Burnham Brought Home the Invoice, Not the Power
Central government in this country collects more than 90p of every pound raised in tax. The OECD average is 53p. Britain is not merely centralised, it is an outlier among outliers, the kind of number that should embarrass a Treasury official into silence at a dinner party and somehow never does. Andy Burnham has spent his career campaigning against exactly this fact, and on 29 June, at the People's History Museum in Manchester, as Prime Minister he finally did something about it. Sort of.
The announcement itself was clean enough. Mayors of England's city regions will get a share of income tax revenue for the first time. They'll keep some of the business rates collected on their patch. They'll gain more control over housing, transport and skills, under a new "local first" principle that requires ministers to justify why a power should stay in Whitehall rather than devolve it. Fourteen Mayoral Strategic Authorities, a country's worth of Tracy Brabins and Kim McGuinnesses and Steve Rotherhams, standing on the Downing Street steps taking selfies, waiting to find out what they've actually been given.
Because what they haven't been given is a number. The exact share of income tax mayors will retain hasn't been decided. Chancellor John Healey will set it out in the autumn budget. The whole arrangement is meant to be "fiscally neutral," replacing something called the Integrated Settlement, a grant mechanism that was itself only finished this April, and was designed before anyone in government had decided to blow it up in favour of tax sharing. Britain has managed to build the plumbing for the old system and the announcement for the new one, in the wrong order, roughly six weeks apart.
The case for doing this at all is a strong one, and worth taking seriously before you start kicking the detail. A country where 90p in every pound is decided in London has no business complaining that its regions all look and vote the same. Prosper UK's proposal, that mayors get 2.5p of the 20p basic rate, a 12.5 per cent slice worth billions across England's city regions, is not a rounding error, it's a genuine transfer of fiscal weight to people who answer to a specific electorate on a specific date. Centre for Cities makes the sharper point: mayoral boundaries track real labour markets in a way Whitehall departments never will, so the incentive to grow the tax base sits, for once, with the person best placed to do something about it. If you think Britain's disease is an accountability vacuum, and I do, this is in principle the cure.
In principle. The problem is that Westminster has announced the transfer of money without announcing the transfer of consequence, which is the only part of devolution that was ever supposed to be the point.
Consider what happens when it goes wrong. Income tax receipts are volatile by nature and geographically lumpy by design; London's base bears no relation to the North East's. The government has promised an "equalisation system" so that places collecting less tax still get support, but nobody has said how that top-up is calculated, who signs off on it, or what happens to a mayor whose region simply has fewer high earners to tax — which is to say most of them. The Local Scrutiny Committees meant to hold mayors to account, per the 2026 Devolution Act, can investigate, recommend, and report to a Secretary of State. They were designed, on the evidence of the Fabian Society's own written submissions, before the Chancellor's fiscal devolution announcement existed. Britain has built an oversight body for a settlement that no longer applies and is now improvising the accountability for a settlement that hasn't been specified. That is a game of pass-the-parcel with the music still to be composed.
Ohio worked this out in 1971. The Regional Income Tax Agency exists because state law required, before a single dollar changed hands, that participating municipalities each impose the tax under statute, that a board of trustees be legally authorised to administer it, and that any agreement be approved by each town's legislative body and signed by its mayor personally. RITA now collects for nearly 400 cities and villages, roughly half of Ohio's taxing jurisdictions, on the back of a population threshold, a legal instrument and a chain of signatures that makes it obvious, at every stage, whose name is on the decision. Unglamorous municipal plumbing from a state most Britons couldn't find on a map, and it has more accountability architecture, built in year one, than Britain has produced fifty-five years later for a scheme worth billions.
The risk isn't that devolution fails. It's that it succeeds exactly as designed, and the design keeps the one lever that matters — the equalisation formula deciding which regions are "weak" and by how much — sitting in the Treasury, unelected and unreachable, while mayors take the local blame for a national arithmetic they never got to see. Burnham didn't bring power home. He brought home the invoice, and left the calculator in London.