Government Social Research

Charlie Jeffrey - Director of the ESRC Devolution and Cultural Change Programme

Devolution has bedded in remarkably smoothly. But it remains a fractured project, a collection of separate initiatives, which lacks an overarching sense of purpose. UK Government in Westminster and Whitehall has been slow, complacent even, in thinking through the UK-wide implications of devolution.

That devolution lacks a compass is shown in the questions of policy variation and economic disparity. How much of each should we have in a common state? The initial instinct was to let the various devolved flowers bloom. There is some concern in Whitehall now to set limits, at least on economic disparities, at least for the English regions. There needs to be more concern, not (necessarily) in reducing differences between territories but in establishing where the outside limits to difference should lie.

Devolution changes the content of UK citizenship. Being a citizen post-devolution can mean that the state - UK-level or in its devolved incarnations - provides different standards and services for you in different places. Of course it also did before, but on a smaller scale in both theory and practice. What has been lacking since devolution is a restatement of what the minimum level of state provision is that should be available to all on equal terms no matter where anyone lives.

There are plenty of indications that people want such minimum standards: concerns over 'post-code lotteries', a sense that the 'north-south divide' is a problem, the imagery of the 'national' health service. Some of the most potent indications surround the terminology of 'need' which pervade UK territorial finance debates. Special needs in one place that require compensation also require some kind of tacit or explicit consent in other, less 'needy' places that compensation will be given. There is a veiled assumption in the idea of need about UK-wide solidarity. It needs to be unveiled so that an open and sensible debate can be had about who gets what and why, and about why everyone should in some fields of state activity get the same from the state across the UK.

There are some pointers in public opinion about a UK-wide capacity to create a sustainable trade-off between solidarity and variation. People in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland seem to think they get too much government from the centre, and too little scope for making decisions closer to home. Much the same could be said of the debate on English regional devolution. At the same time though - with exceptions in Northern Ireland - people combine a strengthening sense of (sub-UK) national identity with continuingly strong attachments to some idea of Britishness.

Devolution in all these senses - relations between governments, outputs of the state, public attitudes - is not about 'either-or' questions, but 'both-and' equations. But no government in the UK - in Westminster or beyond - has put much effort into defining the UK-level and UK-wide dimensions of any of these equations. Without such efforts devolution runs the danger of drifting into a centrifugal dynamic. And that is not what it was meant to be for.