The Week 11 April 2025
Director of Policy and Research
Parliament is in recess. Spring is in the air. Who’s that little creature, with his basket of treats, hopping joyfully through Whitehall, before boarding a northbound train? Why, it’s the Bureaucrat Bunny, of course! He’s bringing carefully ringfenced flexibilities, pre-agreed outcome frameworks, and the thrilling ability to reallocate up to 10% from capital to revenue: a cracking opportunity for good little Combined Authorities.
Yes, the long-awaited single integrated settlements – the ‘trailblazer deals’ announced under the last Government and negotiated ever since – have arrived for Greater Manchester and the West Midlands. We now know that these will just be the start: that a further tranche of these ‘department-style’ settlements will be rolled out soon, and that ultimately the aim is to set one up for every ‘established’ Strategic Authority with a mayor.
We should take a moment to reflect on how important this moment is for a country as overcentralised as ours. The integrated settlements consolidate a plethora of fragmented funding streams, and provide a system which will later allow for multi-year planning (though these first settlements are agreed for a one-year period only for now). They bring huge opportunities for flexibility, local prioritisation, strengthened oversight, and reduced bureaucracy.
As things stand, though, the autonomy aspect of this change still feels distant. The establishment of Outcomes Frameworks will likely make Manchester and the West Midlands a bit more circumspect about how they make use of their resources. In principle, an outcomes-based approach is preferable. It’s much better to ask “what are you achieving?” rather than “how are you spending it?”.
But. The targets and instructions, both within these frameworks and in the rules governing the settlements themselves, will be a constraining factor. Local strategies have been considered but are not as important to the frameworks as Government’s national missions. For example, Manchester’s framework sets targets for 80% of bus passengers to feel “satisfied” with their journey, and for “1,056” businesses to become more productive, creating 169 more jobs through “intervention” in priority sectors. Being a ‘trailblazer’ creates a lot of pressure to be seen to make this approach work – and Whitehall is setting the terms of what success looks like.
None of this is likely to end while the accountability for this spending sits with the Whitehall departments rather than with the Combined Authorities themselves. That’s why we think the integrated settlements should be accompanied with a shift so that regional chief executives become Accounting Officers.
Read of the week
Not a read of the week from me this week, but something to watch. Health Secretary Wes Streeting was joined by Chris Whitty and the new NHS England CEO Jim Mackey to give evidence to the Health and Social Care Committee about their big reform plans. Lots of interesting discussion here, so I recommend you put it on in the background while you’re cooking dinner and pretend it’s just an unusually formal podcast. When you do, look out for an exchange toward the end of the session which suggests a tantalising openness to genuine health devolution (something we at Re:State firmly advocate): would Streeting be up for closer alignment (mergers?!) between combined authorities and Integrated Care Systems? “We’re certainly up for trying things differently and testing and learning.” Mackey agrees: “the principle of being very aligned for strategic planning for a population – we would absolutely expect that.”