Apart from the joyous hyperactivity that comes with suddenly making it to No 10, there are good reasons why Andy Burnham seems to be a prime minister in a hurry. If he decides that his first term is going to run to its maximum length, he has three years, which is a maddening time-frame: too long for him to just tinker here and there, set out his long-term vision and then ask the electorate for permission to do more, but probably too short to start and finish many of his key projects. His chosen solution, it seems, is a mixture of the strategies he would use for each approach, which includes running at some issues at breakneck pace.
So it is with his specialist subject: devolution for England. The huge changes now afoot actually began under Keir Starmer, with the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act passed earlier this year. Areas that previously had two tiers of local government will see them replaced with new unitary councils. But the most historic move centres on regional mayors – what the government calls “strategic authorities” – and a shift that the Whitehall PR machine is hyping up as a “fundamental rewiring of the way our country works, surrendering power that for too long has been held in Westminster and Whitehall”. In principle, this is unquestionably worth celebrating. But it also gives rise to a whole range of increasingly urgent and awkward questions.
One change became clear earlier this year, and now looks like it will be turbocharged. By April 2027, regional and metro mayors will be able to keep as-yet-unspecified quantities of the business rates generated in their areas, and from the following year onwards, they will retain a share – also yet to be announced, presumably because the Treasury and No 10 North are wrestling with it – of local income taxreceipts.
These revenue streams will replace existing Whitehall grants rather than being additional money. But Burnham’s announcements have, among the more established and confident mayors, triggered visions of even greater liberation from Westminster and Whitehall, and possible command of schools, GP services, childcare and much more. There are also welcome predictions of loans being taken out against mayoral authorities’ projected income to fund long-overdue projects, most promisingly in housing and public transport.
England’s 14 regional and metro mayors are right to see a growing opportunity for a civic political renaissance. Burnham and his people are equally correct in their conviction that improving public services and infrastructure, and firing up growth, demands a leading role for these mayors. But whatever the PM’s insistence that he intends to foster “good growth in every postcode”, the core of the vision is undeniably city-based. As the London School of Economics’ local government expert Tony Travers told me last week: “The whole idea of this version of economic change, which is very embedded, is that the only way to make the economies of city regions work is by letting the central part of the city develop fast, and hope that people will commute in and out to take advantage of it.”
And at that point, we should pause for thought. I write this from Somerset, which sits just outside the West of England mayoral combined authority (containing Bristol, South Gloucestershire, and Bath and North East Somerset) and therefore has no regional leader, nor yet plays any part in a strategic authority. Together with its neighbouring county of Wiltshire, it contains the sort of places that almost no one talks about: towns ringed by countryside or on the coast – Melksham, Bridgwater, Calne, Minehead, Trowbridge – that have experienced serious decline, and have been denied a voice for far too long.
Too many places, in fact, are now years behind parts of the country whose devolution journeys began a long time ago. The best thing to be by far is an established mayoral strategic authority – which, according to a House of Commons library briefing, qualify for the widest range of powers and integrated multi-year funding settlements, and include Greater London, Greater Manchester, the Liverpool city region, the West Midlands and such recently elevated territories as Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and the aforementioned West of England.
A second tier is reserved for such “mayoral strategic authorities” as Tees Valley, Greater Lincolnshire – led by Reform UK’s Andrea Jenkyns – and Hull and East Yorkshire, which have to wait at least 18 months after their foundation to join the top rank, and have more restricted or ringfenced funding. They will probably soon include areas that the government is still in the arduous process of getting on board, including Kent and Medway, and “Wessex”: a giant territory that will include Wiltshire, Dorset, Bournemouth and – oh joy! – Somerset. And beneath them, you find foundation authorities such as Lancashire and Devon and Torbay, which have no elected mayor yet and are run by local politicians.
When we spoke, Travers asked me a rhetorical question: “What happens to all the places that are not in high-performing areas that can build up their tax base?” We do not really know the answer yet, because so many of those areas are barely on the first devolutionary rung. Stoke-on-Trent, for instance, which needs every shred of help and local empowerment it can get, only took its first steps to joining a foundation authority in March this year. Cornwall, to which the same applies in spades, finally agreed to become a single-foundation authority at the end of last month. The story of devolution up to now, all told, is replete with delays and procrastination: in late 2025, for instance, the Starmer government postponed mayoral elections in Greater Essex, Sussex and Brighton, Hampshire and the Solent, and Norfolk and Suffolk from 2026 until 2028.
And then everything changed. On 31 July, the new government put out a statement titled Re-wiring The State, setting out its ambition to make central government “smaller and more strategic” and “to ensure every area in England has, or is in the process of establishing, a strategic authority by the end of 2027, with strategic authorities in place everywhere by the end of 2028”. Given that most councils and public services are hopelessly cash-strapped and overburdened, that is a remarkable timetable, particularly in the midst of other devolution headaches. The weekend brought news that plans for new, larger police forces are being delayed because their proposed boundaries don’t match up with those of some mayoral authorities. The reports also mentioned the PM’s unwieldy-looking proposals for reconfigured fire and rescue services and integrated care boards to fit with devolution areas in the same way: there are slight shades of lines and shapes being drawn on maps, and messy reality being hurriedly squeezed into them.
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There is another potential problem: the whole programme threatens a system with not nearly enough accountability. Even if an elected mayor is in place – and remember, some of them will probably be from Reform, with all that may entail – proper scrutiny will be in short supply. The only area with an elected assembly that can properly monitor the mayor will still be London: the rest will have “scrutiny committees” that do not sound very convincing at all.
Note also a plain fact about those established, pre-eminent mayoral strategic authorities: most of them are in the north of England and the Midlands, which might avenge years of southern dominance, but seems to threaten answering one story of unfairness with another. As a resident of the south-west, I know we have an immense amount to contribute to the devolution drive, which needs to feed ideas upwards to Whitehall as well as down from central government to the social grassroots. If the past 15 years have taught us anything, it is that the worst thing to be, politically speaking, is left behind: as fast as he and his senior mayoral mates move, Burnham has to be sure that speed and zeal do not have very damaging consequences, and that he takes absolutely all of us with him.
