UK Government to include ‘culture’ within the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill.

We were delighted to hear from our colleagues at Culture Commons that the UK Government have agreed to include ‘culture’ within the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill. This bill creates new powers for communities to protect local spaces, shape their high streets, and celebrate culture.

In earlier drafts of this bill, culture was at risk of being sidelined as a downstream beneficiary of other policy areas, rather than as a central driver of high quality devolution that can be seen and felt by people and communities across the country. The specific inclusion of ‘culture’ in the bill follows two years of campaigning by Culture Commons and their Director Trevor MacFarlane:

“After two years of intensive research, policy design and advocacy, the government has now adopted our proposals to put culture at the heart of its flagship devolution reforms. This represents one of the most significant shifts in cultural policy for a generation - recognising culture not as an optional extra, but as essential infrastructure for growth, identity and community. I’m very grateful to the Secretaries of State, Ministers, Mayors, MPs and Peers who have worked with us to get this over the line in recent months. We now look forward to working with partners across England through our dedicated ‘think and do tank’ on cultural devolution to turn this into real change on the ground.”

Culture Counts partnered with Culture Commons in the development of this campaign, collaborating on The Future of Cultural Devolution in the UK, which brought together 30 core partners, six universities and over 250 organisations across all four nations. The strength and breadth of the research outputs gave Culture Commons a robust evidence base and a clear mandate to work with, which directly informed their engagement in England with Secretaries of State, Ministers, Mayors, MPs and Peers, and underpinned  amendments to the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill.