Andy Burnham has been in Downing Street under a month, and his argument is already clear. Britain is too centralised, Whitehall has held onto money and decisions it should have let go of years ago, and the country needs power moving out to the places that can use it best. Number 10 North, a promised English devolution settlement, transport and housing powers given to regions: the direction of travel is set, even if the detail is still being worked out.
Officers reading this will recognise the sentiment. They will also, I suspect, have heard some version of it before. Devolution rhetoric has a habit of arriving faster than the resources to match it. The more useful question for local government isn't whether power is coming. It's what a council actually does with it, when that promised power arrives alongside rising demand, shrinking budgets and a public expectation that it can somehow fix more with less.
