After months of parliamentary debate, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 (‘English Devolution Act’) received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026. The Act has important implications for the relationship between central and local government and the long-running ‘English question’ in UK constitutional politics.

This post situates the Act within almost three decades of local government reform before turning to its two core ambitions of deeper devolution and community empowerment. We ask how far the spirit of ‘constitutional autonomy and partnership’ that animates the Act might be realised through its terms, and what it entails for our understanding of the broader territorial UK Constitution.

Previous Legislation

Much has happened over the last three decades to reinvigorate local democracy. Enacted in the shadow of devolution to the UK’s subnations, these largely unsung developments have enabled English cities to recover something of their former constitutional status and civic pride.

A list of relevant enactments appears below. Common features include: ‘empowering’ local authorities by ‘devolving’ more powers; creating bigger units capable of larger-scale coordination and action; a preference for streamlined local executives, especially Mayors; enhancing ‘local democracy’; and mixing political motives with economic (e.g. the ‘levelling up’ agenda) or social interests (e.g. social care, or health and well-being).

• Local Government Act 2000 (Labour): introduced new executive arrangements such as Leader and Cabinet or Mayor and Cabinet models.
• Local Government Act 2003 (Labour): strengthened financial management of local authorities.
• Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Act 2007 (Labour): aimed to strengthen local democracy inter alia by allowing for directly elected mayors to be established through a faster process.
• Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 (Labour): introduced larger-scale ‘combined authority’ or CA.
• Localism Act 2011 (Conservative/Liberal Democrat Coalition): introduced a ‘general power of competence’ granting LAs the legal power to act in the community’s interest among other community empowerment provisions.
• Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016 (Conservative): introduced directly elected mayors to CA.
• Levelling-Up and Regeneration Act 2024 (Conservative): introduced ‘combined county authority’ (CCA) on lines of CA.

The English Devolution Act builds materially on these statutes and seeks to give principled consistency to them. Emerging from the 2022 Commission on the UK’s Future led by former PM Gordon Brown, the goals of the Act, as stated in the White Paper, are to effect ‘a permanent shift of power away from the centre’ and establish ‘a principle of constitutional autonomy and partnership’ to structure central-local relations in England. The case for local devolution reform is rooted in the intuition that local networks of accountable leaders (read: directly-elected Mayors) of more efficient units (read: larger strategic authorities) encourage economic and social innovation and growth. 

Structural Reform

While it displays continuity with preceding Conservative-sponsored initiatives, the Act’s new ‘devolution priority’ approach modifies the previous system of ad hoc bargaining in which devolution deals were negotiated individually to a default framework aimed at ensuring comprehensive coverage of ‘Strategic Authorities’ across England. The term ‘Strategic Authority’ (SA) is new, but in many cases the substance is not as again the Act builds on existing mayoral combined authorities (CAs) and county combined authorities (CCAs) introduced in earlier legislation.

What is novel, as well as the ambition of full territorial coverage, is the introduction of a structured, tiered system. Three tiers of Strategic Authorities (SAs) are envisaged: Foundation, Mayoral and Established Mayoral. As authorities move up the tiers, they gain broader devolved competences and more streamlined funding arrangements. SA competences span: transport and infrastructure, skills and employment, housing and planning, economic development, environment and climate change, health and wellbeing, public safety, culture, and rural affairs and coastal communities (s.2). The Act introduces a duty on Mayors to consider impact on health and health inequalities when deciding whether and how to exercise these functions (s.45). 

The goal is to achieve coverage without heavy-handed imposition. The Bill initially envisaged a directional power vested in the Minister to establish by Order, after negotiation, a SA and/or a Mayor. The Act, as it emerged from the Lords, softens that power so that the Secretary of State can only establish or expand a SA where the local authority either proposes or consents to it (ss3&8 & Sch.1). The Secretary of State may also provide for the merger of authorities into a single tier local government (Sch.28, s.2) with the authority having freedom to choose which area should form the area for the single tier (Sch.28, s.4). Any establishment or expansion must meet a statutory test: that ‘it is appropriate to make the order in relation to the area having regard to the need to secure effective and convenient local government in relation to the areas of competence’ (Sch.1, s.16). The Act extends the general power of competence articulated in the Localism Act 2011 s.1(1) – a ‘local authority has power to do anything that individuals generally may do’ – explicitly to SAs and mayors.

A clear preference emerges for the directly elected mayor model. The White Paper was explicit that the ‘deepest powers’ will be available only at the mayoral level and above. The expectation is that authorities will progress through the tiers over time, with mayoral governance as the end goal.

The statutory framework is designed to be dynamic. Devolution may be deepened in three principal ways. First, competences may be expanded by secondary legislation, assuming they have been led or agreed to locally, whereas functions conferred through this route cannot be removed via the same mechanism. Second, SAs may pilot new, additional powers through regulations made by the Secretary of State (s.19). Third, Established Mayoral Authorities may request further powers tailored to their areas. The Act provides broad regulation-making powers to confer or modify functions and transfer associated property, rights, and liabilities (s.54 & Sch.27). The result is not merely administrative flexibility, but a structurally open-ended settlement.

Democracy and Community Empowerment

Alongside strategic reforms sits a commitment to ‘neighbourhood governance’, identified by Government guidance as one of the Act’s central objectives. The concern underpinning this commitment is that larger strategic structures might ‘delocalise’ decision-making in the sense that they are more likely to become mere proxies for national political debate. To counter this, local authorities will be required to establish effective neighbourhood governance arrangements, bringing decisions closer to residents (s.62). While the Act provides few specifics, it signals an intention to revitalise local participation – echoing the idea of ‘double devolution’, prominent in the Brown Commission Report, in which powers flow not only from the centre to regions, but also from regions to communities.

The Act does contain more concrete provisions aimed at empowering neighbourhoods. It introduces powers to impose community infrastructure levy on new developments (Sch.17), to ‘call in’ development applications of potential strategic importance (Sch.14) and to issue, revise and revoke Mayoral Development Orders (Sch.15). These powers already exist in London – the Act in effect exports the London model to SA mayors elsewhere. It also expands procedures enabling SAs to exercise a strengthened ‘community right to buy’ e.g. a pub, swimming pool or community centre (s.67) and bans upwards-only rent review clauses in commercial leases (s.100).

The Act contains significant governance and electoral reforms. On the governance side, the main goal is to replace the committee system with a Leader-and-Cabinet model (Sch.29), operated already by the vast majority of English councils. After objections in the Lords, the Act now includes a distinction between ‘protected’ and ‘not protected’ committee system councils. A committee system is protected where it became or remained the local authority’s governance arrangement either following a referendum, and the 10 year referendum protection period has not ended, or by virtue of a resolution and the 5 year protection period has not ended. Whereas ‘protected’ councils effectively have at most a 5-year stay of execution, and must conduct a ‘review’ of whether it should move to a Leader-Cabinet system within a year, ‘not protected’ councils must move to a Leader-Cabinet system within a year.

Mayoral elections, including for London, will revert to the supplementary voting system so as to ensure that mayors command broader support (first-past-the-post resulted in some mayors with a very low percentage vote share). The Act also prohibits so-called ‘double hatting’. You cannot be a Mayor and sit in the Commons or in the Senedd, Holyrood or Stormont.

Conclusion

The Act is ‘a serious constitutional reset’ but also draws attention to the devolutionary moves that have dominated central-local government relations in England for some time. It is too early to tell the extent to which the Act will realise its animating principle of ‘constitutional autonomy and partnership’ since much depends on secondary legislation and subsequent political and administrative practice. A measure of unpredictability is inherent to the Act’s open-ended design, which includes a number of avenues for bottom-up initiative, notably in its provisions to deepen SA autonomy and to trial new powers. The Act nonetheless represents a genuine attempt to enhance local power. It seeks to square a concern for autonomous regional decision-making with the desire for a more coherent and comprehensive system of English local government, and there is a perhaps inevitably a degree of messiness in the trade-offs that ensue.

In aiming to systematise English devolution, the Act looks to answer one important aspect of the ‘English question’ that has troubled constitutional politics since 1998 – whether it is possible to create robust English regional units of government, on a broadly similar scale to Scotland or Wales, which at least go with the grain of existing sentiments of regional affiliation. No-one would claim that the Act solves this question in one fell swoop. And it certainly does nothing to reconfigure the relationship between a ‘sovereign’ Parliament and the quasi-federal units of government that have emerged under its aegis. But in moving towards a universal spread of larger English units, often grounded in the bigger regional cities, it does create a framework in which more consonant arrangements might be found.

Suggested citation: T. Poole and E. De Nictolis, ‘The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026’, U.K. Const. L. Blog (19th May 2026) (available at https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/))