Devolution and the Pandemic

Has the pandemic exposed problems with the UK constitution?

The UK’s constitutional framework has been pieced together, picked apart and restitched over centuries. Northern Ireland’s parliament has existed since the partition of Ireland in 1921, although it has been opened and shut down throughout the region’s tumultuous history. In modern times, Wales and Scotland were, until 1998, essentially governed by British government departments under the control of a Westminster-appointed secretary of state. This changed when the Scots and Welsh voted for former prime minister Tony Blair’s devolution plans. Both secured their own parliaments, first ministers and cabinets, along with substantial powers over domestic legislation, most significantly health. England, meanwhile, by far the largest and richest state of the union, has no legislature of its own, relying instead entirely on the Westminster parliament.

Major public services affected by the pandemic, in particular public health services and education, are the responsibility of the devolved administrations in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. In the case of Scotland and Northern Ireland, policing and justice matters are also devolved. The Coronavirus Act 2020 conferred new powers on devolved ministers in areas such as health, education and justice. For example, the Act empowers devolved ministers to provide an indemnity to medical staff for criminal negligence cases, and to temporarily close educational establishments. In the early phase of the crisis, the four governments closely co-ordinated their response; the UK-wide action plan that was jointly produced by the four administrations and published on 3 March. However, as the UK has started to move out of lockdown the four governments have each taken their own approach to lifting restrictions. Each published their own plan for reopening the economy, with Northern Ireland and England moving at a faster pace, for example by opening non-essential retail and pubs and restaurants, before Scotland and Wales. It illustrated just how much the coronavirus pandemic has emboldened the UK's devolved administrations to make decisions which significantly diverge from those in Downing Street. There have been claims, including by UK Transport Secretary Grant Shapps, that differences in restrictions within the UK causes confusion.

The pandemic has highlighted the uneasy and unequal nature of the UK’s devolution settlement. It came as a particular shock to many in England, not least as the other first ministers began holding separate daily TV briefings. To his discomfort, Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, found that he not only had far less control over the UK’s levers of power, but also that he was forced to share decision-making with political opponents.

Some Conservative ministers meanwhile felt Ms Sturgeon was rushing to be first to announce measures that were already planned for England, in order to give the impression of more sure-footed leadership. They also believed Scotland’s leader was playing politics with the crisis, sheltering behind UK policy and the Treasury’s furlough scheme while using her own televised daily briefings to advance the nationalist agenda.

English Devolution

Covid-19 has been a coming of age moment for England’s metro mayors. But the pandemic has also highlighted the unfinished nature of English devolution. While Burnham, Andy Street in the West Midlands and Steve Rotheram in Liverpool have never enjoyed a higher profile, they lack the powers to go with it. This mismatch both contributed to the British state’s lacklustre response to the pandemic and also made the public row between Burnham and Johnson inevitable. The unfinished nature of English devolution not only impacts the residents of northern cities but the quality of governance across the UK. Tony Travers, professor at the London School of Economics, says that England’s hyper centralisation is the cause of many of its problems.

“National government has virtually no apparatus to deliver local responses. The Prime Minister acts as the mayor of England with so many decisions concentrated in Downing Street. Central government is too strong yet too weak. It would be far more effective if it wasn’t trying to do so much.”

As mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham has more powers even than Mr Khan but has not been invited to Cobra meetings at all, even though he is a former Labour health secretary. As political pressure built in Westminster to reopen the economy in mid-May, Mr Burnham was clear that in the north, where the virus was still only just past its peak, it was still too early to come out of lockdown. He was ignored, he says, and found out that the national restrictions were being eased only when local health officials picked up that the government was planning to shift its slogan from “Stay at Home” to “‘Stay Alert”. “I can remember feeling astonished that it happened. I just couldn’t believe it the day when it was first put to us without consultation,” Mr Burnham recalls. “I think the voice of London business was heard because they were saying, ‘oh, look, the cases are low, we need to get back’. It wasn’t the same for us at that moment; very centralising, very much hearing ‘London first’.”

Burnham is convinced that the pandemic has exposed the limitations of running the country from SW1. “Imagine a world where test and trace was localised from the start and funding is given to city regions to provide business support. I think we’d be in a better place if we’d adopted a more collaborative approach.”

David Lidington, Mr Gove’s predecessor and the de facto deputy prime minister under Theresa May, says the fundamental obstacle is something no British government looks likely to wish to change. “The obvious straitjacket is Westminster’s voting system. If you have a majoritarian system at Westminster, and Westminster is sovereign, then whatever is put in place, it is always trumped by Westminster being sovereign. As a result, any solution will have a sense of impermanency.” Unlike a number of European nations, and indeed the devolved parliaments, Westminster’s leaders are used to supreme power and not to cross-party collaboration. Over-centralised power meant ministers frittered away billions of pounds in crony contracts to Conservative Party donors that did little to tackle the pandemic. The vaccine roll-out worked because the NHS already had in place a more appropriate balance that allowed effective collaboration between decision makers at the centre and on the front line