The UK government can meet some of its biggest challenges by combining mayoral devolution with its mission-led approach. Empowering local leaders to deliver on national missions will mean giving them greater control and bigger budgets.
In the UK, Keir Starmer’s Labour government has had a rocky first year in office. With opinion polls tumbling and rebellion on the back benches, his government seems far less stable than its massive 2024 majority would suggest. An underlying current of turbulence makes the job of governing increasingly challenging. In recent years, the UK has had a constantly changing political context, destabilised by Brexit, polarisation and constitutional tensions. As in many developed countries, political and economic instabilities have emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crash and the subsequent period of public spending austerity. At the same time, the state is responding to ongoing public health and environmental crises.
In the face of these challenges, the UK government offers two innovations that could make the country a much better place to live. Both are about fixing the foundations of policymaking. First, the government has expanded the existing plan to create mayoral authorities across England, grouping local authorities together under elected mayors, and devolving funding and powers. Second, Starmer’s Labour have built its wider agenda around five national ‘missions’, which focus the attention of government, business, and civic institutions on a clear set of achievable goals. Both agendas will only work if they are ambitious, but their success will also depend on ensuring that they work together.
In research published earlier this year in the Regional Studies journal, we found that it is the combination of mayors and missions that provides the strongest foundation for delivering real change in the UK. Mayors need to be empowered to achieve their missions, but also guided by them. Mayors can be figureheads for a place, work directly towards national missions, implement cross-cutting programmes, convene partnerships, and lead local innovations with new evidence and data. However, more central government support is needed with investment in capacity, a broader range of powers, and greater freedom from central targets and siloes.
To explore the potential of mission-oriented mayors, we investigated a particularly complex policy challenge – how to make cities healthier places to live. Currently, urban environments are a major factor in ‘non-communicable diseases’ like cancer and heart disease, which account for 85% of all deaths in the UK. But making cities healthier will require coordinated action among a huge range of actors. Despite decades of government promises to prioritise prevention over treatment, the coordination challenges have remained.
It is in response to this coordination challenge that there is significant potential for empowering mayors within a national mission framework. The national government needs to create the right structural conditions, especially in terms of policy and budgetary flexibility. In our article ‘How democratically elected mayors can achieve mission-oriented policies in turbulent times’, we offer five recommendations for realising the potential of mission-oriented mayors:
- They have legitimacy through their direct election and role as a local figurehead. This enables them to build a bold, forward-looking vision to galvanise local actors and build trust among local communities. Mobilising this at the national level will require powerful national mission boards that are sensitive to local voices.
- They can use partnership working to identify problems and opportunities for mission delivery. National missions will need to manage the core tension between building up local priorities and potentials, on the one hand, and ensuring that local places are contributing what is needed to realise national missions, on the other.
- They can use their formal powers to effectively shift a range of local actors towards a problem-focused approach. However, they are currently constrained by a lack of powers in key sectors and are caught up in centrally directed policy silos. Widening and deepening ‘single settlements’ is a crucial step forward.
- They can reach across sectors more easily than local authority leaders, but creating integration between local partners is undermined by overcentralisation in the UK. Rather than treating missions as a new method of central control or yet another new layer of bureaucracy, missions need to reform existing systems and hierarchies.
- They have shown the potential for important innovations in the creation and use of analytical and data tools. An important role for a mission-driven approach is to identify innovative sources of evidence and build them into mission planning at a national level. This helps to build trust and shared objectives between different actors.
When considered together, mayoral devolution within national missions holds significant potential to solve complex policy challenges and thus to make the UK a better place to live. However, realising this potential means thinking carefully about how the two agendas intersect, and it means changing existing practices, rather than just adding new layers of bureaucracy. Missions provide strategic direction, long-term thinking, and shared goals. Mayors are effective network builders and policy innovators who mobilise new forms of legitimacy. Together, they offer a positive reform agenda for the UK’s creaking status quo.
This blog is based on the following article:
Ayres, S., Newman, J., Sandford, M., Barnfield, A., & Bates, G. (2025). How democratically elected mayors can achieve mission-oriented policies in turbulent times. Regional Studies, 59(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2025.2472014
Connect with the Author
Jack Newman is a Research Fellow at the University of Bristol. His research considers how the reform of political institutions can lead to more effective public policy. In recent years, this has been focused on decentralisation and spatial policy in England.
: jacknewman.bsky.social 
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Sarah Ayres is Professor of Public Policy and Governance at Bristol University. She is a political scientist with an interest in English devolution, central-local relations and Whitehall decision-making.
