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 the public, and where culture, creativity and heritage are restored to their rightful place – at the very heart of our local, regional and national life…

Like the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates, devolution can be incremental and go unnoticed. But every now and then, the plates shift at breakneck speed and the landscape is changed forever.

Trevor MacFarlane FRSA
Director of Culture Commons

Introduction

The UK is in the middle of a ‘devolution revolution’ that looks set to ramp up at pace in the coming months and years. Local and regional leaders will receive more powers and responsibilities for the decisions that affect the people they serve. This will have far-reaching consequences for places across the UK and many policy areas.

The creative, cultural and heritage sectors have been noticeably absent from the national debate about devolution in recent years. This is despite having been identified as key strategic growth sectors by our national governments and a growing appreciation for the transformative benefits they bring to local people and places.

Culture Commons and 30 partners have now come together to run a major four nations open policy development programme to explore how our sectors might make the most of devolution and use this significant period of change to address some of the deep-seated policy challenges we face.

The partnership is made up of 30 core organisations. Collectively, we are based and/or work within every region and nations of the UK.

We’ve opened up a space for a diversity of people, places, organisations, funders, firms, support bodies and research institutions to share their perspectives.

  • Our place partners represent nearly 8 million people in villages, towns, cities and regions across the UK
  • Our sector partners are a mix of private and public organisations and representative bodies operating within and/or engaging with DCMS sub-sectors
  • Our research partners are leaders in the respective fields and disciplines and are connected to extensive wider academic and research networks
  • Our funding partners irrigate the ecosystem and invest extensive levels of private and public funding in different ways
  • Our observer partners are connected to high-level decision making processes that shape the policy landscape

You can find out more about each of the partners in Part 2.

Culture Commons led the design and delivery of this four nations open policy development programme on behalf of the 30 partners.

Culture Commons is an independent and not-for-profit think tank. We specialise in bringing the creative, cultural and heritage sectors together with researchers to co-design new policy and influence decision making at the local, regional and national levels.

Our team is made up of policy experts, former political advisors and civil servants who have worked at all tiers of government, in parliaments and within the creative, cultural and heritage sectors.

You can find out more about our wider work at www.culturecommons.uk

Our Mission

To activate the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem in all parts of the UK to tackle socio-economic and spatial injustice and address ecosystem instability by harnessing the momentum of the 'devolution revolution'.

Our Actions

At the start of the programme, the partners set out to:
 
  • Identify and articulate the challenges and opportunities that more decision making powers and responsibilities for local and regional government might present to the creative, cultural and heritage life of different places across the UK. 
  • Arrive at a new shared language to better articulate how the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem interacts with, and can support, local place-based development and policy priorities in an increasingly devolved policy landscape.  
  • Co-design a suite of evidence-informed policy positions that could help deliver a more equitable and sustainable flourishing of creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem in all parts of the UK.

Through extensive research and insight gathering, we’ve surfaced a wide variety of views about how devolution and increased local decision making might roll out in different places and different sub-sectors. Nonetheless, we have started to build up a picture of the areas that the sector feel concerned and optimistic about. 

From the evidence we have amassed so far, it is clear that we must ‘decentralise’ decision making associated with the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem and immediately set about building new local and regional infrastructures that can empower communities and address extreme regional inequities.

At the same time, we find that a premature devolution of some powers and responsibilities could further fragment our sub-sectors and the patchwork of provision. This could lead to several unintended consequences that may exacerbate some of the very structural issues we’d like to address.

To seize the opportunities and mitigate against the risks, decision makers at all levels will need to depart from the status quo and apply some radical new thinking. 

We’ve set out six new policy principles and made 20 policy recommendations that we believe are sensible and implementable – proportionate to the obvious fiscal challenges of our time – but that nonetheless seize the moment to recalibrate the ecosystem as devolution extends.

With a pioneering spirit and a thoughtful approach, we feel certain we can grow our sectors in a way that includes and benefits more people and places than ever before.

‘Open Policymaking’ is a method established by UK Government to open up public policy design to a wider variety of stakeholders. We have adopted some of the key principles sitting behind this approach and built on others whilst designing this open policy development programme. 

At Culture Commons, we believe that the people who are going to be most affected by a policy should be able to participate in its making. This is particularly important in relation to policies of national significance such as devolution that will impact on large numbers of people where they live.

The full diversity of the ecosystem rarely have an opportunity to come together to talk about policy in a systematic way. We know that certain stakeholders groups such as the public and the workforce (and in particular freelancers) can be excluded from policymaking processes. This can see some parts of the ecosystem – usually those that have the time and resource to give – shaping policies that impact everyone.

This open policy development programme purposefully invites everyone in: from local and regional governments, sector representative bodies, arm’s length bodies and grant-giving bodies, the workforce (including freelancers) and the public too. Recognising the considerable variation in contexts across the country, we have engaged stakeholders from across all regions and nations of the UK.

We are commitment to a radically open and transparent approach. Culture Commons has been publishing details and outputs from every meeting, roundtable, panel, workshop and Policy Lab we’ve run, summarising insights gathered in a series of open-access reports. All of our commissioned research has also published open source to enable as many people as possible to benefit from it.

We detail the full programme design in Part 2.

This Microsite

We hope this microsite will serve as a useful and accessible tool to help a wider range of stakeholders to engage with the ideas coming out of this open policy development programme.

As you move through the microsite, we invite you to think about how the findings resonate with your own personal and professional experiences and how we might work with you to bring the recommendations to life in your context.

In Part 1, we define some of our key working terms and set out a rationale for the programme with a focus on how our sectors have factored into devolution policy so far. 

In Part 2, we outline the design of the open policy development programme, share our research methodology and describe our insight gathering activities. 

In Part 3, we share some of the key findings emerging from across the research and insight gathering phase and begin to analyse them.

In Part 4, we lay out a suite of new policy principles and policy recommendations directed at different tiers of government and decision makers.

In Part 5, we propose a series of spin-out projects we’re working on that will see our recommendations extrapolated into immediate action. 
  • As a programme built on a partnership model and with the intention of engaging as widely as possible across the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem, we have an extensive number of individuals and organisations from all four UK nations and beyond to thank.

We’re particularly grateful to all those who engaged with us during the research and insight gathering phases of the programme. It is the time, lived experiences and expertise that they so generously shared with us that has made it possible to design the policy in this report.

We outline the individuals and organisations we have engaged with during the course of the programme in Part 2.

The core project team for this open policy development programme was as follow:

  • Trevor MacFarlane FRSA, Founding Director, Programme Lead and Research Series Editor, Culture Commons
  • Alanna Reid, Policy & Programmes Manager, (Oct 2023 – Nov 2024), Culture Commons
  • Dr Lucrezia Gigante, Postdoctoral Research Associate (Mar – Nov 2024), Culture Commons
  • Morwenna Fuge, Communications & Events Manager (Apr – Nov 2024), Culture Commons
  • Dr Claire Burnill-Maier, Postdoctoral Research Associate (Feb – Jun 2024), Culture Commons
  • Helen Haslam, Executive Assistant

The programme was supported by a Steering Panel made up of senior representatives from each of the programme partners, as well as a team of leading researchers who are all outlined in detail in Part 2.

As an open policy development programme, Culture Commons and our partners are sharing all our findings and outcomes as we go. To this end, we have published a series of Research Papers, Insight Papers and other materials on a dedicated digital hub which can be accessed freely by anyone.

This digital report and all the outputs that appear on the dedicated digital hub mentioned above are published under a Creative Commons ‘Attribution-NoneCommericila-ShareAlike 4.0 International’ licence. This means that anyone can share and adapt the content as long as: 

  • appropriate credit is given to the author(s) 
  • a link to the material is included in the citation 
  • all changes to the original material are indicated 

In addition, the original content may not be used for commercial purposes – this in-keeping with the not-for-profit nature of the open policy development programme.  

Lastly any remix, transformation or materials built on the original material that is developed must be distributed under the same license as the original.  

You can read the full license terms and conditions in more detail here. 

To cite material, please use: 

‘The Future of Cultural Devolution in the UK’, Trevor MacFarlane, Culture Commons, November 2024, https://devolution.culturecommons.uk/

If you have any questions or thoughts about this paper, we’d be delighted to hear from you; please email contact@culturecommons.uk and a member of the Culture Commons team will be back in touch with you. 

Part 1. Diagnosis