Case studies

When England’s oldest hotel caught fire in 2016, Exeter city council’s communications team sprang into action, using digital channels to warn, inform and engage communities in the recovery operation.

Exeter City Council have been constructing buildings to Passivhaus standards since 2009, using their triple bottom line approach to deliver high quality builds, by being socially, environmentally and financially responsible. Since starting to deliver Passivhaus homes, they have developed and built nearly 150 homes to these standards. The process of designing and building so many different types of structure, has enabled them to improve their delivery model and in doing so reduce the overall cost.

Exeter City Council has created Wellbeing Exeter, a strategic alliance with Devon County Council and Sport England, which aims to link up community, healthcare and wellbeing services, and to reinforce local assets which might strengthen wellbeing outcomes.

The combined authority believes that devolution has increased its influencing power and that it is more involved in decisions at an earlier stage. As a result, other national bodies, such as the Careers and Enterprise Company (CEC), are now in discussions with the combined authority about how to devolve funding to meet its specific skills needs.

The devolution of employment and skills led to the profile of these areas being raised within both the local authority and the LEP and has resulted in the creation of a fully resourced and funded team to manage programmes and strategy.

"devolution is fantastic and I think we've proved we can manage it".

The City Region argues that devolution has allowed it to move away from policy silos and address interconnected problems in a far more joined up way, for example Households into Work having an impact on social housing strategy.

Managing funding locally through devolved budgets has increased scrutiny of how money is being used to meet local skills needs.

The combined authority argue that devolving the skills revenue and capital funding in the UK Shared Prosperity Fund would better allow it to align all funding streams and produce a linear model which would offer support to people from transitions into work to progression in the labour market.

The combined authority argues further devolution, whether of careers education or, as in Greater Manchester, of health would allow better join up and tailoring: “I think that is an absolutely critical missing piece of the skills and education devolution at the moment.”