Sussex at a turning point: why devolution will succeed or fail on delivery, trust and good jobs

Sussex is on the brink of its biggest political and economic shift in a generation. A mayoral combined authority, and newly calibrated unitary councils, promise scale, clout and long-term thinking. But if that still feels abstract, it’s because it often is.

For businesses, the real question isn’t whether devolution is a “good idea”, but whether it will finally remove the everyday barriers that stop the county turning talent, ideas and investment into sustained growth.

Recent expert blogs for the Sussex And The City project converge on a consistent message: structure matters less than behaviour, and delivery matters more than vision statements.

Sarah Willcox, organisational change expert and founder of Sussex-based consultancy Fairisle, argues that the biggest risk is pretending this transition will be neat. Sussex is not stopping the clock while it reorganises. Councils, public services and partners will be asked to keep delivering while simultaneously redesigning themselves. That is hard, messy work. The danger isn’t disagreement (that’s inevitable) but avoiding it, or dressing uncertainty up as certainty.

For business leaders, this matters because uncertainty kills momentum. Willcox’s emphasis is on the need for clear roles, shared language and honest conversations. Regions that manage change well invest early in clarity and cadence: what is fixed, what is still being shaped, and how decisions will be revisited. A mayor who can run today’s services while openly testing tomorrow’s arrangements will create confidence even before outcomes are fully visible.

Economic delivery is the second fault line. Chirantan Chatterjee, Professor of Development Economics, Innovation and Global Health at the University of Sussex Business School, is blunt about Sussex’s long-standing problem: the county is excellent at generating ideas but less effective at keeping the value local. World-class research, creative talent and global infrastructure exist here, yet too much growth leaks elsewhere.

Professor Chatterjee frames Sussex’s opportunity as a systems challenge, not a branding exercise. Universities, NHS Sussex, Gatwick, offshore wind and the creative economy already act as anchor institutions. The missing piece is coordination: affordable grow-on space, early customers for innovation, smarter procurement and capital that supports scale rather than exit. For firms, success looks less like another strategy and more like contracts landing locally, supply chains sticking, and apprenticeships aligned to real demand.

Crucially, this does not require Sussex to abandon its identity. Brighton’s values – openness, creativity, inclusion and a healthy suspicion of top-down schemes – are an economic advantage, not a constraint. Growth that ignores them will fail. Growth designed around them can succeed.

The third strand is trust, and this is where delivery becomes political. Michael Wang, immigration lawyer, founder of a Sussex-based practice and former shortlisted candidate for the Liberal Democrat Sussex mayoral nomination, argues that devolution will be judged quickly and harshly. People will not measure success by governance diagrams or mission statements, but by whether anything changes within a year.

Housing, in particular, sits at the centre of the economic debate. Affordability is no longer a social issue parked somewhere else; it affects recruitment, retention and spending power across the county. Fragmented planning, misaligned skills funding and opaque decision-making are not abstract governance problems — they are constraints on growth.

Wang’s challenge is that if a mayor cannot explain choices in plain English, publish progress openly and show how trade-offs are being made, trust will drain away fast. For businesses, transparency matters as much as incentives. Confidence grows when firms can see where homes will go, how transport will support them, and how skills investment lines up with demand.

Across all three perspectives, one theme dominates: trust is built through visible delivery. Not perfection, not unanimity, but progress people can see and understand. Publishing data, admitting when things slip, and showing working rather than spinning outcomes.

Sussex’s strength has always been its diversity: coastal towns, creative cities, market villages and global gateways. Devolution should not smooth that out. The prize is coordination without conformity: clusters that collaborate, infrastructure that lines up, and leadership that convenes rather than commands.

For business leaders, the message is clear. Engage early. Push for clarity. Back delivery over rhetoric. If Sussex can learn to talk better, decide better and deliver while it learns, this moment could finally translate into firms that scale locally, talent that stays, and an economy that feels joined-up rather than jammed.

It won’t be tidy. It doesn’t need to be. But it does need to be real.

To read all of these blogs in full, and many more, visit sussexandthecity.info