Rewiring the state to break the revolving door: Revolving Doors, devolution and learning from Greater Manchester
We are spending billions picking people up after they fall instead of stopping them falling in the first place. People caught in the revolving door bounce between police, prisons, hospitals, homelessness and drug services, with nobody responsible for the whole picture. Greater Manchester is testing a different approach, make the system work around the person, share responsibility and tackle the problem before the next crime or crisis.
The cost of a fragmented state
The 30,000–50,000 people caught in the revolving door are not the responsibility of any single department. They repeatedly interact with policing, courts, probation, prisons, A&E, mental health, substance use, homelessness, housing and welfare services. The £5.2 billion cost of this cohort is therefore not simply a justice problem. Even the biggest crime-related staff cost does not fall on the justice system, it falls on the NHS,£101m annually in staff cost). And this is without counting the wider health costs of a group experiencing high health inequality.
This is the cost of a fragmented state. Despite the costs falling across agencies, time and time again what we see is the failure of those agencies to work together. The result of this is that all the interactions and interventions result in failure, at heavy financial cost to the state and personal cost to the individual. And as we have long argued, the cycles of crisis and crime in which they are trapped represent much more than a justice challenge – they need to be treated as a whole-system issue, with whole-system solutions.
Greater Manchester: a testbed for change
Since July 2025, Revolving Doors has been working with Greater Manchester Combined Authority and local partners to develop a Whole System Approach to Diversion (WSA2D).
Bringing together criminal justice agencies, local government, health and support services, voluntary and community organisations and people with lived experience, WSA2D aims to develop more preventative responses to the revolving door cohort in the community, in court and in prison.
Its central principle is that the system should adapt around the person, rather than expecting an individual experiencing multiple disadvantage to navigate several different systems alone. Rather than a conventional pathway into commissioned services, it has developed into a more relational model, including peer-led support, local recovery communities and grassroots organisations.
This flexibility is key, testing whether services which retain different statutory duties, budgets and accountabilities can nevertheless begin to share responsibility for the same people and outcomes.
Devolution must flow through the system
The government has committed to rewiring the state, devolving power and rebuilding public services around people and place. The revolving door should be one of the first tests of whether that ambition can be translated into practice.
Here, Greater Manchester’s Whole System Approach to Diversion provides an important opportunity for such a test. Its significance lies not in providing a model that can simply be replicated elsewhere, but in testing a different relationship between national government, strategic authorities, local systems, communities and people with lived experience.
If that approach can enable services to share responsibility, intervene earlier and address the causes of repeated crisis and offending rather than continually paying for their consequences, it will offer an important lesson not only for criminal justice reform, but for what a genuinely rewired state looks like in practice.
