Words do a lot of quiet work in politics, and "devolution" is doing more than its share right now. The English Devolution White Paper, published in December 2024 under the banner of a "devolution revolution", actually contains two very different projects stitched together. One genuinely pushes power down. The other pulls it up. They are being sold as the same thing, and they are not.
I want to separate them, because the test I apply to all of this is the same one I apply to the European Union and to Malta: subsidiarity. Decisions belong as close to the people affected as they can sensibly sit. That is not a slogan I reach for only when it is convenient. It cuts against Brussels when Brussels overreaches, and it cuts against Westminster here.
The half that is real devolution
Start with the part I would defend. Moving powers and budgets from Whitehall to elected regional mayors is, on its own terms, a gain. A mayor you can name, hold to account and vote out is a more legible form of power than a department in London that no one outside it can find. The White Paper's three tiers of strategic authority, and the plan for more directly elected mayors from May 2026, give a city region a single figure responsible for transport, skills and strategic planning. For genuinely regional questions, the ones that cross every council boundary, that is the right level. This is devolution in the proper sense: power coming down from the centre to somewhere closer, with a name attached to it.
If that were the whole story, I would simply applaud it. It is not the whole story.
The half that quietly centralises
Bundled into the same programme is a local government reorganisation, and this is where the language starts to mislead. Two-tier areas, where a county council and several district councils share the work, are to be abolished and replaced with single unitary authorities, with the government steering towards a minimum of around 500,000 people each. Twenty-one two-tier areas were invited to submit plans, and more than seventy proposals went in, with decisions falling through 2026.
Read that again with subsidiarity in mind. A district council might serve 100,000 or 150,000 people and know its market towns and villages by name. Fold five of those into one body of half a million or more, and the decision about a planning application, a leisure centre or a bus route is now taken further from the people it lands on, not closer. That is not devolution. At the local level, it is the opposite. You can call the merger efficient, and sometimes it will be, but you cannot honestly call it bringing power closer to communities while you are moving it away from them.
I am not inventing this objection. The District Councils' Network has warned about "unprecedentedly large" unitary councils built to an arbitrary population floor, and critics across the spectrum have called the process rushed and top-down, the very charge a devolution agenda is supposed to answer. When a reform's loudest critics are the bodies closest to residents, that is a signal worth reading, not dismissing.
The trade-off, named honestly
Now the other side, because I am suspicious of anyone who argues this without it. The status quo was not some golden age of localism. Two-tier government genuinely confuses people, who often cannot tell you which council empties the bins and which runs the schools. Thinly stretched district budgets struggle to hold serious capacity. Scale can buy professional planning teams, stronger negotiating weight with developers, and clearer lines of accountability. A directly elected mayor is a real democratic gain that small councils cannot offer. None of that is nothing.
So the honest position is not "bigger is always worse". It is that scale and proximity are a genuine trade-off, and the burden of proof sits with whoever wants to move a decision upward. The strategic-authority half clears that bar: regional transport really does need a regional body. The 500,000-person unitary often does not, because the planning application and the leisure centre were never strategic to begin with. They were local, and local is exactly what is being averaged away. And the savings used to justify the merger are, for now, a promise rather than a proven result, while the upfront reorganisation costs are real and immediate. Where the evidence is thin, I say so, and on the efficiency case it is thin.
Why a Maltese reader should care
This is not an English curiosity. It is the same argument Malta will keep having with itself, only at a different scale. Many of the new English unitaries will be larger than the entire population of Malta. If half a million people is too big a unit to feel close to its market towns, it is worth asking honestly what that says about how decisions are taken on an island of similar size, and what it says about Gozo.
Subsidiarity within a small state is not an abstraction. It is whether local councils have real powers and real money, or whether everything of consequence drifts back to a ministry in Valletta because that is administratively tidier. Gozo is not a suburb of the mainland, and a locality is not a rounding error in a national spreadsheet. The English experiment is a useful mirror precisely because it shows the temptation in its purest form: the constant, well-meaning pull to consolidate upward in the name of efficiency, dressed in the language of bringing power closer to people.
The test that survives the rebrand
So here is where I land. Judge each half of this on its own merits and the verdict is not symmetrical. Hand a named, elected mayor real power over genuinely regional things, and that is devolution worth having. Abolish the councils closest to people and merge them into half-million-person blocks, and call that devolution too, and you are relying on the word to do work the policy does not. The same rule decides both, and it is the oldest rule in good government. Power belongs as close to the citizen as it can sensibly sit, and anyone moving it the other way carries the burden of proving why. A reform that fails that test does not stop being centralisation just because it borrows a better word.
Questions readers ask
What is the English Devolution White Paper? Published on 16 December 2024, it sets out the government's plan to move powers and budgets from Westminster to elected mayors and strategic authorities, and to replace two-tier county and district councils with larger single-tier unitary authorities. It is being taken forward by the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, published on 10 July 2025.
Is reorganisation the same as devolution? No. Devolution moves power downward from Westminster to mayors; reorganisation merges district and county councils into unitary authorities, often above 500,000 people, moving everyday decisions further from communities. The first can be genuine devolution; the second can be centralisation at the local level.
What does subsidiarity mean? It is the principle that decisions should be taken as close to the people affected as they can sensibly be, with the burden of proof on anyone wanting to move a decision upward and away from a community.
Sources: UK Government, English Devolution White Paper, 16 December 2024; House of Commons Library, "English devolution: mayoral strategic authorities" and "Local government reorganisation 2026"; Institute for Government, "Nine things we learned from the English devolution white paper"; District Councils' Network briefing on the White Paper; English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, published 10 July 2025. Population thresholds and the count of invited areas and submitted plans are drawn from these sources; projected efficiency savings remain estimates rather than confirmed outcomes.