Noted public policy thinker and opponent-murdering enthusiast Vladimir Lenin allegedly once said: “There are decades when nothing happens, then there are weeks when decades happen.”
The four or so weeks since Andy Burnham became British Prime Minister are probably not the sort of thing he meant – democratic politics and peaceful transitions not really being big with the Bolsheviks. But in its own way, Burnham’s government has, certainly rhetorically, done in a very short time things other Westminster governments have sometimes talked of, but never sought to enact, for forty years or more.
The scale of devolution Burnham has proposed is at the furthest end of what people might have expected, promising a level of power redeployment even Lenin might have been impressed by. Burnham even took the time in his first few days in office to kill something – in this case, not the Tsar and his family, but the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT).
This has made a number of people quite sad, especially in the higher education sector, because this had been the department where some, but by no means all, government interaction with the sector dwelt, and certainly the bit universities felt most in sync with.
It made me sad too, because, a mere few days before DSIT was taken into the metaphorical basement to be administered the coup-de-grace, I published a paper saying that it should become the beating heart of a significantly expanded ministry dedicated to achieving the new PM’s stated goals of prosperity and local empowerment.
Thus, DSIT’s demise was a bit of a blow, I must confess. But other things that Burnham and his colleagues have done make me think that, while a “Ministry for Manchesterism” is not coming, both the problems my report identified and a lot of the solutions it proposed are still viable and relevant.
Testing Manchesterism
To explain, my core thesis was that Burnham’s Manchesterism is a genuine governing philosophy, not merely a label slapped on a grab-bag of ideas. Burnham believes the British state is over-centralised, its public policy apparatus over-marketised, and in consequence, its citizens feel alienated and unheard.
I think Burnham’s own pronouncements and especially Rewiring the State (RtS) – the Cabinet-agreed statement of intent, hereafter RtS – suggest that analysis is correct.
Unlike others who have spoken about reforming the state prior to moving into Downing Street only to decide they quite like all the money and power once they move behind the black door, Burnham has set out a clear intention to reduce his own and his cabinet’s control of not merely implementation of policy, but determining what needs to be done, and even how it should be funded.
“Devolution by default” is RtS’s operating principle – decisions made locally unless there is good evidence they need to be made nationally. That last formulation is almost word-for-word the first principle I proposed for a Manchesterist department: “local where possible, national where necessary.”
The paper argued that the current Whitehall calculus for who gets to decide should be reversed – instead of every devolution decision requiring justification against a status quo of central control, it should be central retention that requires justification. RtS adopts that reversal.
Burnham also recognised that statements of intention alone are not enough – I argued that no current Whitehall department is administratively constructed or culturally incentivised to genuinely carry through on the redistribution of power. Burnham has announced not only a “Number 10 North” operation, headed by seriously networked members of his own trusted circle, but done what no other PM has dared to do and create an actual Prime Minister’s Office to ensure the chair of the Cabinet has the bureaucratic wherewithal to see that action is taken.
So, I am genuinely hopeful about Burnham’s overall conception of the state and his approach to enacting it.
What is worrying me is the other reason I wanted a beefed-up DSIT: unification of post-16 educational oversight in a single place.
Devolution by negotiation
My paper highlighted that no other comparable government has organised their post-compulsory education system as England has, with splits between Department for Education (DfE) looking after further education, higher education teaching, Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) in control of adult skills policy, and now the Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (where DSIT’s oversight of research funding and policy has gone). Our peer nations either have one big education department, often with more than one Cabinet-level minister, or they split governance of compulsory and non-compulsory education.
So, while the creation of DBIST does one thing I wanted – bringing the teams with responsibility for the industrial strategy together with at least a part of the post-compulsory education and skills system – there is still far too much fragmentation.
DfE is overloaded holding a schooling brief where huge amounts of work need to be done on SEND in the next Parliamentary session, while DWP and DfE now have a claim on the time and attention of further education colleges, and the policy architecture for university research remains divorced from that of university teaching.
This is not a recipe for seriously tackling an area of huge strategic importance for Burnham’s mission, that is, the alignment of educational activity with economic need. Burnham has said Britain will now always value the hard hat as much as the graduation cap. While this is a nattier formulation than previous governments have come up with, as an aspiration it is little different from that of the previous Labour administration, and indeed could easily have been uttered by Rob Halfon, a former Skills Minister in the last Tory government. If Burnham wants his policy to make the difference Halfon’s didn’t, he needs to explain what will be different this time.
Of course, part of his answer will be “devolution.” RtS proposes to devolve significant powers over skills, education, and economic development to mayors and strategic authorities. But devolve from where? If the centre cannot speak with one voice on post-compulsory education – if a mayor wanting to build an integrated local skills and higher education strategy has to negotiate separately with DfE on colleges, DWP on apprenticeships, and DBIST on research infrastructure – then devolution becomes a process of collecting fragments from different departments, each with its own priorities, its own minister, its own spending review settlement.
That is not devolution by default. It is devolution by negotiation, conducted separately with every part of a Whitehall machine that has no structural incentive to coordinate. The barrier is not with any single department, but with the fact that no department owns the whole problem.
Philosophy needs form
I am genuinely encouraged by RtS. The moral commitment at its core – that reconnecting economic power to the places where people live and work is a precondition for reversing national decline – is right. The pace is serious.
The Cabinet Office origin signals that this is not a departmental hobby but a governing priority. And the willingness to assign fiscal powers – income tax, business rates – rather than merely devolving spending powers within Whitehall grant frameworks is a qualitative shift from everything that came before.
But a governing philosophy still needs institutional form. RtS is a statement of intent from the centre, Number 10 North and the Department of the PM have begun the rewiring of Whitehall – but the parts of it responsible for post-18 education, the engine room of any serious prosperity strategy, remain fragmented, and uncoordinated.
My paper proposed a Department for Skills, Research, and Prosperity built on the DSIT base. That base no longer exists.
If the government now recognises – as I believe the logic of its own devolution programme requires – that post-18 education needs a single coherent department, it will have to build it differently. The DSIT base was convenient, not essential. What matters is the function: one department, one minister with Cabinet status, all post-18 education and research under one roof, governed from its first day by the presumption that decisions should be made locally unless there is good evidence they cannot be.
The devolution of powers is the hard political work, and the government is doing it.
The creation of the department to make that devolution coherent is the structural work that remains. Without it, new and existing strategic authorities will each have to solve the same coordination problem that has defeated Whitehall for a decade – and they will have to solve it separately, from a weaker position, with fewer levers.
The next machinery of government change is the one that matters most. Burnham has shown he is willing to kill a department he sees as not serving his purpose, but is he willing to build one that can?
After all, as Lenin nearly said, “Without revolutionary machinery there can be no revolutionary devolution.”
