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.
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.