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  • The English Devolution Experiment: What Giving Mayors More Power Actually Looks Like in Practice

    The English Devolution Experiment: What Giving Mayors More Power Actually Looks Like in Practice

    There is a version of this story in which metro mayors are quietly transforming English cities, cutting through bureaucracy, commanding serious investment and making decisions that Whitehall would have sat on for a decade. There is another version in which the whole devolution settlement is an elaborate performance: powers handed over with such conditions attached that the people receiving them can barely move. In 2026, both versions are true, simultaneously, depending on which city you’re standing in and which Tuesday of the month it is.

    Empty council chamber representing English devolution mayors 2026 decision-making structures

    The English devolution mayors 2026 story is not a simple triumph or a cautionary tale. It is messier and more instructive than either. Greater Manchester and the West Midlands are the two most-watched experiments, and what they reveal about the limits and genuine possibilities of devolved power in England deserves a closer read than the headlines usually afford.

    What Greater Manchester has actually achieved

    Andy Burnham’s Manchester is the closest England has to a genuinely functioning city-region government. The integrated transport authority, Transport for Greater Manchester, now controls the Bee Network, a reintegrated bus system that, since franchising replaced the deregulated free-for-all in 2023, has expanded routes and brought fares under public control. By early 2026, the Bee Network covers all ten Greater Manchester districts. Patronage is up. The political credit is real.

    On housing, Greater Manchester’s spatial development strategy sets binding targets across the ten local authorities rather than leaving each council to argue its corner in isolation. That matters because it forces a level of regional coordination that the old structure simply couldn’t produce. The mayoral combined authority has also used its investment powers to anchor the NOMA development in the city centre and push affordable housing requirements in ways that individual local authorities, facing developer pressure alone, rarely managed.

    Skills and employment are another area where the Manchester model has delivered. The Greater Manchester Good Employment Charter, a voluntary but increasingly influential framework that over 300 employers have signed, sets standards on pay, flexible working and contracts. It is not legally binding, but it has created reputational pressure in a tight labour market. These are not nothing. They are the kinds of pragmatic, local interventions that central government, managing policy for 56 million people, consistently fails to calibrate.

    The West Midlands: a different kind of ambition

    Richard Parker, who succeeded Andy Street as West Midlands Mayor in 2024, inherited a combined authority with strong infrastructure investment credentials and genuine private-sector relationships. The West Midlands secured the UK’s largest urban regeneration zone outside London, and the Commonwealth Games legacy investment reshaped parts of Birmingham in ways that are still compounding.

    The Integrated Rail Plan, though significantly scaled back from original proposals, still positions the West Midlands for better connectivity. The region’s investment in SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) provision, using devolved skills funding, is drawing attention from other combined authorities looking for workable models. Parker has been less publicly flamboyant than Burnham, which suits a region that often felt London-centric commentary treated it as a curiosity rather than a serious economic zone.

    The West Midlands also has the most developed single settlement agreement of any English combined authority outside London, giving it pooled funding across housing, transport and skills rather than having to negotiate each pot separately. On paper, this is exactly the kind of structural shift that makes devolution meaningful. In practice, the settlement still comes with performance conditions, reporting requirements and ministerial override clauses that would make any serious regional government blush.

    Where Westminster is quietly pulling the strings

    Here is where the story gets uncomfortable. The Treasury has not surrendered fiscal control in any meaningful sense. Combined authorities receive grant settlements, they do not set their own tax rates, they cannot borrow freely against future revenues, and they cannot run deficits in the way that comparable city-regions in Germany or the United States can. When Birmingham City Council issued a Section 114 notice in 2023, effectively declaring insolvency, the mayoral combined authority had no mechanism to intervene. That structural problem has not been resolved.

    The Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 created a framework for further devolution, but the pace at which powers have actually transferred has disappointed most metro mayors. The government’s own English Devolution White Paper, published in December 2024, proposed a more systematic approach to mayoral authority over planning, skills and employment support. Whether the legislation that follows actually delivers on that framing remains the central question of 2026. Early signs from the government’s English devolution policy documents suggest genuine intent, but the Treasury’s grip on capital spending means intent and delivery remain some distance apart.

    Transport is the clearest illustration of this gap. Outside Greater Manchester, bus franchising powers remain largely unused because the upfront cost of transitioning from deregulation is prohibitive without Treasury support. South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and the North East all have combined authorities with transport powers on paper. In reality, they are running variations of the same broken privatised bus system that has been failing passengers since the 1986 deregulation. The power exists; the funding to exercise it does not.

    The accountability question nobody wants to answer

    Metro mayors have accumulated real visibility. Burnham in particular has become a national political figure. But democratic accountability at the combined authority level remains thin. Scrutiny committees exist but lack the resources to hold well-staffed mayoral offices to account. Local ward councillors, the closest elected representatives to most residents, often find themselves excluded from decisions that directly affect their areas. This is not a reason to abandon the devolution project; it is a reason to take its democratic infrastructure as seriously as its investment pipelines.

    There are also sharp inequalities in the devolution settlement itself. The eight mayoral combined authorities in England cover around 19 million people. The remaining 37 million live in areas with either no combined authority, a county council deal without a mayor, or arrangements so recent they have yet to produce anything resembling a coherent regional strategy. Cornwall, for example, has a devolution deal but not a mayor and not the same suite of powers. Rural England, in particular, risks being left further behind as city-regions consolidate influence and investment. This connects to a broader pattern: the parts of the country least visible to Westminster have always been last in the queue. As we’ve examined in our coverage of Britain’s brain drain, the geography of economic opportunity in England remains stubbornly concentrated, and devolution has not yet proved it can correct that.

    What genuine devolution would actually require

    The countries that have made regional government work, Germany’s Länder, Spain’s autonomous communities, Scandinavian municipalities, share one characteristic that England’s combined authorities lack: genuine fiscal autonomy. The ability to raise revenue locally, borrow against it and make long-term capital commitments without ministerial approval is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a regional government and a regional delivery mechanism for central government priorities.

    The English devolution mayors 2026 picture is one of genuine but constrained progress. The ambition in Manchester and the West Midlands is real. The people running these combined authorities are, by and large, more pragmatic and locally informed than the departments they are trying to work around. But the constitutional settlement has not changed. England remains one of the most centralised large democracies in the developed world, and handing a mayor control of bus routes while keeping control of the money does not fundamentally alter that. The experiment is worth continuing. But calling it a revolution, at this stage, is flattering the evidence.

    For context on how Westminster’s reluctance to relinquish control manifests across other domains, our analysis of Britain’s agricultural subsidy overhaul and the leasehold reform process both demonstrate a familiar pattern: structural change promised, structural change delayed, and the gap filled with announcements rather than outcomes.

  • The Truth About Britain’s Broadband Rollout: Where Full-Fibre Reaches and Where It Has Simply Given Up

    The Truth About Britain’s Broadband Rollout: Where Full-Fibre Reaches and Where It Has Simply Given Up

    The government’s gigabit broadband target was, on paper, one of the more ambitious infrastructure pledges of recent years: full-fibre connectivity to at least 85% of UK premises by the end of 2025, with gigabit-capable broadband reaching virtually everywhere shortly after. Ofcom’s own Connected Nations report now gives us a clear-eyed account of how that promise is holding up. The short answer is: well enough if you live in a city, and not at all if you do not.

    The UK full fibre broadband rollout 2026 has genuinely accelerated. Full-fibre coverage now reaches around 60% of UK premises, up from a dismal 8% in 2019. That is real progress, and credit belongs partly to the competitive market that emerged when alternative network builders, known as altnets, piled into profitable urban territories. But acceleration in aggregate obscures a deeply uneven geography. The question that matters is not how fast the national average is moving; it is who remains on the wrong side of it.

    Rural British countryside with telegraph poles representing areas missed by the UK full fibre broadband rollout 2026

    What Ofcom’s data actually shows

    Ofcom’s Connected Nations data for 2025 makes for uncomfortable reading if you happen to live in rural England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. In some rural areas of Wales, full-fibre availability sits below 30%. Parts of rural Scotland fare similarly. Northern Ireland has the highest overall gigabit-capable coverage in the UK, largely because of the publicly funded Project Stratum, which is itself a revealing detail. State intervention works where markets will not go.

    Urban pockets also suffer, though in different ways. Dense blocks of flats in cities like Birmingham and Leeds frequently have gigabit-capable infrastructure passing the building but no operator willing to fund the internal wiring needed to connect individual flats. Coverage maps mark these premises as served. In practice, the residents cannot get a full-fibre connection at any price. Ofcom’s own methodology counts a premises as covered if fibre passes nearby, which leads to statistics that are flattering to everyone except the person trying to work from home on a failing copper line.

    Why the commercial model is failing rural Britain

    The government’s strategy rested on a reasonable assumption: competitive commercial markets would drive rollout in profitable areas, while the £5 billion Project Gigabit programme would fund the rest through public subsidy contracts. The problem is that the boundary between commercially viable and commercially unviable has proved far more hostile than anticipated.

    Laying fibre to a village of 200 homes in Cumbria or Ceredigion costs roughly the same per property as connecting an urban terrace, but the revenue potential is a fraction of the size. Altnets, companies such as Cityfibre, Toob, and Gigaclear, have largely concentrated their capital in cities and market towns where return on investment is calculable. BT’s Openreach, to its credit, has pushed further into rural territory than most, but even Openreach has acknowledged that a meaningful percentage of UK premises will never be commercially attractive to any operator without subsidy.

    Project Gigabit contracts have been signed, and some rural communities in Devon, Lincolnshire and the Scottish Borders are finally seeing engineers at work. But the procurement process has been slow, marked by rebidding and delays that have pushed realistic completion dates well into the late 2020s for many areas. Some communities awarded contracts in 2022 are still waiting for a spade to enter the ground.

    The people who need it most are being served last

    The cruel irony of the UK full fibre broadband rollout 2026 is that the communities least well served are often those for whom reliable connectivity matters most acutely. Rural households and businesses are frequently more dependent on remote working than their urban counterparts, not by lifestyle choice but by necessity. A farmer managing procurement through an online livestock marketplace, a GP surgery attempting to run remote consultations via NHS Digital systems, a secondary school in a market town delivering hybrid lessons, all of them are operating on infrastructure designed for a different era.

    The economic consequences compound over time. The haemorrhage of skilled workers to better-connected locations is partly a broadband story. Young professionals who might otherwise remain in rural communities leave not because they dislike them but because working from a cottage in Yorkshire on a 15 Mbps ADSL connection is simply not viable in a world that expects Teams calls, cloud collaboration and video pitching as a baseline. Poor connectivity is a quiet accelerant to depopulation.

    Altnets in crisis, and what that means for coverage ambitions

    There is a further complication that barely featured in the government’s original projections. Many of the altnets that were supposed to compete Openreach into efficiency have run into serious financial difficulty. Smaller operators have consolidated, been acquired, or quietly stopped building. The altnet funding model depended on cheap capital and investor appetite that has thinned considerably as interest rates rose. Several prominent players have restructured their debt or paused rollout in 2025 and 2026, leaving behind partially built networks that serve some streets in a postcode but not others.

    This creates a new class of underserved premises: not remote farmhouses beyond the commercial frontier, but ordinary streets in provincial towns where a network was started and then stopped. Residents are sometimes unable to switch because a half-built altnet network has been registered as covering their address, deterring other operators from investing in the same area. The duplication of infrastructure in wealthy neighbourhoods alongside abandonment elsewhere has produced a market that is structurally inefficient in ways that were entirely foreseeable.

    The situation echoes broader questions about what happens when public services are left to market logic alone. Much as NHS dentistry has retreated from the areas that need it most because the funding model simply does not follow patient need, broadband infrastructure follows revenue rather than necessity. The parallel is uncomfortable but exact.

    What a genuine solution would require

    Universal service obligations exist in telecoms, BT is legally required to provide a connection of at least 10 Mbps to any premises that requests one, but 10 Mbps is an embarrassingly low floor in 2026. The government’s own £1 Gigabit Broadband Voucher Scheme, which offered households and businesses in eligible rural areas up to £4,500 towards connection costs, was oversubscribed almost immediately and has suffered repeated funding gaps. Demand exists. The money and the delivery mechanisms have not kept pace with it.

    Properly solving rural connectivity requires either a much larger and faster-moving Project Gigabit programme, or a radical revision of the universal service obligation to reflect what the digital economy actually demands. Some analysts advocate a model closer to the electricity grid: a regulated national wholesale infrastructure, with commercial operators competing on services rather than on who builds pipe to which postcode. The political appetite for that level of intervention has historically been low, though the gap between rhetoric and delivery is making the conversation unavoidable.

    The UK full fibre broadband rollout 2026 is, in aggregate, a genuine achievement. Millions of premises now have access to speeds unimaginable fifteen years ago. But aggregate statistics have a way of hiding the specific, named communities that remain on the wrong side of every chart. For them, the rollout has not moved slowly. It has not come at all. That distinction matters, and it deserves to be said plainly rather than smoothed into a national average.

    Meanwhile, broader questions about how Britain builds and funds essential infrastructure, from school buildings falling apart to fibre cables that stop at the edge of a profitable postcode, are accumulating into something that looks less like a series of isolated failures and more like a governing philosophy that has reached its limits.

  • Why Britain’s Charity Sector Is Facing Its Most Severe Financial Crisis in Living Memory

    Why Britain’s Charity Sector Is Facing Its Most Severe Financial Crisis in Living Memory

    Something has quietly broken in the infrastructure that holds British civil society together. Across the country, charities that have operated for decades, some for over a century, are shutting their doors, shedding staff, or merging with rivals they once considered competitors. The UK charity sector funding crisis 2026 is not a single event. It is the accumulated pressure of at least four simultaneous financial shocks arriving at once, and the sector has run out of room to absorb them.

    UK charity food bank volunteers sorting donations — UK charity sector funding crisis 2026

    The numbers are sobering. According to the National Council for Voluntary Organisations (NCVO), more than half of UK charities entered this year with reserves below the three-month threshold widely regarded as the minimum for financial safety. Food banks, hospices, disability support services, mental health charities and homelessness organisations are all reporting the same pattern: costs rising faster than income, statutory contracts failing to keep pace with inflation, and donor fatigue setting in after years of emergency appeals.

    The employment cost trap

    The April 2026 increase in employer National Insurance contributions, confirmed in the 2025 Budget, has landed particularly hard on organisations that are labour-intensive by nature. A hospice running thirty nursing and care staff cannot automate its way out of a wage bill increase. A food bank relying on a small team of paid coordinators and logistics staff faces the same dilemma. The Federation of Small Businesses estimated that the NI threshold change would add thousands of pounds per year per employer, but charities lack the pricing power that private businesses use to pass costs on.

    The real minimum wage increase, also phased in this year, adds a further layer. Charities broadly support fair pay; many have long argued their workers are underpaid. The practical problem is timing. These cost increases have arrived precisely when statutory income is contracting. The result is an impossible equation: higher fixed costs, lower revenue, the same level of demand from the communities they serve.

    The slow withdrawal of public sector contracts

    For two decades, local councils and NHS commissioners outsourced significant chunks of social care, mental health support, and community services to the voluntary sector. It was, in theory, efficient. Charities could deliver services at lower cost and with greater community trust than public bodies. The model worked when council budgets were stable.

    They are not stable now. Local authority finances across England are under extraordinary stress, with multiple councils having issued Section 114 notices in recent years. When councils cut, they cut contracts. Charities providing adult social care, supported housing, and children’s services are routinely receiving termination notices or finding contracts renewed at rates that bear no relationship to actual delivery costs. One Citizens Advice bureau in the East Midlands reported its statutory contract had not increased in real terms for six years, whilst the cost of delivering the service had risen by roughly 30 per cent over the same period.

    The hospice sector is perhaps the most visible casualty. The Hospice UK trade body has been explicit: the funding gap between what NHS England pays hospices for NHS-commissioned care and what that care actually costs is widening every year. Several hospices have already cut beds, reduced opening hours, or entered emergency fundraising appeals simply to remain open. This is palliative care for dying people. The moral weight of that fact has not translated into political urgency.

    Donations are falling too

    The cost-of-living pressure on households has, predictably, reduced discretionary charitable giving. CAF’s UK Giving Report found that whilst the proportion of people who give has remained relatively stable, the average monthly amount has declined in real terms. The middle-income donors who historically gave reliably by direct debit, £10 a month to Cancer Research UK, £15 to the RSPB, £5 to a local foodbank, are cutting back or cancelling entirely.

    Fundraising events have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels in many areas. Legacy income, which charities depend on for long-term planning, is subject to volatility from the property market and, increasingly, from the inheritance tax changes announced in the autumn 2025 Budget. As we examined in our analysis of the inheritance tax reckoning, the changes to agricultural and business reliefs have complicated estate planning significantly, and with it the charitable legacy decisions that often sit alongside those plans.

    Mergers, redundancies, closures

    The sector’s response to all of this has been predictable and painful. Mergers between charities working in the same space, which the Charity Commission has quietly encouraged for years, are accelerating. Some are sensible consolidations that improve efficiency. Others are desperate lifeboats in which two struggling organisations combine in the hope that the sum will be more stable than the parts. It often is not.

    Redundancies are widespread. The largest charities have made headline cuts: Oxfam GB, St John Ambulance, and several major housing associations have all reduced headforces in the past eighteen months. Smaller organisations, which do not attract press coverage when they shed two or three posts, are doing the same thing at scale across every constituency in the country. Those redundancies represent not just lost jobs but lost institutional knowledge, lost community relationships, and lost capacity that cannot simply be rebuilt once the financial weather improves.

    And then there are the closures. Charities rarely announce closure loudly. They tend to quietly stop taking referrals, run down their programmes, and dissolve through the Charity Commission without fanfare. The communities that relied on them are left with a gap that no other organisation is funded to fill.

    What happens to the people left behind?

    This is the question that rarely makes it into the policy debate. When a domestic violence refuge closes, the women it would have helped do not simply find alternative provision. When a mental health drop-in centre cuts its hours, the people who used it do not transfer seamlessly to NHS services that are already overwhelmed. The voluntary sector has long acted as a pressure-relief valve for a public system that cannot meet all demand directly. Remove the valve and the pressure goes somewhere else: to A&E, to police, to housing. The costs do not disappear; they shift.

    This connects to a broader concern about what is happening to British civic life more generally. We have written previously about the professionals leaving Britain for opportunities abroad and the burnout engulfing those who stay and lead organisations under impossible pressure. The charity sector sits at the intersection of both: it is losing experienced professionals who can no longer justify the pay cut, and burning out those who remain through chronic under-resourcing.

    What needs to change

    A small NI exemption for charities, which the sector lobbied hard for ahead of the April 2026 changes and did not receive, would have helped. Full cost recovery in statutory contracts, rather than the current model in which charities routinely subsidise public services from their own fundraised income, is a more structural fix. Neither requires a dramatic new policy framework; both require political will that has so far been absent.

    The Charity Commission’s remit does not extend to funding advocacy. The government’s Office for Civil Society exists but carries limited weight in spending rounds. Charities are, by their nature, reluctant to campaign aggressively for their own survival in the way a trade union or professional body might. That reticence may need to end.

    Britain’s voluntary sector is not a nice-to-have. It is load-bearing infrastructure. Treating it as though it can absorb indefinite financial pressure without consequence is not a funding policy. It is a slow demolition.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    Why are UK charities closing in 2026?

    A combination of rising employer National Insurance contributions, local council contract cuts, and falling individual donations has created a severe funding gap. Many charities, particularly smaller ones providing social care and community support, can no longer balance their books and are being forced to close or merge.

    How has the 2025 Budget affected UK charity finances?

    The increase in employer National Insurance thresholds that took effect in April 2026 raised the wage bill for labour-intensive charities significantly, without any sector-specific exemption. This came alongside minimum wage rises, squeezing charities that rely on paid staff and cannot pass costs on to service users.

    Which types of charities are most at risk from the funding crisis?

    Hospices, food banks, domestic violence refuges, mental health drop-in services, and disability support organisations are among the most exposed. These are all highly labour-intensive, heavily dependent on statutory contracts, and serving populations with no alternative provision if the service closes.

    Are people donating less to charities in the UK?

    In real terms, yes. CAF’s UK Giving research shows average monthly donation amounts have declined as cost-of-living pressures have reduced household discretionary spending. The proportion of people who give has held up, but the amounts involved have shrunk.

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