Devolution's Missing Layer - Why Mayors Need the Capacity to Deliver

For the first time, Britain is led by a Prime Minister who is a product of devolution rather than of Westminster. And he has wasted no time. Within a fortnight of entering Downing Street, Andy Burnham announced that mayors will, albeit eventually, keep a share of the income tax and business rates raised in their regions, alongside stronger powers to unlock stalled development sites, with the full roadmap promised in a white paper at the Autumn Budget. Power and money are moving out of Whitehall at a pace that makes the last decade look glacial.

I welcome this without reservation, and I say that as a Conservative who spent five years leading local and regional government nationally. There is more continuity here than either party cares to admit: Michael Gove's department did much of the spadework for this settlement, and the direction of travel has survived four Prime Ministers. After much talk, devolution is no longer a debate. It is happening.

Powers without capacity

Which is precisely why an uncomfortable truth needs stating now, before the white paper is written, and it is one the Prime Minister will recognise from his nine years in a Mayoralty. Having the power to decide is not the same as having the capacity to deliver. I have sat at the table with successive Secretaries of State wrestling with why housebuilding at scale so rarely happens. I have run a Council that owned billions of pounds of stalled regeneration sites, and I founded the delivery company built to unlock them. From all three seats, I reached the same conclusion: the new landscape has a missing layer, and unless it is filled deliberately, the powers now flowing to Mayors and regions will not turn into homes.

Handing Mayors sweeping powers without delivery machinery beneath them does not devolve responsibility; it devolves blame.

Delivery rarely fails for want of a 'power'. Governments of both colours have reached repeatedly for the same instruments - a new funding pot, a new target, a new promise to 'build, build, build' - and none of it has moved the dial, because the fundamental and binding constraint sits below the level at which those interventions operate. It sits on individual sites, where a specific drainage problem, a specific road junction, a specific viability gap or a specific stand-off between landowner and authority is holding back thousands of homes. The patient, site-by-site graft of establishing precisely what is stuck and why is the work almost nobody does, because it is slow, unglamorous and does not fit a press release. And above the site level sits a second tier of blockages that only make sense regionally: where the water comes from, where the grid capacity lies, how a dozen landholdings might be assembled into a place worth building. Tackled singly, these problems are often insurmountable. Tackled strategically, they usually are not.

Neither existing tier of the new system, the strategic mayoral authorities or the powerful slew of new unitary councils, is equipped for this work. The strategic authorities are lean by design: small teams, huge geographies. The new unitaries are consumed by the sheer effort of their own reorganisation. I have seen where that combination leads. Asked to review a combined authority in difficulty, I found a powerful Mayor with a clear direction of travel and, beneath him, constituent councils unconvinced and unwilling, with no neutral ground between them. The result was not delivery but the slow grind of disagreement, energy spent contesting authority rather than getting anything out of the ground. That was not a failure of individuals. Rather it was a structural prediction, and the new map simply multiplies the conditions for it.

A new layer to speed up delivery

So here is the proposal. Between the strategic authority and the unitaries, convene a new layer: call them Place Delivery Partnerships. Their purpose is narrow. Take the basket of significant sites in a region, establish - site by site - where each is stuck, and surface that diagnosis in a way decision-makers cannot ignore - then hold the ring while mayor and councils act on it.

Two design principles matter above all. The first is that these bodies must be expert-led and politically neutral: populated by people who have actually built things - master developers, housebuilders, engineers, land managers - alongside voices with deep local knowledge. Ironically, given my background, I would go further: elected politicians should be kept out of this layer entirely. A politician's proper role is to set direction and hold delivery to account, not to sit in the engine room. Keeping politics out of one layer is a healthy counterweight in a system where politics is, rightly, present nearly everywhere else - and at a moment when control of councils and mayoralties is fragmenting across parties, an apolitical delivery function is insulated from electoral swings in a way no politically owned body can be.

The second is the honest broker function. Because a Place Delivery Partnership sits between the mayor and the unitaries, trusted by neither more than the other, it can do what neither can do alone. When a mayor's strategy collides with a council's instincts, an independent, evidence-led body in the middle is the difference between resolution and judicial review.

What makes this unusually practical is that it requires no legislation, no quango, no Whitehall machinery exercise. The devolution settlement already gives mayors a statutory power to convene local partners, with a matching duty on those partners to respond. Any willing mayor could stand up a Place Delivery Partnership tomorrow, with a handful of priority sites and a small expert panel, at negligible cost, with results measurable within a year. The autumn white paper should go one better and build the function into the architecture as standard - a standing capability available to every region, not an occasional luxury commissioned by the most capable.

A clear mandate

The Treasury's first question will be what this costs. The honest answer is that a delivery layer designed properly should reduce calls on the public purse, not add to them. To ensure this however, its mandate should be optimistic and clear: find the cheapest credible route to unlocking each site, treating central subsidy as the last resort. Where a long-term interest in a place is retained rather than built out and sold on, patient capital funds infrastructure over longer horizons and certainty itself drives the value uplift that closes viability gaps. That is a proposition a Chancellor can say yes to, and it is entirely of a piece with a governing philosophy that rejects both leaving everything to the market and reaching first for the chequebook.

The Prime Minister has more riding on this than anyone. A premiership built on the proposition that places can deliver where Whitehall cannot will be judged, funnily enough, on whether the places deliver. Every stalled site in a mayoral region is now, politically, his stalled site. Handing Mayors sweeping powers without delivery machinery beneath them does not devolve responsibility; it devolves blame. Place Delivery Partnerships are the insurance policy on the whole project - and because they are apolitical by design, they can be offered to Conservative, Reform and Liberal Democrat mayors without a flicker of embarrassment.

The powers are already on the statute book. The money is starting, finally, to move. The task now, this autumn, is to make sure there is something underneath strong enough to bear the weight. Fill the missing layer, keep it expert, point it at the sites that matter, and instruct it to unlock them cleverly rather than expensively. Do that, and this government has a chance of building not just more homes, but better places that last. That, after all, is the point.