Capacity Building in the English Devolution Agenda: Supporting the Devolution Periphery or Fuelling Political Spatial Inequality?

The strength of ‘local capacity’ is a pre-requisite of devolution to strategic authorities in England. The current UK government are seeking to transition from a contractual devolution model – in which places must demonstrate capacity to access powers – to a more comprehensive model in which all places will need the ‘capacity’ to exercise a core set of powers. However, there are longstanding concerns from government departments about whether this emergent ‘middle tier’ has the capacity to deliver on central priorities at all. Moreover, there is considerable ambiguity about what the government means by ‘capacity’ in practical terms, and how, therefore, it can be built across different regions and localities. In this paper, we analyse the current government’s approach to capacity in the English devolution agenda, drawing on insights from the literature on both 'policy' and ‘governance’ capacity (Wu et al. 2015; van Popering-Verkerk et al., 2022). We devise a systematic and operationalisable definition of what constitutes ‘capacity’ in practice, before applying it as part of a document analysis of key strategy documents at the heart of the English Devolution agenda. We answer three questions: what do policymakers mean by ‘capacity’; to what extent is central government taking responsibility for capacity-building, and what measures are in place to tackle the spatial inequalities in governance capacity. While we identify several promising policy initiatives within the English devolution agenda, we find four limitations. First, capacity is too narrowly conceived in terms of individuals and organisations, rather than place-based networks. Second, attempts to build local capacity are disconnected from capacity needs in strategic authorities across the country. Third, it is unclear the extent to which central government takes responsibility for local capacity or whether it sees it as a gauge of local performance. Fourth, capacity-building is targeted at those places already furthest ahead and is therefore likely to further entrench England’s ‘devolution periphery’ and ‘political spatial inequality’ (Warner et al. 2024).