Keir Starmer's government is bringing power to local communities. We need that in social security

Starmer’s new government has certainly hit the ground running, with the King’s Speech announcing 40 draft bills, and a broad and arguably ambitious agenda for change. As part of a commitment to ensuring that those with ‘skin in the game‘ are empowered to take key decisions that affect them, the government will extend and mainstream devolution.

Plans include the English Devolution Bill, which will create stronger structures and power for devolution within England, providing regions with more freedom on transport, planning and employment support. 

The sad thing about terms like ‘devolution’ is that it can be a hard thing to excite people about – while people are keen for more democratic accountability and to feel closer to decision-making that affects their communities, terms like multi-level governance and regionalism can seem abstract or can switch people off.

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But done right, devolution has the power to really matter, and Starmer’s government are being bold here in trying to get power to local communities, something which could end up making a real difference to communities and individual lives.

In his very first days of office Starmer visited each of the devolved nations, and held the first ever meeting of all the English regional mayors, who came together at Downing Street earlier in July. The King’s Speech promised a new Council of the Nations and Regions to ensure that there are spaces for the leaders of devolved authorities to connect and collaborate. 

While the King’s Speech was almost completely silent on social security, this is a policy area where there is already considerable devolution, with people’s experiences of universal credit, for example, differing depending on where in the UK they live. In Northern Ireland people receive universal credit fortnightly, whereas it’s routine to receive it monthly elsewhere in the UK.

The benefit cap, which restricts the total social security households can receive, is mitigated in both Scotland and Northern Ireland, leading to big differences in the income families may be entitled to, purely dependent on where in the UK they live.

Here, Westminster could learn from Scotland, which has invested in social security through the Scottish Child Payment, which provides £25 per child per week to low-income families and plays a key part in Scotland’s ambition to invest in children and families to reduce child poverty. 

And there are differences at the local and regional levels too. Think of packages of crisis and discretionary support, which now create a patchwork of support which varies a great deal depending on where you live.

The household support fund has provided critical crisis support – a ‘sticking plaster’ for an inadequate social security system – but this support could come as cash, vouchers, or goods and services, with the decision of how to target it and to whom made by local authorities and subject to growing demands for limited funds.

Some of the English regional mayors have already called for devolution of social security powers to regions – most notably the mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, who pledged in his recent election manifesto that “we will ask the incoming government to make Greater Manchester the testbed for an entirely different way of providing social support and social security in the 21st century”. Kim McGuinness, the North East Mayor, has also made reducing child poverty her number one priority.

With devolution, there is an opportunity – as Starmer’s government seems to recognise – to do things differently based on local needs, but there is also an opportunity for learning, to understand how and why different approaches work, and to use this learning to improve practice in the future.

Real devolution and localisation must involve both power and resources, otherwise there’s a risk of a new round of ‘austerity dumping’, with problems pushed to overstretched local authority budgets as we saw during the Conservative years.

While not a focus of Starmer’s King’s Speech, there is an urgent need to reform and improve our social security system, and it will be vital to use evidence from different practices across the UK to inform this. The extent, nature and impacts of devolution and localisation of social security remains poorly understood, something which our new research programme should help correct. 

Liz Kendall, the new secretary of state for work and pensions, has promised that regions will be granted new powers to think about how best to tailor employment support for the needs of their local economies as part of what is described as a Plan to Get Britain Working again.

Employment support is already devolved in Scotland, for example, providing insights for how a shift from the previous UK wide contracted-out welfare-to-work programmes was replaced by a devolved approach to employment support. But for employment support to be effective, there is also a need to look at the adequacy of social security payments as when people are busy with the work of getting by, it can be harder to find time to look for paid work, or to invest in their well-being or skills development to enable them to access better quality work.

Starmer’s new government needs to bring boldness not just to devolution but to social security too, thinking carefully about how best to provide a social security system that provides protection from poverty and creates an effective safety net in times of need. Although we may not think so, we all have skin in the game in making a social security system that works for all of us. And the work to do that needs to start now. 

Ruth Patrick and John Hudson are professors of social policy at the University of York, Hayley Bennett is a lecturer in social policy at the University of Edinburgh. They are researchers on the social security in a devolved UK project.

This project has been funded by the Nuffield Foundation, but the views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily the Foundation. Visit www.nuffieldfoundation.org