From Deal to Delivery Machine: why April heralds a new chapter in England's Devolution Revolution

By Nina Newhouse, Senior Consultant

In the long and complicated history of English devolution, most milestones have been invisible to anyone not paid to follow them closely. Spending Review settlements, statutory instruments, deal-signing ceremonies: these were all hard-won moments, expanding the room for local leaders to act. But helping people connect that progress to their daily lives has been tougher work. All too often, translating the machinery of devolution to tangible impact has remained regional government’s thorniest problem.

From April this year, that changes. On the first day of this month, five of England's Mayoral Strategic Authorities - Liverpool City Region, the North-East, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, and Greater London - took on Integrated Settlements for the first time. Two others, Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, moved into their second year with a milestone of their own: the first multi-year settlement, allowing a stable platform of funding and flexibility for the next four years. In short, devolution moved from a series of deals to becoming a delivery system.

A key moment in the devolution revolution

To understand why April 2026 is significant, it helps to understand where England has come from. For most of the past two decades, devolution was something that happened through negotiation: individual deals, struck between Treasury ministers and combined authority leaders, each one bespoke, each one hard-won.

The results were real but uneven. Greater Manchester, which has been building its institutional capacity since the first city deal in 2012, now operates one of the most sophisticated regional governance systems in the country - coordinating buses, trains, skills, housing, and economic development in ways that would have been unthinkable under the old fragmented model. But outside a handful of areas, the picture remained a patchwork. Different powers in different places. Different funding pots with different strings. No consistent framework that told regions what they could expect or told investors what they would find.

The December 2024 Devolution White Paper was explicitly designed to change this, establishing “devolution by default” to replace the era of bespoke deals with a consistent, statutory framework for devolution across all of England. And the Integrated Settlement was the financial expression of that ambition. Instead of a dozen separate grant pots - each with its own application process, reporting requirements, ring-fencing conditions, and Whitehall oversight – it pools major funding streams into a single, flexible resource that regions can deploy according to their own priorities and plans with genuine discretion over how it is spent. This means real change, in the places that need it most.

Policy papers are easy to dismiss. But the machinery behind this one has direct consequences for how public money works in a region and for the people it’s meant to serve. Integrated Settlement status matters because of the agency it unlocks. Authorities, rather than being tied to a dozen separate funding streams each with their own conditions and oversight, gain genuine financial flexibility and decision-making authority over how resources are deployed – including, crucially, the ability to move money between streams where local priorities demand it.

Take skills and employment. Under the old system, someone in Liverpool seeking to retrain might find themselves navigating three different programmes - the Adult Skills Fund, Skills Bootcamps, and employment support - each funded from a different pot, managed by a different agency, with different eligibility criteria and different interfaces with local employers. The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority could see the problem, and the solution. But without control over the funding, it could not redesign the system. Now, it can. The Integrated Settlement gives it agency to align these programmes, commission them around specific skills gaps faced by local employers, and hold providers accountable for outcomes that matter locally - not just the measures required by Whitehall.

The same logic applies across housing, transport, and economic development. A mayoral authority that controls all of these levers together can make choices that a patchwork of separate programmes cannot. It can decide to invest more heavily in transport infrastructure in an area where housing development is being unlocked. It can tie business support to the skills pipeline that feeds it. It can make long-term bets that would be impossible under annual, ring-fenced grants.

This is what devolution actually means when it works - not a transfer of paperwork from one level of government to another, but a genuine shift in who makes decisions and how they are joined up to reflect how places function in real life.

The reality of delivering

For the six authorities receiving Integrated Settlements from April, this marks a major milestone and the start of a new phase of delivery. Securing these settlements has taken years of leadership, negotiation and institutional development. The task now is to turn that hard won flexibility into sustained delivery and impact.

With financial flexibility comes a new accountability architecture. Each authority receiving a settlement has had to agree an Outcomes Framework with government: a set of shared commitments about what the funding is intended to achieve, and how progress will be demonstrated. This is, in principle, exactly the right model. It shifts the relationship between Whitehall and regional authorities from one based on compliance - did you spend in the right way? - to one based on results - did unemployment fall? Did new homes get built? Did the local economy grow?

It also changes what strong delivery looks like for the organisations involved. The outcomes frameworks developed for this stage were designed in the context of a one-year spending phase. Multi-year settlements now create the opportunity, and the need, to reflect a longer-term scope and ambition Making that shift work requires an organisation to set priorities, track progress against them, hold its delivery partners and commissioned providers to account, and tell a coherent story about what its resources achieved. Building that capability while continuing to lead and deliver at pace is a significant organisational challenge.

Using an Integrated Settlement well requires a clear sense of a region's comparative economic advantage, a realistic understanding of the levers it holds and what each can achieve, the partnerships and relationships needed to shape a complex regional system, and the internal machinery to take decisions, deploy resources, and account credibly for the results.

These authorities are starting from different institutional baselines, but all now have a stronger platform to shape how public money works for their place. The good news is that the settlement they now hold gives them more freedom to define the terms of engagement. The challenge is using that freedom quickly and well enough to drive visible results.

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