England has acquired a layer of government that barely existed fifteen years ago. Directly elected mayors now preside over city regions containing a majority of the country’s urban population, with budgets, transport powers and increasingly a role in skills and housing. It happened without much national drama, largely because each deal was negotiated separately and reported locally. The cumulative effect is nonetheless the most significant change to English governance in a generation.
Whether it amounts to genuine devolution or to elaborate administrative delegation is a real question, and the answer varies considerably by mayor and by policy area.
How the model was built
The original bargain was transactional. Central government offered powers and a devolved budget in exchange for accepting a directly elected mayor, a governance structure many local leaders initially resisted. Whitehall wanted a single accountable figure to negotiate with; local authorities wanted money without surrendering autonomy to a new figurehead.
The compromise produced combined authorities where the mayor chairs a cabinet of council leaders, holding some powers personally and others only with their consent. Analysis from the Local Government Association on devolution deals shows how uneven the resulting settlements are: no two are identical, which makes comparison difficult and accountability diffuse.
Transport is where mayors have real power
The clearest successes have been in transport, because it is genuinely regional, because the powers transferred were substantive, and because visible improvement is politically rewarding. Bus franchising, integrated ticketing and network branding have changed daily experience in several city regions in ways residents notice.
This matters beyond convenience. Public transport quality determines the effective size of a labour market, and labour market size drives productivity. Research collated by the Institute for Government on regional productivity connects transport connectivity to the gap between British cities and their European counterparts.
Skills devolution has been harder
Adult education budgets were among the earlier transfers, on the theory that local leaders understand local employer needs better than a national department. The logic is sound and the results have been modest, for reasons that illustrate the limits of the whole project.
Mayors received control over one funding stream while the larger streams — apprenticeships, higher education, working-age benefits conditionality — remained national. Coordinating a coherent skills strategy while holding perhaps a fifth of the relevant levers is extremely difficult. Reporting from the National Audit Office on adult skills funding describes a system where responsibility is split in ways that make outcomes hard to attribute.
The fiscal problem nobody has solved
English mayors have almost no tax power. They can add a precept to council tax and, in some cases, levy a supplement on business rates, but the overwhelming majority of their funding arrives as grant from central government, frequently in the form of competitive bidding pots.
This is the deepest weakness in the model. A mayor who cannot raise revenue cannot make genuine trade-offs, cannot borrow against future receipts with confidence, and cannot be held accountable by voters for the cost of choices. Competitive bidding compounds the problem by consuming local capacity in bid-writing and by making long-term planning contingent on Whitehall decisions. Work by the Institute for Fiscal Studies on local government finance sets out how unusual this is by international standards.
Accountability is thinner than intended
Direct election was supposed to create clear accountability. In practice turnout in mayoral elections is low, media coverage of combined authority decisions is sparse, and many residents cannot name their mayor or describe what the office controls.
Scrutiny arrangements exist but are typically staffed by councillors from constituent authorities, with limited resources and competing loyalties. The result is a body spending substantial public money with weaker external examination than either a local council or a government department receives.
What the model has genuinely achieved
Despite all this, dismissing English devolution would be a mistake. It has created a class of political leaders with a regional mandate and a public voice, capable of arguing for their area in national debate in a way that council leaders never managed. It has produced institutional capacity — transport bodies, investment vehicles, spatial plans — that persists between administrations.
It has also, quietly, changed how Whitehall behaves. Departments that once dealt with hundreds of councils now negotiate with a manageable number of regional bodies, which has made some policy delivery more coherent.
The choice ahead
The model is at a fork. One path formalises and deepens it: multi-year settlements instead of bidding pots, real fiscal powers, consistent arrangements across regions, and stronger scrutiny. The other leaves mayors as regional advocates with limited means, useful to central government as delivery partners but not genuinely autonomous.
Everything depends on whether Whitehall is willing to surrender fiscal control, which no British government has voluntarily done in modern history. Until that question is answered, English devolution will remain an unusually successful experiment in administrative reorganisation rather than a redistribution of power.
