Functional responsibilities for the Integrated Settlements 2025 to 2026
Published 30 January 2025
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Following the publication of the MoU, an “Employment Support” functional responsibility has been added to the integrated settlement. Therefore, the functional responsibilities for the integrated settlement for the 2025 to 2026 financial year are as follows.
1. Local Growth and Place
a. Activity that promotes place-based economic development, improves productivity, and aims to reduce inter-and-intra regional spatial economic disparities.
b. Coordination and delivery of local programmes to drive business productivity whilst ensuring integration between local and national business support activity, enabling businesses to access support.
c. Regeneration, place-making, and improvements to local infrastructure.
d. Activities that promote pride in place, including but not limited to measures to improve social cohesion, the improvement of public facilities and the public realm, for instance on high streets.
2. Local Transport
a. Oversight and delivery of the area’s transport strategy. This includes developing local transport plans and considering how transport will support wider objectives such as employment, housing and net zero.
b. Working with their Local Highway Authorities on delivery of local transport capital projects, including but not limited to highways maintenance and small-scale renewals as well as transformational local projects. This excludes strategic national transport infrastructure.
c. Managing local public transport services, including but not limited to the local bus network, mass transit, local rail integration, integrated multimodal fares, network information and branding, promoting safety and tackling anti-social behaviour.
d. Delivery of the local active travel strategy and schemes.
e. Delivery of local transport decarbonisation schemes, such as the local electric vehicle infrastructure funding programmes.
f. Strategic oversight of the local road network and promotion of road safety.
g. Undertaking scalable, feasible, and tangible transport innovation, including trialling new transport-related products and processes, improving existing services via technological upgrades, and implementing regulatory changes or best practice.
3. Adult Skills
a. All non-apprenticeship adult skills funding and functions, including but not limited to:
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Ensuring that residents aged 19 and over in their area, who are eligible for funding, have access to appropriate education and training
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Encouraging and providing adults with the skills and learning they need to equip them to progress into, or within, work; or equip them for an apprenticeship or other learning
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Provision of statutory entitlements to provide free courses for adults
4. Housing and Regeneration
a. Regeneration via enabling and improving local housing supply.
b. Delivery of capital investments to unlock additional housing and regeneration.
c. Remediation and development of brownfield sites.
5. Buildings’ Retrofit (Warm Homes)
a. Retrofitting social housing; and all other residential buildings focusing on households at risk of fuel poverty in the local area
b. Decarbonising public sector buildings managed by the MCAs or their constituent authorities and, where deemed reasonably practicable by the DESNZ Secretary of State, by wider public sector actors.
6. Employment Support
The same flexibilities which apply to the Local Transport, Adult Skills, Housing and Regeneration and Buildings Retrofit (pilot) themes will apply to the Employment Support theme.
a. Responsibility for supporting disabled people, people with long-term health conditions, and other agreed disadvantaged groups with complex barriers who are economically inactive, or at high risk of becoming economically inactive, to sustain work through delivery of supported employment.
b. DWP and the CA will work together on the design of how the new national Jobs and Careers Service will work in their area, and management of wider employment support, to deliver an integrated and locally responsive system that maximises outcomes for residents and employers.