If one word summed up Labour Party Conference in Liverpool this year, it was devolution. It ran through the Prime Minister's speech and through the Chancellor's. It was the starting point for fringe events on everything from skills and housing to health, energy and even music.

For anyone who has spent years arguing that decisions about places should be made closer to the people who live in them, that was genuinely hopeful to watch. The direction of travel is right. Ministers talked about prevention, about joining up spending in a place, and about investing in people's success rather than paying for failure. We have waited a long time to hear a government speak this language.

But now the conference is over, one distinction feels more important than ever. Devolution is not the same as community power. As it was described in Liverpool, it may well mean more power for Government, just closer to home. 

Power is moving, but to whom?

Listen closely to the speeches and a clear pattern emerges. The big idea was public control. Water, energy and housing brought back under stronger democratic control. Mayors given new powers over water companies and a bigger role in energy. Councils able to take over empty homes and buy up the worst private rentals. Outsourced jobs across Whitehall brought back in-house, with a new unit at the centre of government to speed that up.

Even devolution itself has moved closer to the centre. The First Secretary of State and No 10 North now oversee devolution strategy, rather than the Department for Communities.

Much of this is welcome, and some of it is long overdue. But it's worth being honest about what it is. Rewiring the state, as described at Conference, means rewiring statutory institutions. Power moves from Whitehall to mayors, from mayors to councils, and from private companies back into public hands. At every step, it stays with government.

That is a real shift, and in many places it will make a real difference. But it is not the same as shifting power to communities. A council with more powers is still a council. A mayor with a bigger budget is still a mayor. Neither is automatically a neighbourhood deciding what it needs.

Some of the most local voices at conference said as much. The leader of Labour's councillors in the Local Government Association warned that devolution which stops at combined authorities stops short of the people it is meant to serve. We'd go one step further: devolution that stops at the town hall does too.

The thread that went quiet

What makes this striking is that the language of community power was right there, only a few months ago. In July, the then Communities Secretary told council leaders that power can be over-centralised locally and nationally. He called for "double devolution" that puts communities in control, and described it as a building block missing from the government's early reforms. He promised procurement reform to bring in more small, community-led providers.

The government also has its own neighbourhood programme with real money behind it. Pride in Place promises up to £5 billion to 244 of the most deprived neighbourhoods, with boards of local people in the driving seat. On paper, it is one of the most significant community power programmes in a generation.

None of that came through in the main conference speeches. Double devolution, neighbourhood boards, Pride in Place and the Civil Society Covenant were all absent from the big set pieces. Community power organisations ran fringe events and invited ministers to talk about these questions, but they weren't part of the headline story.

We don't read that as a retreat. Programmes carry on whether or not they make the conference stage, and a lot of good work is happening quietly on the ground. But political narratives matter. They tell civil servants what to prioritise, tell councils where the energy is, and tell communities whether they are part of the plan. Right now, the story is about mayors, councils and public ownership. The neighbourhood risks becoming a delivery detail rather than part of the big idea.

The market is not the only thing outside the state

The story told in Liverpool was a story about markets that failed. Utilities run for shareholders. Services broken up and sold off. Money flowing out of places rather than into them. That critique is fair, and plenty of people working in communities would recognise it.

But the way the answer is framed carries a risk. When the choice is presented as private or public, market or state, everything outside the state starts to look like the market. And that simply isn't true.

The community centre run by local residents is not a water company. The tenants' association, the youth club, the community-owned pub, the food partnership that knows every family on the estate: none of these exist to extract value. They exist because people in a place decided to look after each other. Many deliver public services, often better than anyone else could, because they are rooted in the place and answerable to the people who use them.

Marketisation failed because it put profit between people and the services they rely on. Civil society works for the opposite reason: it closes that gap. So as the government rightly brings failed contracts back in-house, we need to make sure the same logic doesn't sweep up the local organisations that were never the problem.

This matters in practice, not just in principle. Insourcing, pooled budgets and new duties on public services to work together all shape who gets a seat at the table and who holds the money. Treat civil society as just another supplier, and it will be designed out. Treat it as a place-rooted partner, and it can help public services reach people they have never reached before.

Finishing the circuit

Rewiring is a good metaphor, so let's take it seriously. A circuit only works when it's complete. Power has to flow all the way through, from Whitehall to the region, to the council, and on to the people and organisations closest to the ground. Stop halfway, and nothing lights up where it's needed most.

The good news is that the pieces are already on the table. A neighbourhood programme with real money. A commitment to pooling budgets around places, with Total Place revived by name. A Civil Society Council at the centre of government, and a Covenant that describes civil society as a strategic partner. What's needed now is to connect them to the big story.

The devolution white paper, expected later this autumn, is the moment to do it. A few practical places to start:

• Make neighbourhoods part of the devolution settlement, not an add-on to it, so power reaches the street as well as the town hall.
• Build community organisations into pooled, place-based budgets as partners in deciding priorities, not only as providers bidding to deliver them.
• Be clear, as insourcing gathers pace, that the aim is to end extraction, not to replace local, community-rooted provision with the state.
• Invest in building the capacity of civil society organisations and social leadership so communities can lead change, especially those communities who are losing out on current funding

None of this is a criticism of the direction the government has set. It is an invitation to go the whole way. Councils, mayors, funders, charities and communities all have a part to play, and many, but not all of them are ready.