What do the English public think about changes to how funds are allocated to local government?

About 

The ways in which central government allocates funding to local government to spend on the services and needs of a particular area are the subject of renewed scrutiny in the context of the Labour government’s 2024 Devolution White Paper. In February 2025, the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) convened 43 members of the public at an all-day, deliberative workshop in Birmingham to discuss the topic. Participants heard from subject specialists before deliberating in small, facilitator led groups. Discussions centred around three degrees of reform – incremental, moderate, and radical – developed by the wider ESRC funded research team led by the University of Birmingham. During and at the end of the day, participants voted on which reform option they preferred and provided their reasons.

Findings

There was a general feeling in the workshop that ‘the way things were done’ in the UK was creating issues in lots of key areas and widening inequalities, leaving the need for big change in a ‘broken system’. There was a clear sense of demand for radical change, for long-term policy solutions and a review of the system as whole if these issues were to be stabilised and addressed. At the mid-point of the workshop, a majority indicated support for radical reforms. However, by the end of the workshop, the majority were in favour of the moderate level reform (n=25); radical reform (n=17); incremental reform (n=1).

Inductive thematic analyses revealed the key reasons behind participants’ preferences: 

• Trust and accountability: Participants broadly supported bestowing greater powers on local authorities to decide how to spend their budgets, as they were considered best placed to identify and respond to local needs. However, there was also widespread distrust of policymakers, including at the local level, and doubts about their ability to manage budgets wisely. As such, participants generally supported increased autonomy at local levels, but with some continued oversight from, and accountability to, Westminster.
• Balancing local need with national priorities: While participants broadly supported greater devolution and its associated potential for more radical policy intervention, a core concern was that if changes were too comprehensive, it would have nationally disunifying effect. Participants discussed this in two quite distinct ways: discordance between national and regional policy priorities, and inter-regional cultural division.
• Politically realistic goals: Participants also weighed up what scales of change would be realistic to expect. A lack of faith in the UK government to implement long-term reforms was a key driver behind support for moderate-level change. Several of those who cited this as a reason for their preference for moderate change in fact saw radical change as the ideal, and the potential for more radical policy interventions that would come along with it. However, these participants had significant doubts over whether a political appetite for such change could be maintained over an extended period of time.
• Deep problems and radical solutions: Participants, particularly those who voted for radical change, perceived the need for radical solutions to a range of issues. On the one hand, participants discussed radical devolutionary change as a solution to broad societal issues like inequality and poverty. In a more specific sense, they referenced public services including the police, health services, education and social care. The ability for local authorities to make longer-term, more effective investments was a key driver behind why participants supported radical-level change at the end of the workshop.

Figure 1: Live visual summary of findings from the citizen engagement workshop. Illustrator: Laura Sorvala

Methodology

Our workshop was designed around a single objective that related to the wider project’s research questions:

• Explore people’s views on how funding allocations could be changed to have greater impact on reducing inequalities including associated trade-offs

We selected a deliberative approach in order to provide participants with the time, information and discursive conditions needed to engage in depth with the topic. Typically taking place over extended periods, in this case the same design principles were applied to our day long workshop. Material – as described above – is provided to ensure that all participants have access to the same balanced information to inform their views. Trained facilitators ¹  supported participants to deliberate this information to ultimately form a view on the questions and policy area at hand. These methods yield insights into people’s considered views on complex, value-driven issues that often require trade-offs for resolution. 

We brought 43 people together on 30th January 2025, in Birmingham. Participants were selected to be reflective of the English population  with quotas also set to recruit seven people from areas that already had devolved arrangements.

The workshop was designed to move between plenary sessions – where two subject specialists from our partnership introduced key evidence, and facilitated table discussions, with seven people at each table. Table groups were designed to include a range of demographic characteristics, ensuring a range of perspectives. One of these tables was composed of participants who live in parts of England that already have devolved arrangements. We chose to seat them together for the workshop as they were likely to already be experiencing or have views about the impacts of those arrangements on where they lived, and we were interested to see whether and how this shaped their priorities. Our two subject specialists plus two other academics from our partnership also circulated around tables throughout the day for short bursts of Q&A to support participants to clarify and extend their thinking. 

The agenda for participants’ discussions were shaped around exploring what priorities people had for the places they lived and the extent to which they thought changes to how services and needs were funded were wanted and needed in order to address inequalities in place. To further support them to deliberate potential changes to funding allocations, participants also worked through three scenarios – focused on transport policy, selected due to its likely impact on most people’s lives – to illustrate what different levels of change might mean and how they might decide between the trade offs implied. 

Scenarios were designed to introduce people to some different characteristics of funding allocations and how they varied in the autonomy, accountability and level of decision making held by central and local government. They also contained a trade-off focused on the priority for what the funding would help achieve: economic growth or more equal access for everyone to a transport service.