The Cabinet Office’s Rewiring the State statement of 31 July 2026 promises to replace consultation by default with new forms of public participation. Three months earlier an Act had already narrowed the statutory duty to consult residents on new combined authorities, without waiting for that broader reform.
What did the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 change?
The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 came into force on 29 April 2026. It changed a specific legal requirement: the duty on councils to consult the public before creating a combined authority or combined county authority (CCA), the two forms of regional body through which government is devolving power to groups of councils. Together, these are known in law as strategic authorities.
Before the Act, councils putting forward a proposal had to consult everyone living in the area the new authority would cover. The Act replaced that with a duty to consult only the councils that will make up the new authority, known in law as the constituent councils, along with anyone else the proposing councils choose to involve.
For combined county authorities, this requirement is set out in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023. The 2026 Act rewrote that section, swapping the area-wide consultation duty for the narrower duty to consult constituent councils described above.
The same change was made to the equivalent duty for combined authorities, the older form of devolved authority, created under a 2009 Act rather than the 2023 Act used for CCAs. There too, the area-wide consultation duty was replaced with a duty to consult constituent councils.
A further change applies at the point where the Secretary of State approves a new authority. For a locally led proposal, one brought forward by the councils themselves rather than directed by central government, the new legislation requires the Secretary of State to consult only such persons, if any, as they consider it necessary to consult.
The words “if any” are deliberate. Parliament has allowed this stage of the process to involve no consultation at all, if the Secretary of State judges that none is needed. This does not remove every consultation requirement across every route to establishing a strategic authority, but it marks a clear retreat from an area-wide guarantee.
Why did Parliament remove the area-wide consultation requirement?
Government’s stated rationale was to streamline the process for establishing strategic authorities, reducing delay and avoiding repeated consultation and consent exercises across successive stages of a proposal. In the House of Lords on 24 March 2026, ministers defended the changes on this basis.
Consultation and consent, ministers argued, would remain important features of locally developed proposals, even as the statutory framework became more flexible about who must be consulted and when.
That rationale should not be dismissed, and it should not be accepted without scrutiny either. There is evidence that statutory consultation under the previous regime did more than record opinions after the decision was effectively made.
The Norfolk and Suffolk Mayoral Combined County Authority consultation ran for eight weeks in early 2025 and received 3,115 responses, most from members of the public, feeding directly into the Secretary of State’s assessment of whether the statutory tests for establishing the authority were met.
In Greater Lincolnshire, cabinet material from North East Lincolnshire Council recorded amendments made to the proposal in response to consultation feedback, before it was submitted. Statutory consultation, in other words, has sometimes changed outcomes, not merely documented them.
What does the change mean for practitioners advising on strategic authority proposals now?
The practical effect is a shift in who holds a statutory place in the process of creating a new strategic authority. Before April 2026, people across the proposed area had a legal entitlement to be consulted. After April 2026, that entitlement belongs to the constituent councils, while other people may be consulted only if the proposing councils judge it appropriate.
This sits ahead of, not inside, the broader reform trailed in the 31 July Cabinet statement, which commits to replacing consultation by default with new forms of public participation and to reviewing where statutory duties to consult might be revoked as performative. The evidence available does not establish that the April changes were designed as a first instalment of that later policy.
The two may simply point in the same direction independently. What is clear is that the narrower duty was already in force, and already shaping who gets a formal say in new devolution proposals, before the wider policy was announced at all.
For practitioners, the immediate task is to establish which statutory route applies to a given proposal, whether that route still requires consultation beyond the constituent councils, and what mechanism, if any, exists for a resident who disagrees with their own council’s position.
The duty to take consultation responses into account has not been removed. But that duty only applies to people the law requires to be consulted. Now that fewer people fall into that group, often just the constituent councils, a resident outside it has no guarantee their view will be considered at all.
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