The ‘devolution revolution’ is ramping up at pace. The impacts are likely to be felt across the country and have far-reaching consequences for a great many policy areas – including for the creative, cultural and heritage sectors.

Culture Commons and 30 partners have run a yearlong programme with stakeholders from across the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem here in the UK. Together, we’ve been holding a space for a national dialogue about devolution and increased local decision making.

We wanted this to be a truly open and transparent programme that could bring all parts of our ecosystem together. That’s why we’ve been publishing all of our outputs as the programme has progressed and have committed to making all the insights open access.

We’re delighted to have been joined by a diversity of people, places, practitioners, sector bodies, funders, research institutions and decision makers. Collectively, our place partners serve nearly 8 million people and our sector partners have an extensive collective reach into parts of the ecosystem we simply could not reach alone.

We’ve now amassed a significant body of new evidence that has helped us to design a suite of new 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 further devolution provide us with.

There is little doubt that the UK needs to ‘decentralise’ and move decision making closer to communities. However, unfettered devolution is a sure-fire road to system collapse, which could entrench the very structural issues we’re trying to address.

Our evidence makes clear that we will need to depart from the status quo and apply some radical new thinking if we are to finally move the dial on the entrenched inequalities that characterise too many parts the country. But we’ll also need to work with existing infrastructures to ensure we have some sense of stability as we go through a period of considerable change.

This digital report brings together the findings and policy thinking in one place to make easier for a range of stakeholders to engage with them. As you move through it, we invite you to think about how the findings and recommendations might be useful in your own personal and professional contexts, and consider working with us to extrapolate them as part of the next phase of the programme.

Most of all, we hope this work marks the beginning of a much wider and ongoing debate about how the UK’s creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem can both support, and benefit from, an increasingly devolved policy landscape.