Labour’s Devolution Priority Programme is welcome – but the government must be alert to the delivery challenges

The deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner, this week announced six areas that would be on a fast track to devolution and local government reorganisation, as part of the government’s Devolution Priority Programme (DPP). In these places – Cumbria, Cheshire, Essex, Hampshire, East Anglia and Sussex – new metro mayors and combined authorities are due to take on devolved powers in May 2026, and two-tier local government will be replaced by a single tier of unitary authorities. 

The DPP is a meaningful step toward ‘completing the map’ of devolution  

This announcement is welcome news and represents an important down-payment on Labour’s promise to complete the map of English devolution, as the IfG has long called for. Extending devolution to the country’s “devolution deserts” will ensure that local leaders in all parts of England have control of policy levers such as transport, housing and skills budgets, all of which the government hopes will help drive growth. 

The six areas listed in the DPP represent almost a sixth of England’s population (15%). Establishing new mayoral strategic authorities in all these places – as well as in  Lancashire, as is also planned – will take the proportion of England’s population covered by mayoral devolution to almost 70%. 

These deals will complete devolution to the north of England – a declared priority for ministers – and extend it to several of the remaining big urban areas left out so far, including Portsmouth, Southampton, Southend and Brighton. This announcement also covers several major international ports, including Felixstowe, Harwich and the Solent area.   

There are some gaps in the DPP, including some large urban areas 

The Midlands and South West have been somewhat left out, however. In A New Deal for England we called for extension of devolution to the largest 25 urban areas and  identified 12 urban areas to prioritise. Eight of our list are missing from the announcement due to a lack of local agreement on a workable geography for a new strategic authority: Leicester, Northampton, Bournemouth, Stoke, Reading, Milton Keynes, Plymouth and Luton. 

Past experience also shows that devolution negotiations quite frequently fall apart due to local disagreements as the process unfolds. There have been several previous attempts, for instance, to extend devolution to Hampshire and East Anglia, but local rivalries and opposition to the mayoral model have delayed progress.  

Until the government legislates to change how devolution deals progress – bringing forth a new ‘ministerial directive’ power that can compel areas to join together, as ministers plan – new combined authorities can only be set up with the unanimous support of all upper-tier (county and unitary) authorities. So government will have to keep its eye on the ball and maintain the right balance of carrots and sticks to get this ambitious set of agreements over the line, in time for the planned mayoral elections in May 2026. 

Local government reorganisation adds additional complexity to the process 

At the same time, most of the areas on the DPP will also be undergoing local government reorganisation (LGR). The English devolution white paper boldly states that “we are clear that reorganisation should not delay devolution and plans for both should be complementary” – but unless government provides sufficient support to places then this promise could turn out to be wishful thinking.  

LGR in itself is a major structural undertaking that will require the investment of significant resources, time and political capital to get right. Such reform can be complex, time consuming and challenging as local leaders continue to deliver business as usual services, transform service provision and establish new councils. 

In addition to helping to steer new devolution agreements around local political obstacles, Whitehall should support local areas with additional capacity – for instance through secondments from the centre – to enable places to get through these two challenging change processes. 

Delaying local elections has upped the stakes 

To free up local capacity for these big changes processes, ministers have delayed elections in eight council areas on the DPP, plus one county (Surrey) that will first reorganise before then making a bid for devolution. The rationaleis that there is little point holding elections for institutions that will soon cease to exist. There is also precedent for this: the scheduled county council elections were cancelled in both Cumbria and North Yorkshire in 2021 shortly before those councils were replaced by new unitary authorities. 

However, this decision has inevitably sparked controversy, given the large number of areas affected. The government has rightly said that there must be an “extremely high” bar for the cancellation of any elections, and indeed it agreed to only half of the requests to delay elections that it received. Nonetheless, given the decision to deprive nearly six million voters of the right to vote this May, it is incumbent on the government to ensure that it now proceeds with both devolution and LGR on the planned timetable, so that elections do not turn out to have been cancelled for no good reason.