A new report from The Centre for Cities examines how England’s ongoing national rail reform agenda intersects with the case for devolving rail powers to the country’s largest city regions outside London. The briefing focuses on six Established Mayoral Strategic Authorities (Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region, West Midlands, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire, and the North East) and argues that the reform agenda, while primarily designed to address operational fragmentation on the national network, also creates an opportunity to address a distinct problem: the spatial mismatch between how commuter rail services function economically and who currently controls them.
The centrepiece of the reform agenda is the Railways Bill, currently progressing through Parliament, which will establish Great British Railways (GBR) as a unified public body with oversight of both track and train operations. This consolidation most clearly benefits inter-city services, where a single national directing mind has an obvious rationale. But the Bill also contains provisions — specifically Clause 5 — that create a statutory basis for GBR to enter into partnership arrangements with mayoral authorities over local services.
Those partnerships would operate on a tiered basis, ranging from lighter collaborative arrangements with limited local influence over fares and ticketing, through to local commissioning arrangements in which mayors would gain meaningful control over service specifications, frequencies, farebox revenue, and branding, with GBR remaining the delivery body. The most extensive option is full devolution comparable to Merseyrail or the London Overground, involving transfer of operational responsibility and potentially assets to the local level.
The economic case for prioritising these city regions rests on previous Centre for Cities analysis estimating that network integration could bring 1.2 million more people within a 30-minute public transport journey of the six largest non-London city centres, with an associated annual economic output gain of £17 billion. A third of those connectivity benefits, the briefing states, would not be achievable without devolved rail powers specifically.
The report identifies two principal concerns with the current legislation. The Clause 5 powers apply to all current and future mayoral authorities without distinguishing the six established authorities, which have the largest economies, densest commuter networks, and most developed existing transport powers — meaning there is no explicit national commitment to advancing these places toward meaningful rail devolution, and the initiative falls to local bodies. There is also no indication that GBR will offer technical support to city regions seeking devolution but lacking the institutional capacity to pursue it, which risks making the extent of rail devolution a function of existing local capability rather than strategic need.
Without active alignment between national government, GBR, and metro mayors, the report warns, the provisions designed to tackle spatial fragmentation may not be taken up in the places best positioned to benefit from them.
You can read the full briefing here.
