The Promise Written in Small Print
In May 2023, Andy Burnham stood outside Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall and declared Greater Manchester’s new integrated transport and public service powers a “historic moment” for English democracy. He was not entirely wrong. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority now oversees a budget exceeding £3 billion, controls a unified transport system under the Bee Network brand, and has formal input into housing, skills, and health integration — powers that most English local authorities can only dream of.
But ask the people who live in the communities Burnham governs whether they feel meaningfully empowered, and the picture blurs. Bus fares remain expensive by European standards. Homelessness has worsened. And critically, on the questions that most directly affect daily life — welfare, most taxation, core NHS funding — decisions are still made in Whitehall, by ministers accountable to a national parliament, applying national priorities to deeply local problems.
This is devolution in practice: a genuine shift of authority in some areas, hedged by conditions, constrained by finance, and often accompanied by accountability mechanisms that report back upward rather than outward to citizens. Understanding what devolution actually delivers — and what it conspicuously does not — requires moving beyond the political branding and into the architecture of power itself.
Devolution Is Not a Single Thing
One of the most persistent sources of confusion in any discussion of devolution is the assumption that it describes a uniform condition. It does not. Devolution in the United Kingdom exists on a spectrum, and the distance between its endpoints is enormous.
At one end sits Scotland, which since 1999 has had a parliament with primary legislative powers in areas including health, education, justice, and some taxation. The Scottish Parliament can set income tax rates and bands for Scottish residents — and has done so, diverging from UK-wide rates — and can borrow for capital investment. It legislates, rather than merely administers. Wales has similar but somewhat more constrained legislative competence through the Senedd, and Northern Ireland’s Assembly, when operational, holds devolved powers over policing and justice in addition to core public services.
At the other end sits England — or more precisely, most of England. Outside London, which has had an elected mayor and assembly since 2000, English local government traditionally operated under a doctrine of ultra vires: councils could only do what Parliament explicitly permitted them to do. The Localism Act 2011 introduced a “general power of competence,” theoretically allowing councils to act in the interests of their area without specific statutory permission. In practice, this power has been used far less transformatively than its advocates hoped.
Between these poles lie the English combined authorities — the tier created by the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016 — which have become the primary vehicle for what the government brands as English devolution. There are now twelve such authorities, from Greater Manchester and the West Midlands to the North East and South Yorkshire, each with an elected mayor and a negotiated “devolution deal” setting out their specific powers. The crucial word here is negotiated: devolution in England is not a constitutional right but a bilateral agreement between central government and a local area, granted on terms that Westminster controls and can, in principle, revise.
What the Deals Actually Contain
Devolution deals have grown more substantive over successive waves of negotiation, but it is worth being precise about their contents. The powers typically included fall into several categories, and the gap between the categories matters enormously.
Strategic planning and transport form the most consistent element of deals. Metro mayors generally have powers to produce spatial development strategies, take decisions on major planning applications, and — in areas like Greater Manchester and London — control over bus franchising that allows them to specify routes, frequencies, and fares rather than simply leaving services to market operators. This is real and meaningful. Research by the Centre for Cities think tank found that integrated transport governance correlates with higher public transport usage and investment efficiency, and Manchester’s Bee Network, which brought bus services under public control in 2023 following a model used in London for decades, is early evidence of what structural change can achieve.
Skills and employment feature in most deals, with mayors able to direct adult education funding toward local economic priorities. Greater Manchester, for instance, has used this to fund courses aligned with its digital and creative sectors. But the amounts involved are modest relative to need: the adult education budget devolved to Greater Manchester amounts to roughly £130 million per year — significant locally, but a fraction of what a genuinely autonomous regional government would control.
Housing and regeneration powers allow mayors to establish mayoral development corporations, take stakes in housing developments, and in some cases use compulsory purchase powers more flexibly. Again, the theory is sound, but the practice is circumscribed by the absence of meaningful fiscal tools. A mayor who cannot raise significant local taxation, and who depends on competitive bidding to central government for capital investment, is a mayor whose housing ambitions are conditional on Whitehall’s approval of their plans.
Health integration represents the newest and most contested frontier. Integrated Care Systems, introduced through the Health and Social Care Act 2022, are not the same as devolved health powers — they are NHS governance structures, not local government ones — but in some areas they are being piloted in closer alignment with mayoral authority. Greater Manchester has the most developed model, with a health devolution agreement dating to 2015. The results are mixed: there has been genuine integration of adult social care and NHS commissioning, but the pandemic exposed how quickly national direction reasserts itself over local health governance when central government perceives a crisis.
What is absent from almost all deals is as instructive as what is present. Control over welfare and social security — the policy lever with arguably the greatest impact on poverty and deprivation — remains entirely national. Core NHS funding follows national allocation formulas. Schools are largely governed through a national framework, with the academisation programme having actually recentralised some educational governance by transferring accountability from local authorities to the Department for Education. And crucially, the fiscal base: local government in England raises roughly 17% of the total public spending it is responsible for, compared to around 47% in Germany and 60% in the Nordic countries. The rest comes from central grants and ringfenced allocations, meaning that local leaders are, in structural terms, implementing agencies with branding rights.
The Fiscal Trap: Responsibility Without Revenue
If there is a single structural fact that most clearly defines the limits of English devolution, it is the relationship between expenditure responsibility and revenue authority. English councils and combined authorities have been handed responsibilities for managing public services through a period of severe fiscal constraint, without meaningful power to raise the revenue required to discharge those responsibilities adequately.
Between 2009 and 2019, core central government funding to local authorities in England fell by nearly 60% in real terms, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Councils responded by raising council tax, cutting discretionary services, and — in a growing number of cases — issuing Section 114 notices, the local government equivalent of bankruptcy. Birmingham City Council issued the largest such notice in UK history in September 2023, listing liabilities of at least £760 million. Nottingham, Woking, Slough, and Thurrock had issued similar notices in preceding years. These were not failures of local management alone; they were the predictable consequence of a funding model that was never designed to accommodate the combination of demand growth, inflation, and grant cuts that characterised the 2010s.
Devolution deals do not, in most cases, address this structural imbalance. They layer new responsibilities on top of an already strained system without providing the fiscal tools — land value capture, local income tax supplements, business rate retention — that would allow local leaders to generate sustainable revenue. The Institute for Government has repeatedly noted that “fiscal devolution,” as opposed to administrative devolution, remains underdeveloped in England. A 2022 report by the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee concluded that “the current system of local government finance is unsustainable” and that further devolution without fiscal reform risked “setting up local leaders to fail.”
There are exceptions. The Greater London Authority can raise supplementary business rate levies, and the devolution deals for the “trailblazer” authorities — Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, which negotiated enhanced deals in 2023 — include provisions for consolidated funding settlements and, potentially, greater flexibility over how money is spent. But these remain pilots, not a systemic change to the fiscal constitution.
The Democratic Accountability Question
Proponents of mayoral devolution often emphasise the accountability benefits: a single elected figure, with a clear mandate and a defined geography, who can be held responsible for the performance of public services. This is a genuine improvement on the fragmented, invisible accountability of pre-devolution regional governance, where decisions were made by quangos, government offices, and appointed boards with little public visibility.
But the model raises its own accountability questions. Metro mayors are elected by large, diverse populations — Greater Manchester covers 2.8 million people — using a preferential voting system that, in practice, has tended to return Labour candidates in Labour-leaning conurbations and Conservative candidates elsewhere. The concentration of power in a single executive figure, with a combined authority board of council leaders serving as the main check, has prompted concerns about democratic quality. Scrutiny committees exist on paper but are often under-resourced and relatively toothless compared to those in more mature devolved systems.
There is also the question of areas left outside the combined authority model. Large parts of rural and coastal England have no elected mayor and no devolution deal. The residents of Norfolk, Lincolnshire, or coastal towns in the South West are governed through a patchwork of district and county councils, with no single voice capable of negotiating for strategic investment. The government’s response has been to encourage county deals and broader structural reorganisation, but progress has been slow and contested, with some areas resisting amalgamation for reasons of local identity and democratic preference as much as administrative logic.
Critics on the left argue that the mayoral model risks creating a form of competitive localism — cities and regions bidding against each other for national investment rather than receiving it as a right — that entrenches geographic inequality rather than addressing it. The now-abandoned Levelling Up Fund required local authorities to compete in bidding rounds for infrastructure investment, a process that academics including those at Sheffield Hallam University found allocated funds without clear correlation to objective measures of deprivation.
What Genuine Devolution Would Require
To move from the current model of conditional administrative devolution toward something approaching genuine regional autonomy — the kind seen in Germany’s Länder, Spain’s autonomous communities, or even Scotland — would require changes on multiple fronts that no UK government has yet shown willingness to make.
First, a codified or at minimum clearly articulated constitutional basis for local and regional government, replacing the current doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty that makes every devolution settlement contingent and reversible. The Scottish Parliament’s powers have been protected by political convention and the democratic weight of Scottish public opinion, not by enforceable constitutional guarantee. English metro mayors have even weaker protection.
Second, fiscal reform that provides local governments with meaningful revenue-raising powers and a larger share of nationally collected taxes assigned to regional use. The Mirrlees Review of taxation and a series of subsequent academic analyses have outlined workable models for greater fiscal decentralisation, but they require political will to confront the Treasury’s institutional preference for centralised control.
Third, clarity about the purpose of devolution. Is it primarily an economic tool — a way to drive growth by tailoring policy to local conditions? Or is it a democratic project, designed to bring decision-making closer to the people it affects? These purposes are compatible but not identical, and conflating them produces policies that serve neither well. The “levelling up” framing of recent years emphasised economic outcomes, which allowed central government to retain control over the definition of success. A genuinely democratic framing would require trusting local communities to make different choices from those a national government would make — including, occasionally, choices that produce different outcomes in different places.
Looking Forward: The Devolution Momentum and Its Limits
The trajectory of English devolution is broadly toward more, not less. The Labour government elected in July 2024 has committed to an “era of devolution” and proposed an English Devolution Bill that would introduce a right to devolution for areas willing to establish appropriate governance structures, reducing the bilateral negotiation model that has characterised deals to date. The party’s stated ambition to move toward county-level deals as a floor, rather than a ceiling, of local empowerment suggests an intention to broaden the geographic scope of devolved governance.
Whether this represents a genuine constitutional shift or an administrative reorganisation with ambitious rhetoric will depend on the fiscal and legislative choices that accompany it. The history of English devolution is replete with moments that were described as transformative and proved, in practice, to be incremental. The 2011 Localism Act was going to unleash community power; the 2015 Cities and Local Government Devolution Act was going to create English powerhouses; successive Levelling Up announcements were going to rebalance the country’s economic geography. Each contained real elements of change. None delivered the structural redistribution of power that their language implied.
Andy Burnham is genuinely more powerful than his predecessors as leader of Greater Manchester. But he remains constrained by a fiscal settlement he did not set, welfare policies he cannot alter, and an NHS structure that national government can override whenever it chooses. The question devolution has not yet answered — and that English politics will have to confront if it is serious about the project — is whether the centre is willing to genuinely lose control, or whether it intends merely to redistribute the management of its own priorities to local addresses.
The distinction matters. One is devolution. The other is outsourcing.