English Devolution – Another deception – Judge for yourself
Wed 10:33 am +00:00, 9 Sep 2026
Source: https://escapekey.substack.com/p/the-english-devolution-bill
I’ve posted selected sections, far more at the above link
Burnham the Fabian
In the 1930s, the Fabian Society offshoot, Political and Economic Planning, published ‘Freedom and Planning‘ — a blueprint for planned society in Britain that framed centralised governance in the language of liberty.
Ninety years later, and with a reframed vocabulary, that blueprint has been converted into proposed legislation by the present Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and member of the Fabian Society — Andy Burnham1.
The Act creates a new tier of governance — ‘strategic authorities‘ — and defines nine ‘areas of competence‘ within which they may operate:
Transport and local infrastructure, skills and employment support, housing and strategic planning, economic development and regeneration, the environment and climate change, health, well-being and public service reform, public safety, culture, and rural affairs and coastal communities.
These were not chosen by the local authority; they were defined by the Secretary of State. The strategic authority operates within them — it does not set them, and that difference matters rather a great deal.
Devolution traditionally transfers power downward — the central authority grants jurisdiction to the local authority. But that’s not what this Act does. Instead, it creates a layer of governance between Westminster and the local council, grants that layer permission to operate within centrally-defined boundaries, and retains the Secretary of State’s power to modify or withdraw functions.
The areas of competence are the standard. The strategic authority is the clearing function — it sits between central government’s objectives and the population, applying conditions defined above to the community below. It does not have the power to contest what’s requested of it — it simply has to apply the standard determined above.
The community is exclusively on the recipient side of the equation.
The Mayor
The Act positions elected mayors as the operational layer of the strategic authority. The mayor may appoint up to ten ‘commissioners‘ — unelected, unaccountable to the community, and experts in implementing the parameters, not in questioning them. The mayor may convene meetings with ‘local partners‘ — defined by the Secretary of State — to consider ‘relevant local matters‘.
Read that carefully. The mayor convenes, the partners respond, but the guidance comes from the Secretary of State. The mayor is an intermediary — sitting between central government’s objectives and the local partners, exercising functions that were conferred from above, within areas of competence that were defined from above, implemented by experts who were trained to this end, ultimately guided by the Secretary of State from above.
The mayor is the local clearing function. Elected, sure, thus providing an illusion of democratic legitimacy. But exercising functions within parameters set by people who were not elected to set them. The areas of competence, the health duty, the guidance — none of these were determined by the community the mayor represents. They were determined by the Secretary of State.
The Collaboration Duty
Sections 22 and 23 create a duty of mayors to collaborate with neighbouring mayors on matters relating to the areas of competence. A mayor may make a ‘collaboration request‘ to an adjacent mayor. The adjacent mayor must respond. If they decline, they must give reasons in writing.
The collaboration must be likely to ‘improve the economic, social or environmental well-being‘ of the people in the area. The mayors must have regard to guidance issued by the Secretary of State.
This creates a horizontal network of regional governance — mayors collaborating across boundaries, within centrally-defined competencies, guided by the Secretary of State. The structure is federal in form: local nodes connected horizontally, operating within a common standard, reporting upward.
And the triple obligation — economic, social, and environmental well-being — is the ESG framework applied to regional governance. Every collaboration must improve outcomes across all three dimensions. The corporate sustainability framework that began with the 1988-1993 Interfaith Declaration on Business Ethics, and migrated through Local Agenda 21, Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley, Dodd-Frank, and CSR into the financial system has finally arrived at the level of the elected mayor.
The Structure
Ergo, the Act creates a governance architecture with the following properties:
- Ethic. The objectives are set centrally — nine areas of competence defined by the Act. Health, wellbeing, environment, climate change. Positioned so no reasonable person could object.
- Standard. The ethic is embedded in statute — the health duty, with its definition of general health determinants broad enough to encompass every aspect of daily life. Housing, transport, employment, personal behaviour — all measured against health outcomes.
- Clearing. The clearing function is the mayor — elected, but exercising functions conferred from above, within parameters set from above, guided from above. The horizontal network — collaboration duties between mayors — creates a federal structure operating within common standards.
- Settlement. Funding, planning approvals, service delivery, regulatory permissions — each one conditional on the strategic authority operating within the areas of competence and meeting the health duty. The Secretary of State’s power to modify functions through statutory instruments ensures the parameters can be modified entirely outside democratic capacity.
- Outcome. The community experiences the cumulative output of every layer above it. But it did not set the objectives, define the standards, choose the mayor’s parameters, or negotiate the conditions. It receives the result — and yet, it’s told it has been ‘empowered’.
The title says ‘Community Empowerment‘. But the reality is that the community is empowered to participate in a structure it didn’t design, within boundaries it didn’t set, pursuing objectives it didn’t choose, measured against health outcomes defined so broadly that no area of life falls outside their scope, governed by mayors whose functions are conferred and guided by the Secretary of State, connected horizontally through collaboration duties that require regard to guidance from above, and subject to modification at any time through statutory instruments that bypass primary legislation.
That is not empowerment. That is subsidiarity — decisions taken at the lowest ‘appropriate’ level, within parameters set at the highest level. The community implements — it does not decide.
The model originates at the London Bankers’ Clearing House — a structure that placed the Bank of England at its apex. In the 1930s, PEP surveyed every institution in Britain and concluded that the Bank of England was the only one that required no structural change.
In 2023, the Fabian Society published ‘In Tandem‘, proposing that the Bank of England should pre-clear fiscal policy before the Treasury acts — placing monetary authority above democratic governance. And now this Act creates the regional implementation layer beneath it — mayors exercising functions within centrally-defined competencies, guided by the Secretary of State, measured against health outcomes that encompass all of life.
The clearing function would run from the BIS at the top through the Bank of England through Westminster through the strategic authority through the mayor to the community. Each layer implements the standard set by the layer above. Each layer can truthfully say it’s only doing its part. And the community at the bottom, experiencing the cumulative output of every layer, is told it has been ‘empowered’.
By extraordinary coincidence, the Fabian Society happens to agree. In August 2026, their website published an article titled ‘Brand New, But Retro‘2 — celebrating Burnham’s government as a return to the Fabian tradition of guild socialism3. The article lauds a ‘decisive ideological shift from centralisers to decentralisers‘, and Burnham, the article explains, has set ‘an acid test for every ministerial decision‘ and ‘an organising principle to guide every minister in every part of government‘.
That is not decentralisation. That is centralised objective-setting with devolved implementation — precisely what PEP proposed in the 1930s, precisely what the Fabians have advocated for over a century, and precisely what the Act delivers.
And the Bank of England was the only institution deemed fit for purpose. The very same, which the Fabians now suggest should have power over fiscal policy.
