Last Friday, I was shopping in my local village centre in Barnard's Green, and spotted all the flags of Worcestershire hanging above the shops - ironically celebrating a county that had, effectively, been abolished as a political unit the day before.

When I was born in Hillingdon in 1980, Middlesex had been abolished as a political entity for fifteen years. Yet it still meant a lot to my family and many others as an identity: it appeared in homes postal addresses, and in the names of institutions as diverse as cricket clubs and hospitals.

I moved to Worcester in 1988, a proud 800-year-old “faithful” city sitting at the heart of an uneasy 1974 union with Herefordshire, a merger contested all the way through to 1998, when it was abolished and the original counties restored — just before I moved back to London for university.

Fast forward to 2005, and I was standing in my first election, in Hoxton, a ward on the edge of a borough (once itself in Middlesex) created in 1965 from the historic metropolitan boroughs of Shoreditch, Stoke Newington and Hackney. I quickly picked up on a local, unresolved sense of unease, and found myself championing a Shoreditch identity that wasn't entirely mine - reacting to unresolved identities and relationships to local power from before I was even born. I worked to fix this, but there remained challenges. In recent years London boroughs have felt felt excluded from further devolution, often sitting in the shadow of the Greater London Authority.

One of the reasons these identities have ebbed and flowed, never quite reconciling or connecting to how people are governed, is that power rarely followed the boundary changes. The English state stayed centralised, and local government became steadily more residualised.

As Andy Burnham enters Downing Street today, he inherits an almost complete map of English local government reorganisation, alongside a far-from-complete map of devolution linked to an English Devolution Act that’s only just received Royal Assent, but which ultimately fell short of the “Take Back Control Bill” once promised. On everything from fiscal devolution to climate action, it didn't deliver; and for all the powers won by strategic authorities; in exchange for reorganisation, few if any of them will reach existing or emerging unitary councils. Definitely no “Devolution Blitz”; and something he will have to fix if he is to make good on that first day promise: "We will take power out of here and take it to every postcode in the land."

IPPR's verdict, published just days before Burnham entered Downing Street, was similarly double-edged: progress that is real but “incomplete,” with places empowered while the centre still dominates decision-making. Burnham has promised “the biggest rebalancing of power the country has ever seen.” IPPR's answer is that delivering on it means action on three fronts at once: growth and fiscal devolution, democratic renewal that pushes power past the mayor's office into neighbourhoods (I'd argue that at least the Town Hall would be a start), and rewiring the machinery of the state itself, from a genuine No.10 North to a written constitution that could outlast any one government.

The sector's own evidence backs this up. LGIU's tracking of the reorganisation process shows councils crying out for fiscal development, clarity, capacity and delivery support, not just headline announcements. The Institute for Government's local-government-reorganisation programme has spent this year asking the harder question of how services and boundaries actually get redrawn on the ground, while IPPR North has warned bluntly that leaving a quarter of the population still outside a mayoral strategic authority risks entrenching a two-tier England, where your access to power and funding depends on your postcode rather than your need. Far from the tools needed to deliver 'growth in every postcode'.

There are welcome signs of ambition. Reports this week that Burnham wants to share income tax revenue with mayors would be a genuine step change in fiscal devolution — the kind of assigned, growing revenue stream that IPPR has long argued is the only way devolution matures beyond deal making or Whitehall's gift. A new Harvard/King's College report, co-authored by Ed Balls, rightly pushes for a prime-minister-chaired Regional Growth Delivery Unit to force the pace across departments that have spent a decade resisting it. But none of this can stop at the strategic authority or mayor's door. Fiscal devolution that only reaches some, but not all mayoralties, while existing and new unitary councils remain reliant on competitive bidding pots simply relocates the centralisation rather than ending it.

For us at UK100, real devolution has to mean a statutory duty on climate and nature that survives changes of government, multi-year place-based funding in areas like the Warm Homes Plan, that reaches every council rather than a narrow few, and the community power - parish and neighbourhood level, not just combined-authority level - that IPPR itself says devolution has too often left behind.

If devolution and getting power out of Westminster and Whitehall is to be Burnham's North Star, then he won't just need another MHCLG-led Bill, but a wholesale different approach. That means either a chancellor and secretaries of state across Health, Education, Transport, DESNZ and DWP as true believers - all committed to upending their departments and distributing power. If not, he and his allies will need to lead from the centre and the Number 10s in both SW1 and in the North - to take them on and drive it through anyway. It must mean real power to councils as well as mayors and strategic authorities, and fast: the last Act took two years, and neither the country nor this government has the time to wait.

Because in the end, the flags above the shops in Barnard's Green aren't just nostalgia. They're what happens when identity and community outlast the institutions meant to serve them, and power never quite catches up. Real devolution isn't just a transfer of powers to a chosen few metro mayors; it's the thing that finally lets people feel that the places they belong to are theirs to shape.

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