For the UK government, devolution and digital sovereignty go hand-in-hand

Digital sovereignty is the agency and capacity of any organisation to make intelligent, informed choices to shape its digital future by design. 

For governments, it is becoming an indicator of their underlying state capacity. Those who lack such capacity tend also to lack a clear strategy or plan for digital sovereignty. And that is a problem. 

Given the big geopolitical questions that exist around digital sovereignty - which countries we should allow ourselves dependence upon, for what, when, and how - it is tempting to think of it only as a national issue. But devolution and digital sovereignty go hand in hand too. 

For a long time, local government in the UK has lacked depth in agency and capacity, the two qualities that digitally sovereign organisations need. Agency, because constrained resources and a fractious parent-child relationship with Whitehall have stripped back local authorities’ control and influence over fixing problems on their patch. And capacity, because local government has come to depend on a small, comfortable market of large companies for technology, outsourced public services, and brainpower. Through lack of agency, local government has lost its heart. Through lack of capacity, it has lost its head. Through lack of both, it has lost sovereignty. 

That is no criticism of those who have fought incredibly hard to keep local government afloat. This loss is a consequence of many things: a lack of political will or interest from Westminster, Brexit and Covid shocks, inadequate and short-term funding, geopolitical currents, and weak regional governance. 

Andy Burnham has made restoring agency, capacity and a sense of place into government a signature note of his administration. This is very welcome. His government has a real challenge on its hands, because Britain is behind. As Professor Alan Brown said in a recent post, “Britain is beginning to assemble a vocabulary for digital sovereignty…[while] a global field has been arguing about digital sovereignty seriously for fifteen years.” People's experience of much of government service delivery is local and in place. The loss of agency has had huge impacts on the ability of local services to respond to people's needs. Local failure becomes national politics because of how it reinforces the 'Britain is broken' narrative.

Britain has lost digital sovereignty not by accident, but by design. Since the 1980s, we have adopted a form of statecraft grounded in a theory of knowledge that what people need from the state can be known, specified, disaggregated, measured and contracted in advance. As a response to the producer capture problems of the 1970s, and in areas with predictable futures and competitive markets, this worked fine. Universalised across everything, it did not. The loss of state capacity and agency was a feature of that approach, not a bug. But most of what matters in public services cannot be specified in advance. It can only be discovered - in relationships, close to the ground, by people with the standing to act on what they find. 

Technology always changes. Expectations always rise. Needs always increase in complexity. 

Britain has several noble examples of work in recent years that have directly tried to challenge the prevailing winds, including some world class digital and technology based outcomes. GOV.UK has done as much to counter disinformation as any media company. AI teams in central government; data expertise in Transport for London and Liverpool City Region. Emergent standards like EHR in Health; the Open UK movement, and others. The Test, Learn and Grow programme, and the national movement it is curating. 

But the managerial source code of bureaucracy - Treasury orthodoxy, senior civil service promotion patterns, retail political storytelling, following the risk-averse herd - have prevented such efforts from having wider impact. 

At this exact moment, the UK government does not yet have the tools it needs to deliver either the relational, place-based services needed to improve outcomes at scale. It does not have most of the national digital and data foundations they should be built upon. Instead, it has institutions, at national and local level, giving contracts it doesn’t want to tender, to companies it doesn’t want to hire, for outputs that won’t deliver the desired outcome. Other democracies find themselves in a similar boat. It could have been different. It still could be.  

The fact that this has happened by design is good news. Because the state can redesign itself, and we have a government that appears to be keen on rewiring. 

Building digital sovereignty as part of a devolutionary government is not going to be a case of fiddling at the edges of existing procurement processes, or fixating on specific contract awards to specific companies. 

It requires something much deeper and more ambitious than that; following a path that other countries have already begun to walk down. Rather than relying on international card networks, Brazil’s central bank built and governs its own instant payment system, launched in 2020, which by the end of 2024 had been used by about 92% of adults. Schleswig-Holstein in Germany moved its administration on to open-source tools like LibreOffice, keeping the policy going through a change of government by making it hard to undo. By late 2025 around 80% of workstations had switched, with more than €15 million in licence savings expected in 2026.

The UK needs to stop treating digital infrastructure as lines of departmental expenditure and start treating it as national economic infrastructure. That can only be led by a team with central authority over standards, architecture, interoperability, identity, data exchanges, and AI governance, actively shaping the market around the technical building blocks and components of a modern, responsive state. Some of it should be built in-house, but not everything. Reduce the incumbent roll-up contracts and create more efficient markets. Every public organisation in the country rents or buys software it resents using, that is hilariously worse than what people use at home. This has been the case for so long we assume ‘good enough for government’ must be a canonical truth. Why? 

All this will complement a shift to greater capacity and agency in local government; putting experience, talent, humanity and leadership nearer to the people the government serves, and giving them status and authority.

And, of course, it will all be amplified by AI. Here is a set of technologies that may create GDP-changing sources of value, and drive domestic business growth. It could eat the transactional graft of public services and leave more space for relational work, as local government leaders like Catherine Howe have pointed out. But just as easily, it could further accelerate and amplify capacity and sovereignty loss. If a government frames AI as solely about chasing incremental productivity gains from today’s institutions, with widgets bought from today’s markets, that will end badly. This is a film we’ve seen before.  

Businesses are increasingly focusing on their digital sovereignty, and grappling with how to restore the agency and capacity they failed to notice had been slipping out of the building. More governments are waking up to the same. 

The first step on that road is awareness - seeing what you have not taken the time to see. Taking a hard look is well overdue.