Burnham says devolution plan makes case for written constitution

Andy Burnham has argued that the government's devolution plans strengthen the case for a written UK constitution. The Guardian and the Financial Times both report the claim, made as Greater Manchester's powers expand under the new settlement.

Burnham's reasoning appears to be that as power disperses - more mayors, more regions, more overlapping competencies - the country needs a single text that says who does what. The argument has a logic: devolution creates new actors and new boundaries, and the constitution is currently a patchwork of statutes, conventions and case law that lives in no one place. A written document would, in theory, clarify.

But the British constitution is unwritten by design, not accident. It evolved that way precisely because no Parliament can bind its successors - the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty means any written constitution could be amended by a simple majority the day after it was passed. The flexibility is the point. A written text would either be decorative, or it would require entrenchment - a higher threshold for amendment - which would mean Parliament is no longer sovereign. That is not a technical question. It is the question.

What to watch: whether the devolution settlement produces enough confusion or conflict between tiers of government to make the case for codification harder to dismiss. The test will be whether the current arrangements prove workable, or whether they generate the kind of boundary disputes that make people reach for a rulebook.