Term Paper Sample: Devolution and the Unanswered English Question

Model Answer

Devolution has been one of the defining constitutional projects of the United Kingdom since the referendums of 1997, which paved the way for a Scottish Parliament, a National Assembly for Wales, and, following the Belfast Agreement, a power-sharing Assembly at Stormont (Bogdanor, 1999). Two decades on, the settlement has proved remarkably resilient in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, each of which has acquired steadily expanding legislative competence. England, by contrast, remains governed as a single unit directly by the Westminster Parliament, the only part of the Union without a devolved legislature of its own. This asymmetry, often labelled the “English Question”, has generated a persistent and unresolved debate about how England should be governed within an increasingly devolved United Kingdom (Hazell, 2006).

This term paper argues that devolution, as currently constituted, has not adequately answered the English Question. It has instead produced a patchwork of partial and inconsistent responses: procedural fixes at Westminster, uneven devolution to city-regions, and a rise in English national sentiment that mainstream politics has struggled to accommodate (Kenny, 2014; Wyn Jones et al., 2012). The discussion proceeds in six parts. It first outlines the asymmetric design of the devolution settlement and the structural gap this created for England. It then examines the West Lothian question and the short-lived experiment with English Votes for English Laws. The third section considers sub-national devolution within England, including combined authorities and metro mayors, as a partial alternative to a national English tier of government. The fourth section reviews survey evidence on English national identity and public appetite for constitutional change. The fifth section draws brief comparative lessons from other multi-national states, before the paper concludes by weighing the principal constitutional options that remain on the table.

This paper draws on the devolution literature, official constitutional documents such as the Scotland Acts and Standing Order changes at Westminster, and secondary survey evidence, principally the British Social Attitudes series, to assess the extent to which the English Question can be considered resolved. It does not attempt to adjudicate normatively on the merits of any single constitutional option in isolation, but instead evaluates each against three criteria used consistently in the literature: whether it addresses the representational imbalance created by the West Lothian question, whether it is politically deliverable given the scale of England relative to the rest of the Union, and whether it responds to the empirical evidence on English public opinion.

The Devolution Settlement: Asymmetry by Design

From its inception, devolution in the United Kingdom was designed asymmetrically rather than as a uniform federal solution. Scotland received a Parliament with primary legislative powers over a wide range of devolved matters, later extended by the Scotland Acts of 2012 and 2016 to include significant tax and welfare competence (Keating, 2009). Wales began with more limited executive devolution in 1999 and has since moved, through the Government of Wales Act 2006 and subsequent Wales Acts, towards a reserved-powers model closer to Scotland’s. Northern Ireland’s arrangements, rooted in the 1998 Belfast Agreement, layer devolution onto a power-sharing settlement designed to manage a distinct constitutional conflict. England alone was left outside this process, governed as before by the UK Parliament and UK Government sitting simultaneously as England’s own legislature and executive (Bogdanor, 1999).

Jeffery (2009) describes this pattern as a piecemeal approach to constitutional change, driven by the specific political pressures in each nation rather than by any overarching theory of how the Union as a whole should be governed. The absence of an equivalent English tier was not a deliberate policy choice so much as a default: England’s sheer size, comprising roughly 84 per cent of the UK population, made a directly analogous English Parliament appear disproportionate, potentially rivalling Westminster itself (Hazell, 2006). Successive governments therefore left the English Question unaddressed at the moment devolution was designed, treating it as a problem to be managed rather than solved.

One especially persistent symptom of this structural gap is the Barnett formula, the mechanism used to adjust the devolved administrations’ block grants in line with changes in comparable UK Government spending in England. Although the formula was never designed as a measure of relative need, spending per head in Scotland has consistently exceeded that in England, feeding a widespread, if statistically contested, English perception of unfairness (Wyn Jones et al., 2012). Because there is no equivalent English institution empowered to negotiate comparable funding guarantees, disputes over the Barnett formula are conducted almost entirely within UK-wide politics, reinforcing rather than resolving the sense that England lacks a distinct voice in decisions that affect it directly.

The consequence has been a structural gap in the territorial constitution. Decisions on health, education and justice are made by distinct legislatures in Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, each accountable to their own electorates, while equivalent decisions for England are folded into UK-wide politics at Westminster. This has produced recurring anomalies, most visibly around funding formulae and voting rights, examined in the following section.

The West Lothian Question and English Votes for English Laws

The most concrete symptom of the English Question is the West Lothian question, named after the Scottish MP Tam Dalyell’s observation that, after devolution, Scottish MPs at Westminster could vote on English matters such as health and education while English MPs had no equivalent vote on the same policy areas in Scotland (Bogdanor, 1999). Once devolution created legislatures for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, England was the only nation whose primary legislation on devolved-equivalent matters continued to be decided by a parliament in which non-English MPs also sat and voted.

The Coalition and Conservative governments attempted a procedural answer in 2015 with English Votes for English Laws, a Standing Order change giving England-only stages to legislation certified as applying exclusively to England, effectively creating an England-only committee stage and consent vote within the existing Commons (Gamble, 2016). Proponents argued this addressed the anomaly without the expense or complexity of a new legislature; critics, including Kenny (2014), argued that EVEL was a technical fix that left the underlying imbalance in political voice unresolved and created a confusing two-tier membership within a single chamber.

In practice, EVEL affected only a small number of bills over its six years of operation, since most major legislation, including Finance Bills and any measure with UK-wide financial implications, fell outside its scope. Parliamentary analysis found that the England-only consent stage was invoked on only a modest proportion of bills introduced during the period, and no bill was ever blocked at that stage while passing the whole House. Jennings and Stoker (2017) suggest this low salience, rather than principled objection, best explains its quiet abolition: EVEL solved a problem that rarely arose in practice while doing nothing to address the underlying absence of an English legislative voice.

EVEL was suspended in 2020, ostensibly because of the practical difficulties of certifying legislation during the pandemic, and was abolished by Standing Order changes in 2021 without ever being replaced. Its short life illustrates a wider point: procedural adjustments within Westminster have consistently proved easier to introduce than to sustain, precisely because they do not resolve the deeper question of whether England needs its own political institutions or can continue to be governed satisfactorily through the UK Parliament acting in a dual capacity.

Sub-National Devolution: City Deals, Combined Authorities and Metro Mayors

In the absence of devolution to England as a whole, government since 2014 has pursued devolution within England, transferring specific powers over transport, skills and economic development to combined authorities led by directly elected mayors. Greater Manchester’s 2014 devolution deal was the template, followed by deals covering the West Midlands, Liverpool City Region, West Yorkshire, the North East and others, each negotiated bilaterally with the Treasury rather than established through a uniform statutory framework (McEwen, 2018).

This model has genuine achievements. Metro mayors have raised the political visibility of city-region government, secured multi-year transport and housing budgets, and given some English areas a democratic voice in negotiations with central government that was previously absent. Directly elected mayors in Greater Manchester and the West Midlands became recognisable figures with electoral mandates distinct from Westminster politics, illustrating that devolved English governance can generate its own accountability relationships (Jennings and Stoker, 2017).

Comparative analysis of individual deals shows substantial variation in fiscal firepower. Greater Manchester’s deal ultimately incorporated control over a portion of business rates growth and an integrated health and social care budget, while several later deals secured comparatively modest transport and skills funding without equivalent fiscal devolution. This unevenness reflects the bilateral, deal-by-deal negotiation model itself: areas with strong existing sub-regional institutions and assertive local leadership secured more generous settlements than those without, reproducing rather than correcting pre-existing regional inequalities in institutional capacity.

However, sub-national devolution has not answered the English Question so much as displaced it. Deals remain geographically patchy, with large parts of England, including much of the South West and the shire counties, still lacking a combined authority. Powers devolved vary considerably between deals, producing an uneven patchwork rather than a coherent settlement. Critically, none of these arrangements addresses the West Lothian imbalance at Westminster, since combined authorities exercise executive rather than primary legislative power. Mitchell (2010) argues that this reflects a longer pattern in UK territorial politics of managing pressure through incremental administrative concessions rather than confronting the constitutional question directly.

English National Identity and Public Attitudes

Alongside institutional developments, survey evidence points to a strengthening and increasingly assertive sense of English national identity since the early 2000s. Wyn Jones et al. (2012) describe England as an “emerging political community”, noting that respondents who prioritise an English over a British identity are more likely to feel that England is treated unfairly within the Union, particularly on funding formulae such as the Barnett formula, which is widely perceived in England as favouring Scotland.

Curtice (2021) finds that a majority of English respondents support some form of change to how England is governed, though opinion is split between those favouring an English Parliament, those preferring continued government through Westminster with EVEL-style safeguards, and a substantial minority who are simply unaware of the issue or indifferent to it. Support for constitutional change also correlates strongly with attitudes towards Brexit and the Union more broadly: Henderson et al. (2020) argue that English identifiers were significantly more likely to vote Leave in 2016, suggesting that English national sentiment has become entangled with wider debates about sovereignty and self-government rather than remaining a narrow devolution question.

Age also structures attitudes towards English identity and constitutional preference. Older respondents are consistently more likely than younger cohorts to prioritise an English over a British or dual identity, and older respondents were also markedly more likely to vote Leave in 2016 (Henderson et al., 2020). Younger English respondents, by contrast, show weaker attachment to an exclusively English identity and greater comfort with multiple, overlapping identities, a pattern that complicates any assumption that rising English identity will continue to build in a single, predictable direction over time.

Importantly, this rise in English identity has not translated into a sustained cross-party political movement in the way that Scottish or Welsh nationalism did. No electorally significant English nationalist party has emerged, and neither Labour nor the Conservatives have made an English Parliament a manifesto commitment. Jennings and Stoker (2017) describe a “bifurcated” English politics instead, split geographically and culturally between a more cosmopolitan, metropolitan England and a more nationally-identifying, provincial England, a division that cuts across any simple constituency for a single English institution.

Comparative Perspectives: Lessons From Federal and Quasi-Federal States

The English Question is not unique to the United Kingdom; many multi-national and multi-level states manage comparable tensions between a dominant territorial unit and smaller constituent nations. Federal systems typically avoid the problem through symmetry: in Germany, all sixteen Länder, including populous ones such as North Rhine-Westphalia, hold equivalent constitutional status and an equivalent voice in the Bundesrat, so no single unit is left outside the federal architecture (Gamble, 2016). Applied to the UK, a genuinely federal solution would require England either to be broken into several federal units of a similar size to Scotland and Wales, or for an English tier to be created alongside careful re-balancing of UK-wide institutions to prevent English dominance.

Spain offers a partial parallel through its system of asymmetric autonomous communities, where regions such as Catalonia and the Basque Country hold enhanced fiscal and linguistic powers not extended uniformly to all seventeen communities. This shows that asymmetry itself is not inherently unstable, provided the central state retains sufficient legitimacy and fiscal capacity to manage the resulting grievances (Keating, 2009). The UK’s experience suggests, however, that asymmetry without a correspondingly assertive English institution has instead displaced grievance onto Westminster politics directly, fuelling the sense of English unfairness that Curtice (2021) documents.

Canada’s experience with Quebec, and Belgium’s linguistic federalism, both illustrate that formal constitutional symmetry is not a precondition for stability, so long as clear, well-understood rules govern which decisions sit at which level of government. The comparative evidence therefore does not point towards a single “correct” model for England, but it does suggest that ad hoc, incremental adjustments of the kind pursued in the UK since 1998 are more likely to sustain a workable settlement than either a rushed federal restructuring or continued denial that an English-specific governance problem exists (Mitchell, 2010).

Constitutional Options: An English Parliament, Devolution-Max and the Status Quo

Three broad options are typically canvassed as answers to the English Question. The first is a directly elected English Parliament, mirroring Scotland and Wales. Proponents argue this would finally resolve the West Lothian imbalance and give England the same institutional voice as the other nations. The principal objection, as Hazell (2006) notes, is one of scale and asymmetry: an English Parliament governing 84 per cent of the UK population would risk becoming a rival power centre to Westminster, raising unresolved questions about the future of the UK Parliament itself and the shape of UK-wide taxation and spending.

The second option is further devolution-max to English city-regions, extending the combined authority model until most of England is covered by directly elected mayoral government with meaningful fiscal powers. This builds on the demonstrated success of Greater Manchester and the West Midlands and avoids the scale problem of a single English Parliament, but risks entrenching regional inequality between areas that secure strong deals and those, often poorer rural and coastal areas, that do not (McEwen, 2018).

The third option is to retain the status quo, governing England through the UK Parliament and Government, with or without procedural adjustments resembling EVEL. This avoids the cost and complexity of new institutions but leaves the underlying representational anomaly unresolved and does little to address the sense of grievance that Curtice (2021) documents among English identifiers.

On balance, the evidence reviewed here suggests that continued incremental devolution to English city-regions, rather than a single dramatic settlement, is the most politically realistic path. It has cross-party support, a working track record, and avoids destabilising the wider Union settlement, even though it leaves the English Question only partially, rather than fully, answered.

Conclusion

This paper has argued that devolution in the United Kingdom has not adequately resolved the English Question. The asymmetric design of the original settlement left England without an equivalent institutional voice; the West Lothian question that resulted was addressed only briefly and inconclusively through EVEL; and sub-national devolution, while genuinely successful in specific city-regions, has produced a partial and geographically uneven response rather than a coherent one. Meanwhile, survey evidence shows a rising and politically consequential sense of English national identity that current arrangements struggle to accommodate, and comparative experience offers no single ready-made template for resolving it.

None of the three constitutional options reviewed offers a costless solution. An English Parliament would resolve the representational anomaly but destabilise the wider Union; continued devolution-max to city-regions is more deliverable but risks entrenching geographic inequality; and the status quo is administratively simple but leaves both the constitutional grievance and the identity politics it generates unresolved. Given the demonstrated fragility of Westminster-based procedural fixes and the practical achievements of the mayoral model, further incremental devolution within England, rather than a single new national institution, is likely to remain the primary vehicle through which the English Question continues to be, at best, only partially answered.

References

• Bogdanor, V. (1999) Devolution in the United Kingdom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Curtice, J. (2021) ‘English Identity and Support for the Union’, British Social Attitudes, 38. London: NatCen Social Research.
• Gamble, A. (2016) ‘The Constitutional Revolution in the United Kingdom’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 46(4), pp. 1–24.
• Hazell, R. (ed.) (2006) The English Question. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Henderson, A., Jeffery, C., Wincott, D. and Wyn Jones, R. (2020) ‘How Brexit was Made in England’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 22(2), pp. 250–267.
• Jeffery, C. (2009) ‘Devolution in the United Kingdom: Problems of a Piecemeal Approach to Constitutional Change’, Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 39(2), pp. 289–313.
• Jennings, W. and Stoker, G. (2017) ‘Bifurcated Politics: Two Englands’, The Political Quarterly, 88(3), pp. 372–382.
• Keating, M. (2009) The Independence of Scotland: Self-Government and the Shifting Politics of Union. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Kenny, M. (2014) The Politics of English Nationhood. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• McEwen, N. (2018) ‘Still Better Together? Purpose and Peril in the Future of Scottish Devolution’, Regional Studies, 52(5), pp. 1–10.
• Mitchell, J. (2010) ‘The Narcissism of Small Differences: Reflections on Devolution’, Parliamentary Affairs, 63(1), pp. 98–116.
• Wyn Jones, R., Lodge, G., Henderson, A. and Wincott, D. (2012) The Dog that Finally Barked: England as an Emerging Political Community. London: IPPR.