Rewiring the State? Don't forget to mention the war...

On 31 July the new government of Andy Burnham dropped a bombshell into British politics that few have fully understood.

In a Cabinet statement entitled Rewiring The State, the government pledged to:

• Create a Strategic Authority in every English region, and align police, fire, social care and other service boundaries with those authorities

• Devolve some income tax receipts to English local authorities

• Hand more of local business rates collected to local authorities

• Devolve some public spending allocated to social housing to Strategic Authorities

• Devolve the power to raise a tourism tax to all Mayoral Strategic Authorities

• Force every English region to choose between mayoral and non-mayoral models, with greater powers granted to the former

• Shrink the Civil Service and distribute its expertise to regions

• Abolish some arms-length bodies, by diving their resources and responsibilities between Whitehall ministries and regional governments

It’s all being done fast, with the full map of Strategic Authorities finalised this year, and in place by 2028. The full details will be published alongside the Autumn Budget on 28 October 2026.

If it works, it is not so much a new wiring diagram as a new state – requiring cultural change in Whitehall, massive upskilling of local government – both at the official level for those elected – and a long hoped for (by me) bonfire of what the statement calls “performative consultations”. Among other things, the Office for National Statistics will be required to produce timely ultra-localised data.

The aim of the project is to achieve Burnham’s goal of “good growth in every postcode” – itself a total reversal of the dynamics that have driven the UK economy in the era of free-market globalisation (a.k.a neoliberalism).

I support these reforms, and I think they are brave.

But in this edition of Conflict & Democracy I want to explore their implications for national security. The UK government has initiated its “national conversation on defence” at sotto voce. But in academia, local government and the Cabinet Office itself there’s a lot of work going on to identify ways to make UK society, infrastructure and governance more resilient in the face of hybrid attack.

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In my University of Exeter paper, Designing the 21^st Century Wartime State, I laid out some suggestion for how the Defence Readiness Bill scheduled for next year, and the “War Book” – which outgoing Cabinet Secretary Darren Jones confirmed is being drafted – might rewire the state under conditions of a conflict with a peer adversary.

Here I will consider what Burnham’s plans for Strategic Authorities and fiscal devolution might mean for the agenda I spelled out in the Exeter paper.

Let’s start with a couple of maps. First, the heat map of English deprivation – which is a fair proxy for low, bad or zero growth in a postcode: