different places across the UK.
- Arrive at a new shared language to better articulate how the creative, cultural and heritage sectors interact with, and can support, local place-based development and policy priorities in a new devolved landscape.
- Co-design a suite of evidence-informed policy positions that could serve to support a more equitable and sustainable flourishing of creative and cultural activities in all parts of the UK.
This Report
This report is structured into five sections:
First, we define some of our key working terms and outline a rationale for the programme with a focus on how our ecosystem has factored into devolution policy so far.
Second, we describe the shape of the open policy development programme, capturing the breadth of the engagement with ecosystem stakeholders.
Third, we share some of the headline findings we have amassed along the way.
Fourth, we make a series of recommendations directed at different tiers of government and parts of the ecosystem.
Lastly, we lay out a series of spin-out projects that we would like to mount that would see the recommendations extrapolated into immediate action.
A note on language
Over the course of the year, we have engaged with an extensive number of people and organisations operating in very different contexts. Everyone has a different working definition of what constitutes ‘culture’, ‘creativity’ and ‘heritage’ or what they might understand to be the ‘infrastructure’ associated with them. Indeed, we seek to address some of these challenges in our policy recommendations later in this report.
For the purposes of this report, we have applied a broad and inclusive definition to ensure a wider readership can engage with this text. Where relevant, we make particular reference to subsectors where we fee this will add value – particularly, for example, where we a drawing out insights from external people who contributed to our insight gathering phase.
There are wonderful resources available for those who may wish to learn more about existing taxonomies!