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We are well on with deepening and widening devolution in England, and this week we presented the largest single package of mayoral devolution to date.
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Iβm delighted that the work already underway in Lancashire before the devolution priority programme was established, and with the new additions of Cumbria and Cheshire and Warrington, it will mean that the whole of the North of England will be covered by mayoral devolution once completed.
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They join Greater Essex, East Anglia with Norfolk and Suffolk, Hampshire and the Solent, and Sussex and Brighton, with mayoral elections planned for May 2026. Surrey will undergo local government reorganisation to unlock devolution.
Those in two tier areas in this new devolution priority programme will have elections postponed, as has been the case in previous rounds of local government reorganisation where the existing council will cease to exist, before electing to new shadow authorities once proposals are agreed. The bar for this unlocking devolution was rightly high, meaning not all of the applications were approved.
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Taken with new mayoral devolution agreements in Hull and East Yorkshire and Greater Lincolnshire which go to the polls to elect mayors in May this year, and foundation agreements in counties across the country, it shows the ambition to hit the ground running.
The work of local leaders to forge agreement has been significant and it is credit to them across political parties which reflects a shared ambition to break from the centralising culture in politics which hoards power and opportunity.
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The programme will also see an ambitious timeline to carry out local government reorganisation to create strong, more efficient and accountable unitary councils, with more resources directed to frontline services.
And going further we have started the statutory invitation process to all two tier council areas to be part of the wider local government reorganisation programme, with all local elections planned for May 2025 going ahead as usual.
Coupled with work to allocate multi-year funding settlements and reform to how councils are funded, so that it better reflects need, deprivation and the local tax base, and the cost of service delivery, for instance in rural areas, it offers a chance to give long term stability and provide better local public services.
Jim McMahon OBE MP 