Twenty-five years after parliaments and governments opened in Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh, a new PolicyWISE report has found that while devolution has delivered policy divergence, there is less systematic learning about what works and what doesn’t. At a time of fiscal pressure and growing political divergence, the UK civil service cannot afford to keep solving the same problems in parallel.
Through roundtables held across the UK in 2024-25, PolicyWISE heard a consistent message from policymakers, parliamentarians and researchers: policy differences are still treated as a problem to manage, rather than a practical tool for improving policymaking. Officials are often “devolution aware but not devolution able”, aware of alternatives but without the confidence, skills or structures to learn from them.
The result will be familiar to many civil servants. Successful innovations are not recognised, policy failures are repeated across jurisdictions, and intergovernmental relations default to competition rather than collaboration. In practical terms, the system leaves money and policy wins on the table.
This matters now more than ever. Elections in Scotland and Wales, with likely growing political divergence, will raise the stakes for bodies such as the Council of Nations and Regions. Brexit and Covid exposed how fragile cross-nation coordination becomes when it relies on personal relationships rather than systems. Future crises won’t wait for reinvention or solutions that already exist elsewhere in the UK.
The competition trap
Too often, policy difference is framed as a league table. When performance is reduced to “who’s up, who’s down”, learning loses. Participants told us they hesitate to promote success or acknowledge failure for fear of political backlash or hostile headlines.
Scotland’s minimum unit pricing on alcohol generated a substantial body of evaluative evidence, which warranted a more systematic UK-wide appraisal. Wales’s Well-being of Future Generations approach has produced practical tools that could travel across contexts, yet weak incentives to do so.
Participants in our research described a reluctance to actively promote success. Not because evidence was thin, but because divergence from England still has to be “justified” and success can attract criticism rather than interest. Northern Ireland’s experience of consensus-building offers transferable lessons, but these are rarely analysed or shared.
The data deficit
Officials repeatedly pointed to a basic constraint: we do not count the same things in the same way.
Indicators are misaligned, definitions drift and statistical geographies fail to reflect how services are actually governed and delivered. That makes meaningful comparison, let alone robust evaluation, difficult.
Without comparable data on outcomes, costs and implementation conditions, it is hard to make an evidence-based case for adopting (or avoiding) a policy from elsewhere.
The capability gap
Comparative policy analysis remains niche rather than routine. Many teams know alternatives exist but lack time, permission or tools to test whether those approaches could travel. Without dedicated capability, even motivated officials default to familiar sources and inward-looking problem-solving.
Learning is harder because devolution is not a single, settled system. Even within England, incomplete and asymmetric devolution leaves comparison skewed, with Whitehall often acting simultaneously as an England-specific government and UK representative.
What’s working now
There are bright spots. Greater Manchester’s place-based integration shows how devolved governance can coordinate across silos with measurable benefits. On the island of Ireland, regular and institutionalised cross-border exchange has helped normalise adaptation.
Five actions officials can take now
Practical steps include:
- Embed learning in intergovernmental architecture through well-designed comparative learning
- Fix the data by building timely, comparable datasets across priority policy areas
- Build a culture of comparative learning with comparative analysis part of standard practice and not defaulting to England as the benchmark
- Strengthen accountability for learning, encouraging scrutiny to include consideration of alternatives from other UK nationsAmplify innovation by documenting and supporting the adaptation of successful reforms
The payoff
None of this requires reopening constitutional settlements. The barriers to cross-nation learning identified in our roundtables are largely institutional and cultural, and within the civil service’s control. Where learning is designed with purpose, supported by comparable data and reinforced through routine practice, differences in approach become an asset.
With political divergence increasing and policy capacity under strain, the cost of not learning is rising. Differing policy agendas across administrations are inevitable and a reflection of distinct mandates. The possibility of three nationalist-led governments post-May, whilst unprecedented, need not be a crisis for positive cross-administration working. It should mean that our leaders and policymakers focus seriously on common challenges, areas of strategic interest and mutual understanding.
Catherine May is head of external affairs at PolicyWISE, a UK and Ireland comparative policy, research and knowledge exchange initiative led by The Open University and funded by Dangoor Education