The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026

On 29 April 2026, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill received Royal Assent, becoming the most significant piece of local government legislation since the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016. Introduced by Angela Rayner on 10 July 2025 and steered through a notably bruising ping-pong, the Act delivers Labour’s “Take Back Control” pledge and the architecture of the December 2024 English Devolution White Paper.

For those of us advising local authorities or working in planning and administrative law, this is a foundational text we will be returning to for years.

The headline architecture: Strategic Authorities

The Act formally creates “Strategic Authorities” as a new tier in English local government, encompassing the Greater London Authority, combined authorities and combined county authorities. Authorities are tiered — Foundation, Mayoral, and Established Mayoral — with “areas of competence” covering transport and infrastructure, skills and employment, housing and strategic planning, economic regeneration, environment and climate, health and public service reform, and public safety.

Mayoral Strategic Authorities gain potential meaningful planning functions: a power to call in applications of potential strategic importance, to make Mayoral Development Orders, and to charge a Mayoral Community Infrastructure Levy. These are not new powers in London — the Mayor of London has had call-in under the Mayor of London Order 2008, MDOs since the Localism Act 2011 inserted section 61DA into the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, and the Mayoral CIL since 2012 (financing the Elizabeth line). What the Act does is export the London model to combined authority mayors elsewhere. For practitioners used to the existing London regime, this is recognisable territory now extended nationwide.

The opposition position on the Act is that it is a centralising step rather than an Act which empowers communities by taking decision making from local councils to strategic mayoral authorities. The government’s position is that decentralising power from Whitehall to the regions is a clear message that the responsibility for decision making and budget management should be with communities and their locally elected mayor, rather than government. The parliamentary debates centred on those issues where this distinct difference of view was most evident.

Governance reset for principal authorities

Schedule 25 requires local authorities operating committee-system governance into a leader-and-cabinet model, while preserving existing directly elected council mayoralties. This was one of the most contested elements in the Lords. Section 16 confirms a mayor cannot sit simultaneously in the Commons or in the Senedd, Holyrood or Stormont. Schedule 26 reinstates the supplementary vote for mayoral and Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) elections, reversing the first-past-the-post change brought in by the Elections Act 2022, with PCCs themselves are set to transfer to vest in Mayors by 2028.

A new Local Audit Office is established to coordinate the local audit system — a long-awaited response to the post-Redmond Review crisis in council audit.

Community empowerment: the high street toolkit

The Act’s “Community Empowerment” half delivers a clutch of measures aimed squarely at high streets and town centres:

• A Community Right to Buy giving local people first refusal on assets of community value when they come up for sale.
• Gambling Impact Assessments enabling councils to refuse new gambling premises.
• A ban on Upwards-Only Rent Review clauses in new and renewal commercial leases. Notably, this is the only provision in the Act with explicit England AND Wales extent — a genuinely significant intervention in landlord and tenant law that has caused real concern in commercial property circles.
• National standards for taxi drivers and cross-border licence enforcement.
• New powers on dangerous pavement parking and rental e-bike licensing.

What didn't make it: the ping-pong casualties

The Bill’s last weeks were dominated by an unusually persistent Lords. On 23 April the Lords inflicted seven defeats on the government, and only after a third round on 28 April did the Bill clear. The pattern is instructive.

Conceded by government and now in the Act

• Rural Affairs and Coastal Communities as a distinct area of competence. Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville’s amendment, supported by the NFU, was originally resisted on the basis that rural affairs was already covered. The government eventually accepted it, adding rural affairs and coastal communities to the Clause 2 list.
• Brownfield-first prioritisation in spatial development strategies. Lord Jamieson’s amendment to require brownfield prioritisation was initially rejected as duplicative of the NPPF; the government ultimately tabled its own version requiring the Secretary of State to make regulations on brownfield priority, putting it on the same statutory footing as sustainable development and health impact.
• Curtailment of Secretary of State powers of direction. The Lords objected fiercely to ministerial powers in Schedule 1 to direct the establishment or expansion of combined authorities or impose mayors. The government conceded, removing the powers to direct establishment and to impose mayors, and committed not to use the residual expansion power for four years post-Royal Assent.
• Transitional measures for governance change. A pragmatic exception extension to the one-year period for moving to the leader-and-cabinet model, where a council is on the path to dissolution, abolition or merger.

Pressed by the Lords but not in the final Act

• London Assembly budget threshold. Lords Amendments 13 and 87 would have allowed the Assembly to amend the Mayor of London’s budget by simple majority rather than the existing two-thirds. Disagreed by the Commons; the Lords backed down.
• Statutory “agent of change” principle. Baroness McIntosh of Pickering’s Amendments 41 and 94 would have written agent of change into section 70 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, protecting existing cultural venues — particularly grassroots music venues — from being closed down by the noise complaints of residents in subsequent developments. The government refused to put it on the face of the Bill, promising strengthened guidance instead.
• Statutory parish governance strategy. Lords Amendments 37 and 91 would have required the Secretary of State to publish and implement a parish governance strategy. The government’s counter-offer (Commons Amendment 37A) was a narrower provision allowing parish representation in neighbourhood structures by regulations.
• Removal of Clause 59 (Leader and Cabinet model). Lord Shipley’s attempt to preserve council choice over executive arrangements was defeated in the Commons 288–147.
• Open and published commissioner appointments. Amendment 4, requiring fair and open selection processes and published criteria for mayoral commissioner appointments, was disagreed by the Commons as “not necessary to legislate for” as this embodies established regulation principles of public authority employment rules.

Topical implications

For planning practitioners

The mayoral planning toolkit is now an England-wide reality (Wales runs its own planning system under the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 and the Planning (Wales) Act 2015). Mayoral Development Orders and the Mayoral CIL will be live questions in every combined authority area, and call-in over applications of “potential strategic importance” creates an entirely new layer of risk and opportunity for developers and authorities alike outside London. The brownfield-first regulations to be made under the new section 12G(2A) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 are the next thing to watch — their drafting will determine whether this is a soft duty or a hard constraint on Spatial Development Strategies.

For local government

Two-tier county areas across England face the practical reality of moving to unitary authorities. The government’s December 2024 White Paper set 500,000 as the minimum population for new unitaries (with stated flexibility), and the Devolution Priority Programme cohort identified in February 2025 — Cumbria, Surrey, Hampshire, Essex, Kent and Sussex — was the first wave, with further areas to follow. The retention (albeit narrowed) of ministerial directional powers means that, while collaborative devolution is the stated preference, the centre still holds reserve levers. The four-year non-use commitment on the expansion power should not be over-read.

For administrative and judicial review

The breadth of mayoral call-in powers will inevitably produce challenges on the proper construction of “potential strategic importance”, with London PSI case law providing the obvious starting point. The new Local Scrutiny Committees and the bespoke health duty on mayors create fresh public-law footholds for challengers concerned about decision-making process. And the leader-and-cabinet conversion will trigger transitional disputes — particularly where a council was mid-cycle on a committee-system review when the Act bites.

For commercial property lawyers

The UORR ban is the sleeper provision of this Act and, uniquely among the Act’s reforms, applies to England and Wales. It will reshape lease drafting, valuation evidence, and the economics of investment-grade high street and secondary office property. Expect a wave of advice work and, in time, litigation over the boundaries of “new” and “renewal” leases.

For the high street

Community Right to Buy and Gambling Impact Assessments give councils tools they have repeatedly asked for. Whether councils will resource them is, as ever, the harder question.

The bigger picture

This Act is a serious constitutional reset. It bakes a permanent regional tier into English government, redraws the centre-local boundary in planning, and — through the UORR ban and the Community Right to Buy — wades unapologetically into private-law territory in service of a high street agenda. The Lords’ partial successes on rural affairs, brownfield priority and Schedule 1 powers have softened some of the more centralist edges, but the core proposition — Whitehall devolving downwards into mayors with real planning and fiscal levers — survives intact.

For those of us who advise local authorities, draft pleadings in judicial review or sit on planning committees, the next two years will be about regulations, codes of practice, and the first wave of cases testing where the new lines run. Worth re-reading the Explanatory Notes alongside the White Paper — much of the legislative architecture only makes full sense when read together.

Jaspreet Lyall is a partner at Excello Law and Catherine Stephens is a governance consultant supporting the Monitoring Officer at West Midlands Combined Authority and Head of Legal (interim) at Sussex and Brighton Strategic Authority.