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…

The UK is in the midst of a ‘devolution revolution’ and the drive towards more localised decision making is set to ramp up at pace in the coming years. There are going to be far-reaching consequences for communities in all parts of the country and in a great many policy areas too.

So far, the creative, cultural and heritage sectors have not featured prominently in national debates about devolution. This is despite being identified as key strategic growth sectors by national governments and the growing appreciation local decision makers have for the transformative potential they bring to the people and places they represent.

This is why Culture Commons and 30 partners from across the UK have come together to collaborate on a major open policy development programme over the past year. We’ve established a new collaborative and not-for-profit platform to examine how we might make the most of devolution and use this moment of considerable change to address some of the deep-seated policy challenges the ecosystem has faced for some time.

We bring the creative and cultural sectors, the research community and policymakers together to co-design new policy and influence decision makers at the local, regional and national levels.

We work on individual programmes shaped around the needs of our clients and partners, as well as run large-scale open policy development programmes that seek to tackle some of the bigger challenges our sectors face.

We work with local and national governments, sector representative organisations, workforce representative bodies, grant giving institutions and the research community.

Our team is made up of policy professionals, researchers, former political advisors and civil servants who have worked in local, national and international governments and parliaments as well as in the creative and cultural sectors.

We’ve been having tangible impacts across a range of policy areas for our clients and partners, including:

  • Securing uplifts in central government funding for flagship cultural institutions
  • Building new policy infrastructures for strategic bodies and sector support organisations
  • Informing emergency Covid-19 policy responses by bringing cutting edge research to the attention of UK, devolved and local government decision makers
  • Building a coalition of major partners to explore devolution and increased local decision making across the UK
  • Advising elected people and their teams on the design and delivery of cultural policy in their areas
  • Leading impactful campaigns for change for grassroots organisations and the creative workforce
  • Providing analysis on legislation and parliamentary business related to the creative, cultural and heritage sectors

We are delighted to be supported with grant funding by the Arts Council England, Paul Hamlyn Foundation and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch).

You can find out more about us at www.culturecommons.uk

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

We have already amassed a significant body of evidence that is revealing how the UK must now ‘decentralise’ and develop new local and regional decision making infrastructures specifically for the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem.

At the same time, we also find that a premature devolution of decision making could have several unintended consequences that could actually exacerbate some the structural issues we want to address.

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

Our programme partners are a unique mix of people, places, organisations, funders, firms, support bodies and research institutions connected to the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem. 

Collectively, we are based and/or work within every region and nations of the UK.

  • Our place partners represent nearly 8 million people in villages, towns, cities, regions across the UK
  • Our sector partners are private and public sector organisations and representative bodies operating within and engaging with all DCMS sub-sectors
  • Our research partners are leaders in the respective fields and disciplines and are connected to extensive academic and research networks
  • Our funding partners are critical to the financial health of the ecosystem and invest extensive levels of private and public funding in a variety of ways
  • Our observer partners are high level decision making bodies who help shape the policy landscape for the ecosystem
Through our extensive joint networks, we have also been able to bring members of the public and the workforce (including freelancers) into the programme.
 
You can find out more about each partners in Part 2.

‘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 when designing this 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 and their own localities.

The full diversity of the stakeholder groups that make up the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem rarely have an opportunity to come to the table to talk about policy. We know that some stakeholders groups like the public and the workforce (and in particular freelancers) can find it particularly hard to participate in policy dialogues. This can lead to certain parts of the ecosystem – usually those that have the time and resource to give – shaping policies that impact everyone.

This is why Culture Commons designed an open policy development programme that 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 also engaged stakeholders from across all regions and nations of the UK.

With a commitment to a radically open and transparent approach, we’ve been publishing summaries of 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 describe the design of the programme in more detail in Part 2.

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 mission dovetails nicely with two of the UK Government’s own national missions, in particular “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 generate both economic and social outcomes.

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.

We think the recommendations we have developed so far are sensible – proportionate to the obvious fiscal challenges of our time – but nonetheless seize the moment that commitments to further devolution provide us with.

As we learn more about how devolution is likely to play out in the coming months and years, we’ll publish new findings and recommendations as they emerge.

Most importantly, we hope this preliminary 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.

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 ‘infrastructures’ associated with them. Indeed, we seek to address some of these challenges in our policy recommendations. 

We have chosen to apply a broad and inclusive definition to the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem to ensure that a wider readership can engage with the ideas coming out of the work so far. We make particular reference to sub-sectors where we fee this will add value – for example, when drawing out specific insights from stakeholders who contributed to the research and insight gathering phase.

We unpack our key terms further in Part 1.

This Microsite

In Part 1, 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. 

In Part 2, we outline the shape of the open policy development programme, share our research methodology and capture describe our engagement with ecosystem stakeholders. 

In Part 3, we share some of the key findings we have amassed so far.

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

In Part 5, we reveal a series of spin-out projects we’re working on that will see our recommendations extrapolated into immediate action. 

We intend this microsite to serve as a useful and accessible tool to help a wider range of stakeholders to engage with the ideas coming out of the programme as they develop.

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 the recommendations might be useful in your own contexts, or even how we might work with you to bring them to life.

Please get in touch with us at  contact@culturecommons.uk if you have any questions or thoughts about the contents or how we might work together from here.

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.

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 this material, please use: 

The Future of Cultural Devolution in the UK, Culture Commons, 2024

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