The English devolution bill marks a major shift in how England is governed, creating a clearer, more consistent framework for mayoral authorities and expanding local powers—though concerns over accountability and neighbourhood representation persist. Alex Walker explores this big moment for the governance of England.
The government has had a bruising year to date. Reform UK dominated the local elections in May 2025, the immediate economic picture has been lacklustre, and backbench Labour MPs have forced a change of direction on planned cuts to public spending. Unsurprisingly, the political spotlight has been largely trained on these travails – but away from the glare the government has been ploughing on with the reforms it hopes will change its fortunes. These include big changes to the planning system; the roll out of ‘innovation squads’ working directly with frontline workers and communities to devise new approaches to local problems; and the introduction of a hefty English devolution bill earlier this month. Despite concerns from some quarters about the prospect of more Reform mayors, the bill confirmed that this is a government that remains committed to changing the way England is governed.
The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill seeks to standardise and make more coherent the pre-existing combined authority model, and includes a suite of powers which ‘strategic authorities’ – to use the new overarching legal category – will be able to access by default. What started out as a series of bespoke devolution ‘deals’ negotiated primarily with northern city regions, has been tidied into a comprehensive framework consisting of three levels of strategic authority (foundation, mayoral and established). Placing this framework in primary legislation will put English devolution on a firmer constitutional footing and make it harder to reverse. There are no big provisions in the bill that were not trailed in the white paper that was published at the end of last year, but this does not make it any less significant. Six new mayoral strategic authorities and one new mayor are due to come on stream next year, which will mean around 70% of England’s population is covered by mayoral devolution, with the government hoping to come close to a complete map within the next five years.
The bill brings clarity around the powers of strategic authorities, establishing in law seven main areas of competency. While most of these responsibilities reflect the conception of combined authorities as growth and regeneration-focused (transport, infrastructure, housing, planning, economic development), others go beyond this, such as duties and powers related to health, public service reform and employment support. While some combined authorities have already taken on more of a role in relation to public services – including through several innovative prevention-focused programmes – the legislation formalises this dimension of their purpose across the board.
The legislation also strengthens the power of the strategic authority mayor – where previously consensus among the constituent councils was needed for most decisions, this has been replaced with majority voting as the standard decision-making procedure. It has been widely acknowledged that as powers and responsibilities increase, local accountability and scrutiny also needs to be strengthened. Accountability for combined authorities has been mostly upward-facing – with requirements for extensive reporting to central government departments – while local overview and scrutiny committees have been under-powered and under-resourced. Various different proposals have been made for how to improve these arrangements, including a recent report from The Productivity Institute proposing a dedicated funding stream, staffing and, in some cases, directly elected scrutiny committees. The white paper acknowledged the issue but didn’t settle on any particular changes – a situation which remains largely unchanged by the bill.
Despite the elements of executive strengthening, the mayoral role remains one that is in many ways about ‘soft power’ and collaboration: convening various different local stakeholders, building support among constituent authorities, advocating for the area on the national stage and liaising with central government. Recognising this, it provides for a ‘power to convene’ and allows for mayors to formally issue requests to collaborate with other mayors and a duty on them to respond. However, while the white paper indicated various areas in which strategic authorities would work jointly with government agencies and departments, the bill does not provide much in the way of further detail. As a recent report highlighted, any revised accountability model would need to reflect the essentially relational nature of much of what strategic authorities are about, rather than seeing them as typical delivery bodies.
Questions remain too on the potential gap being opened up by the abolition of district councils. The government needs to be careful about using the rhetoric of community empowerment while getting rid of one of the most local layers of government. The plan appears to be to fill this gap with enhanced neighbourhood governance (as well as funding via the Plan for Neighbourhoods) and the bill contains a requirement for all local authorities in England to establish ‘effective neighbourhood governance’. But, again, the details are somewhat scant, with the substance to follow via regulations after the bill is in force. Nonetheless, this has opened up a useful debate on what sort of neighbourhood governance model might work best, and what this could mean for existing structures like parish and town councils and neighbourhood boards.
As new mayors are elected, they will no doubt borrow from existing practice but also look to adopt new approaches reflecting different priorities. Despite being well-established in some areas, as a wider model of governance English devolution is in many ways still in its infancy. How exactly new political actors and institutions will interact with each other and the existing components of the landscape remains to be seen. But it may not necessarily be in the ways we expect. For example, Reform’s new mayor for Hull, Luke Campbell, is participating in a cross-party partnership along with other northern mayors focused in part on green energy investment, despite his party’s vocal hostility towards net zero. “Place first” is a mantra used by many of the current mayors, who often operate at some distance from their national parties.
Yet the English devolution agenda appears to be one area where there is a genuine cross-party consensus. Labour has resisted the urge to start again from scratch, opting instead to build on the model they inherited. While Reform may attack supposed wastefulness, the party has thus far not called for the abolition of this new tier of governance. Given the churn in regional policy initiatives over the years, this offers the promise – although not the guarantee – of some longer-term stability.
Another area of continuity has been around the justification for English devolution, which at central government level has focused primarily on economic growth. However, as James Hickson and Jack Newman have recently highlighted this has co-existed – rhetorically at least – with the deployment of other rationales more focused on enhancing democracy and overcoming centralisation. But these justifications have had less of an impact on the practical design of devolution. They warn that this could, in time, erode trust in the project if the economic benefits claimed for it – perhaps due to outside factors – fail to materialise. More needs to be done, they argue, to ensure the promise of community empowerment is not empty rhetoric by, for example, building more of a sense of local ownership of devolution and proactive efforts to enhance democratic engagement.
The measures giving communities the right to buy local assets of public value and on neighbourhood-level governance are positive starting points. But as English devolution continues to expand beyond core city regions, now may be a good time to pay closer attention to these other parts of the picture – which may in turn help to secure the longevity of these new institutions.
Image: The Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner launches the English Devolution White Paper with English metro mayors. Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, OGL 3 http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3, via Wikimedia Commons
The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy.
