Labour was elected to deliver change and our English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill will do just that

After years of broken promises, failure and decline, many will wonder whether that’s even possible. I get that.

For all the talk of levelling up, they’ve seen the good jobs, secure homes and strong communities that our parents and grandparents relied on – that I relied on as a young mum – fall by the way side.

It’s my mission to rebuild these foundations of a good life for all communities in all parts of our country.

From my frontline experience of local government and seeing it change not just my life but many others, I know we won’t achieve this unless we fundamentally change the way our country is run.

Nothing less will do. That means handing power back where it belongs: to local leaders with skin in the game, so they can make decisions on what really matters to their communities.

This is what our landmark English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, being introduced to Parliament today, aims to do – drive the biggest transfer of power out of Whitehall to our regions in a generation and make devolution the default setting.

Through this, we’re ending a begging bowl, micro-managing culture and giving mayors new powers, including levers over planning, housing and regeneration to Get Britain Building as part of our Plan for Change. These powers, along with spending flexibilities announced at the Spending Review, will give them the tools to get growth going.

The Bill will also help rebuild local government, including fixing our broken local audit system, so that it can once again deliver good local services that people can rely on. 

We’ll get local leaders working together over larger areas to drive through big pro-growth projects like integrated transport networks and housing by creating new Strategic Authorities.

We’ll give local people a new Community Right to Buy to save much-loved community assets like pubs and shops, a bigger say in shaping their local area through effective neighbourhood governance and more protections for local sports grounds.  So, at all levels, we’re backing and unshackling local leaders and local communities, with many others queuing up to join them since we published the English Devolution White Paper in December.

This is about change that people can see and feel around them: more money in their pockets, decent jobs, new homes, good transport links, thriving high streets, opportunities for young people. Our devolution revolution will deliver this and more.  It will help us build a modern state based on a fairer, stronger partnership between central and local government and help renew people’s faith that it can deliver for them.   It’s fair to say that faith has been tested in recent years.

Too often, the system works against rather than with local leaders by hoarding power and investment centrally, making regional inequalities worse rather than better.  As a result, too many decisions affecting too many people are made by too few.

Yet, you only have to look at what’s being achieved by local leaders with the powers to really deliver to see there’s a better way.  From building tens of thousands of new homes and getting people into work to fighting child poverty, making public transport quicker and cheaper and investing in arts, culture and sport, brilliant, ambitious Mayors from Greater Manchester to Cambridgeshire and Peterborough are making a difference, every day, for their regions.

Working with them, we’ve already achieved so much after just a year in office. We’re on track to complete devolution in the North and, for the first time, have created integrated funding settlements for Greater Manchester and the West Midlands, with Liverpool City Region, London, the North East, South Yorkshire and West Yorkshire set to follow.

Around 44 million people stand to reap the rewards – close to 80 per cent of the country. The changes we’re making through the Bill will make it easier for areas that aren’t currently benefitting from devolution to take it up, putting this unprecedented expansion in local power on a firmer, more ambitious footing. This is what we committed to in our manifesto and we meant it.

Within days of this Government taking office, Secretaries of State were giving up newly-won powers for the sake of our towns and cities, with the Prime Minister leading the charge. It has not always been easy, but real change takes hard work.  We’re totally rewiring power in England; an irreversible, historic shift from Whitehall to the town hall.

 Real change that puts politics back in the service of working people. This is what it means to take back control.

Where others promised this and failed the British people, this Labour government is delivering.

Angela Rayner is the Deputy Prime Minister

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