Devolution: who actually runs what in the UK

A UK news bulletin announcing a new NHS policy is, more often than not, announcing an England-only policy. Health has been run from Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast for a quarter of a century, along with schools, most transport, housing, agriculture and much of justice. Devolution is the constitutional fact most consistently flattened by national headlines, and a short map of who runs what repays any reader.

The design principle in Scotland and Northern Ireland is that everything is devolved unless reserved: Westminster keeps defence, foreign affairs, immigration, most benefits, broad fiscal policy and the constitution, and the devolved institutions hold the rest. Wales began with a weaker settlement and has converged toward the same model. The practical consequence is that the domestic policies people meet daily, hospital waiting times, exam systems, university fees, prescription charges, income tax rates in Scotland's case, diverge by nation, and the divergence is the point. Free personal care, different exam grades, minimum alcohol pricing and separate rail arrangements are not anomalies but the system functioning.

Northern Ireland adds its own layer: power-sharing means the executive requires both communities' parties to participate, and when one walks out, the institutions stop, a suspension that has consumed years at a time, leaving civil servants administering without ministers.

England is the asymmetry at the centre. It has no parliament of its own; its domestic policy is set by the UK government and its laws by a Commons in which every UK MP may vote. What England has instead is a growing archipelago of combined authorities under metro mayors, from Greater Manchester and the West Midlands outward, holding negotiated bundles of transport, skills, planning and police powers. English devolution is real but shallow by comparison, and its deepening, with fuller settlements for the largest city-regions, is a live project of successive governments.

The money underneath

Funding still runs overwhelmingly through Westminster. The Barnett formula adjusts the devolved nations' block grants in proportion to spending changes in England, a mechanism designed as a stopgap in the 1970s and never replaced. It delivers stable money without linking a devolved government's budget to its own economy, which critics across the spectrum note produces governments responsible for services but only partially for raising what pays for them. Scotland's partial income-tax powers were the first serious dent in that arrangement.

For readers, one habit fixes most confusion: on any domestic story, ask which nation the policy touches. The answer changes what the headline means, whom to credit or blame, and, in a devolved election year, which government is actually on the ballot for the service in question.