The Future of
Cultural Devolution
in the UK

A year-long four-nations research & open policy development programme

Like the movements 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

As more powers and responsibilities move to local and regional leaders, decisions taken closer to home could reshape communities and public services, with far-reaching implications for people and places across the country.

Yet culture, creativity and heritage remain largely overlooked in the devolution debate, despite growing recognition of their contribution to economic growth and their capacity to enrich lives, strengthen communities and transform places.

That is why Culture Commons and 30 partners have come together to lead a major independent programme of research and open policy development across all four UK nations. Together, we are exploring how devolution can help address the long-standing challenges facing our sectors and communities—and create the conditions for culture, creativity and heritage to flourish throughout the UK.

Our approach is open, transparent and collaborative. We are bringing together people from across the creative, cultural and heritage sectors, governments and communities, including those too often excluded from policymaking. By combining research with professional expertise and lived experience, we are developing findings and recommendations grounded in evidence and shaped by the people they affect.

This not-for-profit, crowdfunded programme is made possible by contributions from trusts, foundations and each of our programme partners.

Collectively, our 30 phase one programme partners are based and/or work in every region and nation of the UK.

  • 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

Find out more about 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.

We are an independent and social enterprise. 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, political advisors and former civil servants who have worked at all tiers of government and within the creative, cultural and heritage sectors too.

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

The Mission

To harness devolution to tackle social, economic and geographic inequalities, strengthen the creative, cultural and heritage sectors, and enable people and places across the UK to thrive.

Our Actions

Together, the partners set on this programme to:
 

  • Identify the opportunities and challenges of devolution for culture, creativity and heritage, exploring what greater local and regional decision-making could mean for people and places across the UK.

  • Develop a shared language to explain how culture, creativity and heritage contribute to local development and help communities achieve their priorities.

  • Co-design practical, evidence-informed policy proposals to help culture, creativity and heritage flourish more equitably and sustainably across all parts of the UK.

Through an extensive programme research and insight gathering, we’ve surfaced a range of views from different stakeholder groups about how devolution and increased local decision making might play out for different places and sub-sectors.

We have published more than 25 research and insight papers with our research partners that makes up the largest open source resource dedicated to cultural devolution anywhere in the world.

Through this work, we have begun to build up a rich picture of what our sectors feel both concerned and optimistic about.

From the evidence we have amassed so far, there is a broad consensus 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, it is felt that premature devolution of powers and responsibilities could further fragment our sub-sectors and lead to an even more complex patchwork of provision. This could lead to several unintended consequences that may exacerbate some of the very structural issues we seek to address.

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

We’ve developed 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 we have applied to open up public policy design to a wider variety of people.

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 like devolution that will impact on large numbers of people in the places 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 also know that certain stakeholders groups, like the public and the workforce (in particular freelancers), can be excluded from policymaking processes. This can see parts of the ecosystem 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 too.

We are commitment to an open and transparent approach. That’s why 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 is 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 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 , we have an extensive number of individuals and organisations from all four UK nations and beyond to thank.

We are particularly grateful to everyone 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 team working on 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, Culture Commons

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.

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 and insight papers and other materials which can be accessed freely by anyone.

This digital report and all research and insight papers cited throughout 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) and Culture Commons
    • a link to the material is included in the citation 
    • any and all changes to the original material are indicated 

In addition, the original content may not be used for commercial purposes – this is 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 et al., 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