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Members of England's local government family will be forgiven for any scepticism about the idea of a ‘No10 North'.Relocating desks does not necessarily relocate power or change culture. The presence of part of the Treasury in Darlington has seen some success – but it has not obviously changed the Treasury's instincts or its relationship with subnational government.In the face of that risk, I decided to set out a version of No10 North I think would work, built around a single, absolute purpose – to transform the devolution policy agenda within central government into a state-wide operating model.To do that, it would create an extension of the Prime Minister's immediate power base, rebalancing the core of the system –important when the new Prime Minister is probably the most determined decentraliser in government. It would pull together the many strands of devolution and devolution-adjacent policy-making going on around Whitehall, to combine efforts and force-multiply each others' work.Finally, it would use the psychological and geographical distance from SW1 to incubate a new approach and a new kind of relationship with local systems – a bridgehead for the kind of central government that would need to exist in a more decentralised system.To work, No10 North needs to be the point of a chisel that will ultimately split apart the Whitehall departmental system. Almost every serious proposal to decentralise England runs into departments structured as fiefdoms whose interests lie elsewhere.The Department for Transport wants to retain control over rail. The NHS remains one of the most centralised health systems in the developed world. The Treasury is wary of assigning revenues. Departments protect their agencies, programmes, data and budgets.Only central government can transform itself enough to make devolution real – and maybe No10 North will be the part of central government to get that job done.That is the idea. You can see if you think I miss the mark in my Re:State paper, Building No10 North.And, for what it is worth, this feels like the trajectory that No10 North is intended to take. It will endure only if its purpose is sufficiently established and sufficiently distinct to survive the tenure of a future Prime Minister who happens to be from Bristol, Birmingham, or – heaven forfend – London again.One practical consequence follows immediately. No10 North cannot operate primarily through visitors. Government should set a clear target for the number of relevant civil servants and whole teams who will work there full-time, including senior officials with real authority over departmental policy and spending.If No10 North is to change how government works, it needs a critical mass of people able to make decisions, not simply represent the views of departments whose decisions continue to be made elsewhere.But personnel are only part of the issue. This is also about culture, power and relationships.Bringing in people from local government, public services, business and civil society would help.More important, however, is creating an institution that treats local knowledge as a form of expertise, rather than stakeholder opinion. Local and regional leaders should not be invited into a process whose assumptions, options and limits have already been set in Whitehall.Effective devolution depends upon a different relationship between levels of government – one based on reciprocal obligations, distributed authority and the recognition that complex public services cannot be successfully directed from a single centre. No10 North should be designed to embed that relationship, not merely to provide Whitehall with better local intelligence.It should also be a safe place to ask previously unthinkable questions: What is the end-state that we should be targeting with all this devolution? Why should mature English strategic authorities not ultimately be able to exercise the same powers as the Welsh Government?This would be genuine ‘devolution by default' and it would expose the scale of the resistance that meaningful devolution will encounter. It would require decisions about health, rail, skills, housing, employment support and taxation that go far beyond another round of devolution deals.Strategic authorities and councils should be clear about what they expect from the proposal. They should be direct interlocuters with, and contributors to, No10 North.They should, if necessary, demand a published programme of functional and fiscal devolution, with clear departmental obligations to participate and clear accountability for delay.And, they should insist upon a growing ability for No10 North to be available to every part of the country as a source of engagement, expertise and leverage. After all, this needs to be the start of a new approach to government, not another outpost of the old one.Simon Kaye is director of policy and research at Re:State

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WHITEHALL

Creating a closer relationship

By Simon Kaye | 07 August 2026

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