MPs don't ask about “inclusive growth.” They ask why their constituency missed out. What that means for LED practitioners

David Marlow
Jul 31
8 min read

Roughly 80 people work in the House of Commons Library. By design, they try to be a studiously neutral voices in Westminster. They don't advise government. They don't push policy. They don't tell an MP that one party's position is right and another’s wrong. What they do is assemble information impartially for all 650 MPs and have done, in one form or another, for as long as most of us have been working in local economic development. We were joined on LEDC by Mark Sandford who has been the Library's senior analyst on local government and devolution since 2008, writing on the subject for over 25 years.

Mark has watched fiscal devolution debates, local government reorganisations and promises of policy reform recur across governments from a genuinely unusual vantage point: inside part of the machine that decides what MPs get told, and when. Our conversation ranged across how the Library decides what to brief on, how MPs' interest in devolution has (and hasn't) changed over 15 years, the maturing status of mayors within Parliament, and the fiscal devolution roadmap due in autumn 2026. Recorded in June, just before Andy Burnham's move from Mayor of Greater Manchester to Prime Minister, it now reads rather differently than it would have a month ago.

At least six things are worth pulling out of the episode and pushing further.

MPs want constituency-level answers but the impartial briefings they rely on are built to generalise. That mismatch is a genuine opening for practitioner evidence.

Mark is direct that it's rare for an MP to ask the Library to explain local economic development from the first principles of mechanisms, motivations, expected outcomes. What MPs actually ask for is narrower and more immediate: why didn't my constituency get funding, who decided that, how do we compare with the seat next door. But there's a paradox sitting underneath that. The Library's entire value rests on being impartial and consistent across all 650 constituencies. This means, by design, its briefings can't be bespoke to any one place.

That's a different register of knowledge from the detailed, policy analytic advice, sometimes with a place dimension, civil servants give ministers, and different again from the granular, local government-generated evidence a LGA or LGIU-style policy briefing might carry. If MPs' interest really is this constituency-specific, then the neutral contextual analysis they're given and the granular local answer they actually want are not quite the same thing. That gap is exactly where practitioner-generated, place-specific evidence should be landing. For some Library briefings, a place-specific translation by you for your local MPs will be very helpful.

The evidence base on mayoral impact is uneven, and where it does exist it's more complicated than the sector's usual pitch.

Even the longest-established mayoralties are barely nine years old, and Mark's “very much at the beginning” framing holds up well for economic impact specifically. A 2026 academic study (Sweeney – referenced below) using difference-in-differences methods found that the first six years of Mayoral Combined Authority status produced no faster growth than non-devolved areas, and where gains did appear, they skewed toward already-wealthier districts rather than narrowing regional inequality. This is an uncomfortable finding for a sector that talks confidently about “what mayoral devolution delivers.” The picture is considerably less thin on health. Greater Manchester's own devolved health powers have produced a growing, published quasi-experimental evidence base showing modest gains in life expectancy and healthy life expectancy, alongside a genuinely mixed picture on specific services such as mental health and maternity care.

So, the honest summary isn't “no evidence anywhere”. It's that the evidence is unevenly thin: sobering on economic growth across mayoralties generally, more developed (if still GM-specific) on health. This unevenness is an argument for practitioners elsewhere to build their own evaluation base now, before partial pictures, in either direction, harden into orthodoxy.

Mark’s claim that “No party questions mayors any more” is not (IMO) a settled fact and the mayoral mainstreaming deserves more scrutiny than we gave it on air.

Mark's account of the shift is striking. In the mid-2010s there was active backbench lobbying against giving mayors substantial powers at all; today, he says, no party in Parliament argues against mayors as a mechanism. That's real progress on one reading. But we didn't push him hard enough on it, and it's worth pushing here. Our episode with John Denham makes the case that Reform's use of local platforms like mayoralties and councils to resist central government policy is instrumental to a national cultural agenda, not evidence of any ideological commitment to decentralised governance. That is a materially different starting position from Labour's or the Liberal Democrats', even if it never shows up as opposition to the word “mayor” in a Commons debate.

The asymmetry question also cuts differently than we suggested on the episode: it isn't simply mayoral versus non-mayoral. Greater Lincolnshire (my own patch) now has a Reform mayor so the live asymmetry is between long-established, well-resourced mayoralties and newer, thinner ones (including Reform-led ones), not between places with a mayor and places without. Mark's own phrase for this, “some mayors are stronger than others, some mayors are not even there yet”, is the more useful frame, and Parliament, on his own admission, has barely begun to reckon with it. It's the same asymmetry we explored at length in Two-speed devolution: what the Devolution and Community Empowerment Act really means for places: Mark's episode simply confirms that Westminster hasn't caught up with mayor / non-mayor and mature / start-up binaries yet.

MPs' role in LED and placemaking structures has quietly become formal, not just interested and practitioners should treat that shift as a design feature, not a courtesy.

It's worth stepping outside the episode itself here. Pride in Place, the programme whose funding decisions Mark says are the single most common thing MPs ask the Library about, has written the local MP into the governance of every Neighbourhood Board, with joint sign-off alongside the local authority on appointing the independent Chair. That's a genuine, if under-discussed, institutional shift: MPs are no longer simply lobbied from outside LED and placemaking structures, they increasingly sit inside them, with formal responsibilities attached. Local Growth Plans point the same way. Mayors will be expected to produce them, and an as-yet-undefined list of public bodies will be required in law to have regard to them. Practitioners who still treat MPs as an external audience to be briefed, rather than as institutional actors with formal governance roles, are working from a model that's already out of date.

Fiscal devolution is the story to watch this autumn and Burnham's move from City Hall to Downing Street makes it considerably harder to dismiss as a slow-burn technical debate.

Mark's most consequential point may be his driest: today, mayors operate inside outcomes frameworks: dozens of conditions attached to money that flows from central government departments. If a share of income tax is instead assigned to mayoral authorities as of right, that is a different constitutional relationship entirely: revenue from Parliament to mayors, not from departments to grant recipients. He's careful not to overstate where this lands. Mark notes that Treasury officials were themselves given only days' notice of the Mais lecture that put fiscal devolution on the table, which suggests this has been moving faster, and later in the process, than the usual Whitehall consultation choreography.

The conversation now sits inside a different context: a Downing Street occupied, for the first time, by someone who has spent a decade running a mayoral outcomes framework from the other side of the table; together with John Healey as the new Chancellor. Whether that changes the pace or substance of the autumn roadmap is exactly the kind of question this podcast exists to keep returning to.

A sharper tension this episode circles without quite landing on is the mayors / MPs balance. Burnham's own constitutional preferences would make that structural, not just cultural.

This bolder point is worth stating plainly and is implicit in a number of the five points above, even if it goes beyond what we put to Mark on the day. Mayors are accumulating political weight in and for their patches at a rate individual MPs simply are not: city-region-wide mandates, cross-party media profile, control over transport, planning, skills and, if the autumn roadmap lands as trailed, a preordained share of national taxation. MPs, by contrast, remain constituency-bound, individually limited outside their own casework and committee work, and as Mark's account makes clear, dependent on a shared, neutral Library and other sources rather than any dedicated analytical capacity of their own.

Burnham has spent years arguing for the change that would make this asymmetry constitutional rather than incidental: replacing the House of Lords with what he has called a Senate of Regions and Nations, seating directly elected mayors in a reformed upper chamber. Pursuing this sort of model even partially - a formal council of mayors, or mayoral representation in a reformed second chamber - English MPs would find themselves outflanked, in institutional terms, by leaders who don't sit in the Commons at all. Mark's Library will keep serving MPs with the same rigorous neutrality it always has. The more interesting question this episode leaves hanging is whether that neutral service is being aimed at the branch of English governance that will still hold the most place-based institutional weight in five years' time.

Concluding remarks

This episode is worth the full listen to better understand the Library's internal workings on their own terms, and as an important mechanism through which our sector's evidence does or doesn't reach the people who vote on the legislation that shapes it. Constituency-level interest and neutral, generalised briefing are not the same register of knowledge, and that gap is where practitioner evidence should be landing.

The evidence base on mayoral impact isn't thin across the board: it's unevenly thin, sobering on growth and more developed on health in Greater Manchester specifically, and more complicated in both directions than the sector's usual pitch. The claim that Westminster has settled into a comfortable cross-party consensus on mayors deserves more scepticism than Mark's own account invites. The asymmetry that matters now runs between resourced and unresourced mayoralties, not between mayoral and non-mayoral areas, and Reform's position on devolution is instrumental to a national identity project rather than a genuine consensus on decentralisation.

MPs' formal role in structures like Pride in Place has moved well beyond lobbying target. And underneath all of it sits the largest unresolved question: whether MPs, individually, are becoming the junior partner in English governance to a class of mayors who may soon sit in the legislature that MPs alone currently occupy.

None of that is comfortable for a sector that likes to talk in terms of “what works.” It is, instead, a reminder that the sector's job right now is to get its evidence into a form MPs will actually use, into the register of knowledge the Library's neutrality model can't quite supply, and into the room before someone else's thinner version of that evidence sets the template.

Further LEDC listening

Two-speed devolution: what the Devolution and Community Empowerment Act really means for places, Espresso shot, June 2026
Has fiscal devolution finally gone mainstream? Espresso shot, April 2026
Is a progressive national identity critical to progress in local left-behind places? (LEDC blog and Guest Episode with John Denham, October 2025)
Mayor Claire Ward (EMCCA): Building the plane while flying it, Guest episode, April 2026