May 8: The day city regions fractured from within

When my LED Confidential podcast interviewed chief executive of the North East Combined Authority (NECA) Henry Kippin last year, he described how the new Mayoral Combined Authority (MCA) was stitching together cities, towns and rural areas behind a strategic narrative crafted by his Labour mayor, Kim McGuinness. Her cabinet at the time comprised five Labour members, one Conservative and one Liberal Democrat – workable pluralism – held together by a broadly shared direction of travel and North East traditions.I looked at NECA's new cabinet composition on the morning of 8 May and thought ‘that fabric has just been torn to shreds'.The new political arithmetic of the city regionsUnderstanding my morning afterthoughts requires looking at the results through a distinctive lens – that of the changes in council constituent authorities of the six Mayoral Strategic Authorities (MSAs) now receiving Integrated Settlements from Government (IS6).In the ‘whole council' elections held within IS6 boundaries, the picture is stark. Reform UK won 51% of seats contested, Labour 16%, Greens 10%, Lib Dems 9%, with the Conservatives and Others both on (7%).Not all constituent local authorities had elections, and some had elections by thirds. So, total IS6 councillor membership is now Reform as the biggest party on 33% and Labour on 32%, with the other four between 8%-10% each.One other aspect of the lens is equally important. Within city regions there is now a chasm between the political dynamic in the core city and its hinterlands.Reform UK dominates city region hinterlands – 38% of all seats compared with Labour's 30%.In the core cities – Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield – Reform UK has a modest 14% of seats and is fourth behind Labour (40%), Greens (18%) and the Lib Dems (16%).Core cities are politically diverse, with no overall control (NOC) in four of them – most extremely in Birmingham, with each of five parties, plus ‘Other', having between 12 and 23 seats each.What this means for metro mayoral governanceThe MCA cabinet-level consequences of this are what matters for leadership and governance.NECA's McGuinness now chairs a cabinet with four Reform leaders, one Conservative, one Labour and one Lib Dem, contingent on them forming a minority administration in Newcastle. Her patient work of 2025-26 stitching together a city region narrative must now begin again, in conditions that are drastically different.And NECA is not alone. Tracy Brabin's West Yorkshire cabinet is transitioning to four Reform UK-dominated councils and one Labour (Leeds). Richard Parker's West Midlands has Birmingham at the region's heart in an extreme six-way NOC, plus two cabinet members each from Labour, the Conservatives and Reform.Bad timing…From April, the Government agreed integrated settlements with the Greater London Authority and the six MSAs.Each of them received large, flexible, multi-year financial pots, granting mayors the ability to shift resources between local priorities like transport, housing, and skills in exchange for meeting rigorous, pre-agreed performance targets.The IS6 needs to demonstrate delivery on transport strategies, housing trajectories, skills plans and net zero targets among others. Longer-term investments must be prioritised and sequenced. The electoral arithmetic post-7 May has just made this immeasurably harder to achieve.A fundamental structural flaw? The three testsThe devolution model has rested on an implicit assumption: that constituent councils share a broadly compatible narrative about economic development, spatial strategy and public service reform – and that the integrated settlement provides the financial platform to act on it. That assumption is about to be aggressively stress-tested before it has bedded in.First, Labour mayors with minority Labour cabinets must build new shared understandings across a cabinet table that spans fundamentally different democratic mandates.Reform-led councils in places like Sunderland, Wakefield, Barnsley and Walsall carry ‘left-behind' briefs that sit uneasily alongside the agglomeration logic and higher-value sector strategies that Labour, Green and Lib Dem-dominated core cities broadly share.There are polycentric models of city region development that can bridge this divide – but negotiating them, locally and nationally, just got considerably harder.The second challenge is financial. The integrated settlement is not a passive funding stream. It requires cabinets to make active, collective choices about priorities, sequencing and trade-offs.Transport strategies, housing trajectories, net zero targets – all of these must be agreed across cabinet tables that are now, in several cases, politically irreconcilable in their starting positions.The IS framework was designed to reward coherent long-term planning. It was not designed for zero-sum political conflict.The third challenge is structural and may be the most consequential of all. If the IS6 are visibly struggling to agree a shared narrative and translate it into budgets, what does that say for those seeking progression to MCA and MSA status?Reform-dominated counties – Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex – are next in line for MCA and local government reorganisation. The devolution Act provides the legislative framework. The integrated settlement provides the financial incentive. But the political arithmetic in those counties may provide neither the will nor the confidence to move forward.Resolving the fracturesPassionate advocates of devolution have long argued that properly resourced and empowered place-based leadership can do the big things Whitehall cannot. The Act and Integrated Settlements are supposed to prove that case decisively.However, as the new MCA cabinets convene for the first time, they face a more demanding test than anyone expected – not just of their own leadership, but of the model itself. How they navigate it will determine whether 7 May was a disruption devolution absorbs, or the day the great city regions began to fracture from within.David Marlow is a co-host of LED Confidential, a podcast reaching economic development and place-making professionals in the UK and globally. He is a former local authority and regional development agency chief executive, visiting professor at the Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS) at Newcastle University and founder and chief executive of the Third Life Economics research and consultancy company

Title

DEVOLUTION

May 8: The day city regions fractured from within

By David Marlow | 21 May 2026

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