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Book a place at the CfGS Conference 2025

The government’s vision for English devolution will take years to implement. But we need to talk about it right away

We’ve always planned that our conference in March, Bold Governance and Courageous Scrutiny: Restoring Hope to Public Services, would have more ambition. It would include all the fabulous opportunities to learn and share expertise we always feature, while making room for serious thinking about governance and scrutiny. 

But it feels like the chance to talk and think together will be more important than ever. 

In light of the government’s plans for devolution, which include the merger of many councils and a uniform layer of strategic, devolved government across all of England, there are plenty of big discussions that need to start.  

They are informed by standing back and realising the scale of the government’s ideas, and the opportunities and the challenges it presents. 

And they make some of the questions that were always important ever more pressing… 

  • How do we manage place?  
  • How do we connect citizens to democracy at the right levels, given the changes in scale we are seeing? 
  • And how we create the right governance and scrutiny arrangements? 

To explore these questions, we’ve created a programme that adds to the great knowledge sharing and learning we always include, with sessions that tackle issues arising from the devolution agenda. They are pitched to be inclusive – because we know that the wider themes are universal. 

And we are inviting people from across the three levels of local democracy – hyperlocal, local authority and combined authorities to come – because this is a discussion about place, accountability and governance at every level. 

We’d love to see you there, too – to be at the start of a conversation that will build and develop over the coming months.

Please check out our conference programme now and join us. 

Book now