From isolation to innovation: a cross-nation agenda for better policy learning

Twenty-five years after parliaments and governments opened in Belfast, Cardiff and Edinburgh, a new PolicyWISE report has found that while democratic devolution has delivered policy divergence, there is less systematic learning about what works and what doesn’t. At a time of fiscal pressure and growing political divergence, the UK civil service cannot afford to keep solving the same problems in parallel. 

Through roundtables held across all UK nations in 2024-25, PolicyWISE heard a consistent message from policymakers, parliamentarians and researchers: policy differences are still treated as a problem to manage, rather than a practical tool for improving policymaking. Officials are often “devolution aware but not devolution able”, conscious that alternatives exist elsewhere in the UK, but lacking the confidence, skills and institutional support to learn from them. 

The result will be familiar to many civil servants. Successful innovations are under-recognised, policy failures are repeated across jurisdictions, and intergovernmental relations default to competition rather than collaboration. In practical terms, the system leaves money and policy wins on the table. 

This matters now more than ever. Elections in Scotland and Wales, combined with likely growing political divergence, will raise the stakes for bodies such as the Council of Nations and Regions. Brexit and COVID exposed how fragile cross-nation coordination becomes when it relies on personal relationships rather than systems. The next policy crisis will not wait for officials to reinvent solutions that already exist elsewhere in the UK. 

The competition trap 

Too often, policy difference is framed as a league table. When performance is reduced to “who’s up and who’s down”, honest learning loses out. Participants told us they hesitate to promote success or acknowledge failure for fear of political backlash or hostile headlines. 

Scotland’s minimum unit pricing on alcohol generated a substantial body of evaluative evidence which (whatever your view of the policy) warranted a more systematic UK-wide appraisal. Wales’s Well-being of Future Generations approach has produced practical tools and processes that could travel across contexts, yet incentives to do so remain weak. Welsh participants in our research described a reluctance to actively promote success. Not because evidence was thin, but because divergence from England still has to be continually “justified”, and success can attract criticism rather than interest. Northern Ireland’s experience of consensus-building offers transferable lessons for cross-departmental working, but these are rarely analysed or shared. 

The data deficit 

Officials repeatedly pointed to a basic constraint: we do not count the same things in the same way.  

Indicators are misaligned, definitions drift, and statistical geographies often fail to reflect how services are actually governed and delivered. That makes meaningful comparison, let alone robust evaluation, difficult. 

Without comparable data on outcomes, costs and implementation conditions, it is hard to make an evidence-based case for adopting (or avoiding) a policy from elsewhere. 

The capability gap 

Comparative policy analysis remains niche rather than routine. Many teams know alternatives exist but lack time, permission or tools to test whether those approaches could travel. Without dedicated capability, even motivated officials default to familiar sources and inward-looking problem-solving. 

Learning is also structurally harder because devolution is not a single, settled system. Even within England, incomplete and asymmetric devolution leaves comparison skewed, with Whitehall often acting simultaneously as an England-specific government and the UK representative.