The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill 2025 (Denham and Morphet, 2025) and the UK state’s commitment to radically restructure the way England is governed (Denham and Morphet, 2025) is a positive first step in creating a coherent and strategic way to overcome enduring failures of policy and governance at the (hyper)-local level (Bell, 2024; Freedman, 2024; Heery, 2025) and break away from a highly centralised system that entrenched local and regional disparities for decades (Ayres, 2025). As devolution fundamentally should be about making people’s live better (Pike et al., 2020) in their local areas, it feels important to justify why place management matters in respect of this goal.We are researchers at the Institute of Place Management (IPM), at Manchester Metropolitan University. The IPM is recognised as a leading research and professional body for place management (Georgetown Global Cities Initiative, 2024). Our network includes Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), town teams, anchor institutions, community groups and local authorities. Since 2015, we have worked closely with government, including through delivery of the High Streets Task Force (HSTF) (Parker et al., 2025a), to support hyperlocal regeneration across England (Parker et al., 2025b).Our model of engaged scholarship (Millington et al., 2024; Parker and Ntounis, 2017; Steadman and Millington, 2022) bridges theory and practice, co-producing knowledge with place leaders and civic actors. This dual mandate is essential to our response to the Empowerment Bill. Our response to the draft Empowerment Bill has been developed through an intensive, collaborative process rooted in the principles of participatory inquiry and professional reflection. It draws upon a series of roundtable discussions convened by the IPM, involving experienced IPM Fellows who themselves represent the plural and evolving ecosystem of hyperlocal governance – including Business Improvement Districts, town centre partnerships, community trusts, anchor-led consortia and more. These conversations were enriched by an open call for contributions published through the Journal of Place Management and Development, inviting practitioners, policymakers and academics to share their perspectives on the devolution agenda.The resulting response is both empirically grounded and intellectually robust, shaped by lived experience and a deep familiarity with the operational realities of place leadership. It reflects the pluralism, complexity and adaptability that effective devolution requires – and offers evidence-based recommendations drawn from a wide community of practice, underpinned by published research. In doing so, we aim to model the kind of collaborative, cross-sector dialogue that the Empowerment Bill itself must help to enable.Crucially, and collectively, we view devolution not only as an institutional reform, but as a cultural and operational shift (Denham and Morphet, 2025; Shaw, 2024) – one that requires recognising the everyday practice of managing places. We argue that place management, as a professional and academic discipline (Manchester Metropolitan University, 2025) offers the missing operational infrastructure needed to implement the Bill effectively.The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill 2025 (Manchester Metropolitan University, 2025) makes welcome strides in proposing legal duties for local collaboration and neighbourhood participation. However, we identify five critical blind spots:The emerging academic consensus is clear: effective devolution must take place seriously. This means more than geographical targeting; it requires embedding an understanding of how regeneration unfolds across different spatial scales and social contexts. Other contributions in the special section (Lybeck, 2025; Wade and Galpin, 2025) stress the importance of governance systems that are multi-scalar, plural, professionalised and participatory (Beel et al., 2018), Lybeck, 2025).A multi-scalar approach recognises that transformation occurs not just through large-scale infrastructure or city-region strategies, but through activity at the hyperlocal level (Vey and Storring, 2022) –on high streets, in neighbourhood centres, across estates, in town centres. Governance that fails to acknowledge this risks strategic incoherence and missed opportunities for civic engagement. Plurality is also essential. A one-size-fits-all model of neighbourhood governance risks undermining existing civic structures (Wade and Galpin, 2025). The evidence supports a family of governance models (Parker, 2025) – ranging from formal parish councils to informal place partnerships – that reflect the diversity of community identity and institutional history.Professionalisation is another key dimension. Place leadership requires more than enthusiasm; it demands specific capabilities in convening, diagnosis, facilitation and delivery (Colledge et al., 2022). The institutional infrastructure to support this already exists. For instance, the Institute of Place Management has developed and delivered a postgraduate programme in Place Management and Leadership (Manchester Metropolitan University, 2025b).Place management also contributes a robust methodological foundation to support action, learning and evaluation. The 4Rs framework repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring (Parker et al., 2017) – offers a widely tested model for place-based regeneration, applied in over 100 towns through the HSTF. Alongside this, the 25 Vitality and Viability Priorities provide a diagnostic framework for assessing the health of town centres (Parker et al., 2017), grounded in academic research and refined through practice. These frameworks not only offer practical guidance but also provide an empirical basis for cross-case learning and longitudinal evaluation.Finally, the contribution of place management is evidential as well as theoretical. Empirical findings from the HSTF (Parker, 2025b), alongside the IPM’s evidence brief (Parker, 2025) for the Independent Commission on the Organisation of Neighbourhoods (ICON), highlight what works in practice. These studies underscore the value of local intelligence, embedded civic capacity and iterative learning in achieving meaningful regeneration.Taken together, these contributions illustrate how place management, as both a field of study and a professional practice, offers a foundational infrastructure for realising the ambitions of community empowerment. It bridges theory and action, offering tools, frameworks and pedagogies capable of translating high-level policy into sustainable, inclusive and place-responsive change.The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (Parker, 2025) represents an important opportunity to embed more inclusive and participatory governance across England’s regions. However, its success will depend on the specificity of its language, the clarity of its operational mechanisms and the extent to which it reflects both the diversity of civic practice and the accumulated evidence of what works in place-based regeneration (Parker, 2025). Drawing on the theory and practice of place management, we offer the following broad recommendations for refining the legislative and policy framework.Firstly, the statutory language of the Bill should be tightened to reflect the concept of hyperlocal governance (Vey and Storring, 2022), rather than relying on the more ambiguous and administratively inconsistent term neighbourhood governance. This change is essential to ensure that a wide range of existing, often non-statutory, bodies that do not represent “neighbourhoods” – such as town centre partnerships, cultural consortia, Business Improvement Districts and anchor institution coalitions – are formally recognised and supported as legitimate actors in local governance. Combined authorities should be required to audit and engage with these existing local partnerships, ensuring that their contributions are not displaced by any newly formalised structures (Wade and Galpin, 2025). National guidance should be mandated to provide clear expectations around what constitutes effective engagement, collaboration and evaluation (Parker, 2025).Secondly, there is a compelling case for embedding established frameworks from place management into the Bill’s secondary legislation and statutory guidance. In particular, the 4rs framework – repositioning, reinventing, rebranding and restructuring – and the 25 Priority Interventions should be referenced as tools for diagnosing local capacity, guiding implementation and monitoring progress (Parker et al., 2017). These frameworks have been extensively tested and applied across the UK through the HSTF (Parker et al., 2025b), and they offer a coherent approach to operationalising the concept of “effective governance” in local contexts (Parker et al., 2025a).Thirdly, the long-term success of hyperlocal governance depends on a supportive infrastructure for professional development, peer learning and resource mobilisation. The Bill should be accompanied by a national programme of place leadership development, delivered through a network of combined authorities, universities and training providers. This programme should include CPD-accredited qualifications and structured apprenticeships, designed to open pathways into hyperlocal governance for young people and underrepresented groups – including those from disadvantaged and rural communities. These initiatives would ensure a more inclusive leadership pipeline and equip the next generation of place leaders with the skills, knowledge and legitimacy to support collaborative, effective governance (Institute of Place Management, 202). Such efforts align with the Bill’s intent to empower communities, but must be operationalised through well-funded and formally recognised educational and vocational routes. This should extend to all layers of devolution charged with implementing the bill through their governance strategies and delivery.Fourthly, the duty to collaborate – as outlined in Clauses 21 and 22 – requires further clarification and strengthening. Collaboration should be defined not merely as consultation, but as a process of co-diagnosis, co-planning and co-delivery, involving a broad spectrum of local stakeholders. Statutory guidance should set out minimum expectations for collaborative processes, including mechanisms such as participatory planning, advisory panels and shared data protocols. Without these provisions, there is a risk that collaboration remains discretionary and unevenly implemented.Finally, there must be a stronger and more explicit link between community empowerment and evaluation. Clause 58(4), which refers to monitoring and review, should be expanded to include requirements for baseline diagnostics, published theories of change and outcomes-based evaluation frameworks. These mechanisms must go beyond procedural compliance to assess whether empowerment is substantively advancing equity, inclusion and place outcomes. A multi-level evaluation framework (Parker et al., 2025c) is required – linking local interventions to regional and national policy goals. This is essential to understand the real-world impacts of devolved governance. This approach draws on theories of change and shared metrics to support adaptive learning and continuous improvement across tiers of government. Evaluative practice should also be aligned with existing statutory duties under the Equality Act and other relevant frameworks, ensuring that strategies for empowerment are not only operationally effective but also socially just and accountable.In summary, the Bill has the potential to catalyse a new phase of local democracy in England. But to do so, it must draw on the theoretical, empirical and professional insights that the field of place management offers – grounding its ambitions in the lived realities of local governance and the systems required to support it.The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill marks an important moment in the ongoing reform of local governance in England. Its focus on hyperlocal-level participation and strategic collaboration aligns with longstanding calls from both policy and academic communities for a more grounded, inclusive and responsive approach to devolution. However, the Bill in its current form lacks the operational clarity, professional support and evaluative infrastructure required to deliver on its ambitions. The field of place management, with its growing body of frameworks, evidence and pedagogy, offers a valuable foundation for addressing these gaps and enabling a more coherent system of hyperlocal governance.This article has argued for a refinement of the Bill’s language and implementation architecture – calling for broader recognition of non-statutory place partnerships, the adoption of proven frameworks like the 4Rs and 25 Vital and Viable Priorities and the establishment of a national support infrastructure for place leadership, learning and evaluation. In doing so, we have sought to demonstrate not only the policy relevance of place management but also its theoretical and methodological contributions to the wider project of democratic renewal.There remains, however, a significant agenda for future research. The challenges raised by this Bill illuminate the need for a more robust theory of multi-scalar devolution (cf Regan et al., 2021) – one that recognises the layered realities of power, governance and agency across neighbourhood, town, regional and national levels. Developing this theory requires new conceptual scaffolding capable of linking insights from political science, public administration and area studies with the applied knowledge of place management and urban regeneration. It also demands empirical work that captures the lived experience of civic participation, institutional complexity and territorial identity in specific localities.The Journal of Place Management and Development is well-positioned to lead this intellectual agenda. By convening interdisciplinary scholarship and practice-based insight, it can help shape the next generation of theory and evidence on how place matters in governance – and how communities can be meaningfully empowered in the design and delivery of the places they live, work and belong to.
Parker et al. (Tue,) studied this question.