Hello, my name is David Runseman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're going to try and pull together the threads of our series about the future of the union.

By talking about how devolved government looks from the centre, from Westminster.

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Joining Helen Mead's day is a pleasure to welcome back Mike Kenny, Professor of Public Policy and Mike is the co-author of a new report that's been getting a lot of coverage called Union at the Crossroads and it is precisely about this question.

Since devolution since 1999, as seen from Westminster, the government of the UK hasn't made a lot of sense. I think Mike is fair to say your report concludes there isn't a lot of coherence in the history of the last 20 years of UK governance.

But there's also been new developments all the time over that period but particularly in the last few years.

Should we try and frame it historically and then come to the present? I mean we're talking recent history here at the last 20 and a bit years.

One of the things that you identify in the report is that the original settlement, it's called a settlement but there was nothing settled about it.

Welsh and Scottish, devolution and then Northern Irish, devolution as part of that.

There was almost no thought given to how it would work. Is that fair? As seen from a UK perspective, not in the devolved administrations but from a UK perspective, there's a history of people not thinking about it.

I think there are a number of different features of the devolution reforms which do lend them to help to a sense at the centre that really things can carry on as they were.

Which sounds paradoxical because I mean these are clearly very significant and quite momentous reforms for the governance of Scotland Wales and then by a different kind of process in Northern Ireland.

But I think some of the ways in which those reforms are introduced reinforced a sort of enduring quite deeply rooted sense in Whitehall and Westminster that these sort of territorial issues were somehow marginal to the concerns of the state.

So I think two things I pick up on. I mean one is that if you think about the process of devolution, I mean what really happens in Scotland and Wales particularly is the legislative institutions, new institutions are created.

And they are grafted onto an existing system of administrative devolution because the affairs, many of the issues relating to Scotland, Wales were previously managed through the territorial departments of state, through the Scottish office and through the Welsh office.

And so devolution extends that process and it changes it by bringing the legislative institutions into play.

But still the senses for the rest of the state, well you know these issues are managed elsewhere.

And the other thing I think about the way in which these reforms happen is that particularly in the Scottish case, the passing powers, responsibilities wholesale for things like health and education in quite a clearly demarcated way,

does also lend its up to the idea, well those new institutions are going to run those things. We here at the centre, we retain responsibilities for what are called the reserved competencies, those are issues of statewide concern.

And the idea that there's a sort of clear demarcation between those is quite important because I think it means that the model doesn't have a sense of partnership built into it.

It really is pushing powers away to other authorities. And so this idea that actually things can carry on as they were, and that we can devolve and then rather forget about it, that I think is enabled by those features of the reforms.

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