At Place Matters, we often point out that place matters, but it is not enough. A brilliant neighbourhood coalition cannot, by itself, overcome nationally set funding rules or commissioning cycles that ignore community timescales, or data systems that were never built to see at a neighbourhood level. The system beyond place has to bend if place-based work is to hold, and the work of places needs to speak to and influence that wider system.

The Cabinet Office's Rewiring the State statement, published at the end of July, makes the equal-and-opposite argument, one level up. Handing mayors control of income tax retention, skills budgets, transport, housing and cultural investment fixes the Whitehall-to-region problem. But while regional devolution matters, on its own it's not enough. If the power that flows to a Mayor's office stops there, we will simply have relocated the "system beyond place" problem from Westminster to a Combined Authority HQ. 

Rewiring the State doesn't stop at fiscal transfer. It talks about aligning public service boundaries, creating deputy mayor roles for health, policing and education, and, significantly, "enabling greater alignment and pooling of funding for preventative services {...} allowing strategic authorities and constituent local authorities to invest in joint support." That is genuinely new territory: a route to place-based budgeting that isn't dependent on a single Whitehall department's remit.

A bright spot for regional leadership of place

Cradle to Career began in 2019 as a single-neighbourhood initiative in North Birkenhead, instigated by the Steve Morgan Foundation and SHINE, and delivered by the charity Right to Succeed in partnership with Wirral Council. It brings residents, schools, services and community organisations together around a shared, long-term ambition for the area's children to achieve a marked rise in literacy and a reduction in children in care or on the edge of care. The results have drawn national attention from Ministers through to regulators, with Ofsted and CQC inspectors calling for the learning to be shared elsewhere.

The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority didn't design North Birkenhead's model, and it didn't try to run it. What it did was to recognise it, back it politically, and co-fund its replication, enabling it to roll out across five more of the region's most deprived areas. The Mayor has also committed to rolling it out to 6 more communities. That is regional leadership in its proper register: not directing neighbourhood change, but enabling it, creating the conditions and level of financial support that local places could not access alone.  

Equity of opportunity: a bigger "us", not a competition between places

The Prime Minister has framed his devolution agenda around "good growth in every postcode", an ambition explicitly about equity not just efficiency. However, to date the key mechanism regional and national government has used to spread opportunity between places is competitive funding, whereby  areas bid against each other for a fixed, finite pot. The problem is, this mechanism rewards places that already have the capacity to write a strong bid, and treats every other place's application as something to be beaten, not built on. Under that model, "opportunity" becomes something places compete for, and the places that most need it are usually the least equipped to win.

Every postcode needs infrastructure for change that enables communities to come together as a  "bigger us": shared backbone capacity, common evaluation and data and peer networks that let one place's breakthrough become every place's inheritance, rather than its competitive advantage. It is also, in practice, what equity of opportunity has to mean. Not identical outcomes handed down uniformly to every place, but every place given a genuine, resourced chance to develop its own capacity to transform, inside a system built to let it contribute to and draw from something bigger than itself. If mayors build their Good Growth Funds and pooled preventative budgets around competitive bidding between wards and neighbourhoods, they will reproduce, at regional scale, exactly the postcode lottery that Rewiring the State says it wants to end. If, however, they build them around shared infrastructure for change, then they have a genuine chance of creating good growth in every postcode.

Realising the potential of communities to lead change

As the agenda of rewiring the state moves from statement to policy, we would make four asks:  First, that Good Growth Funds and pooled preventative budgets explicitly fund the social infrastructure, not just the services, that make projects like Cradle to Career possible. Second, that funding is designed to be shared and cumulative between places rather than competed for. Third, that Deputy Mayor roles carry an explicit mandate not only for service alignment but also for neighbourhood-level collective impact, and finally that the capacity-building support promised to strategic authorities extends to the community-anchored organisations doing the work of holding places together.

Place based community led work is often tough and often lonely.  We need to build a learning infrastructure to develop a peer-led field of practice and peer support, essential for the immediate challenge of delivering change in communities and for building a legacy of experience and capability that catalyses a broader movement of community-led change across all postcodes.  Not an institutional centre, but a learning infrastructure that belongs to and is led by the practice community.  The Mycelium network is a good example of how peer learning can be leveraged in this way.

Regional devolution is important. On its own, it is not enough. The neighbourhood still needs the system beyond it to bend, and equity of opportunity, properly understood, means building the infrastructure that lets every place contribute to and draw from a bigger "us", rather than compete for a smaller one. That is a choice mayors will now have real power to make.