Policy paper

Functional responsibilities for the Integrated Settlements 2026 to 2030

Published 26 November 2025

Applies to England

Integrated Settlements will include central government funding falling under thematic policy areas (‘themes’). Mayoral Strategic Authorities have specific ‘functional responsibilities’ under each of these themes that specify the role of the Mayoral Strategic Authority. Central government will use the functional responsibilities to identify whether a funding line should be included in the Integrated Settlements. The functional responsibilities for the Integrated Settlement for the SR25 period are as follows. There will be scope at Spending Review 2027 to review the functional responsibilities.

1. Economic development and regeneration

a. Activity that promotes place-based economic development including growth in the visitor economy, 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. Transport and local infrastructure

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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. Skills and employment support

a. All non-apprenticeship adult skills funding and functions, including but not limited to:

• Ensuring that residents aged 19 and over in their area, who are eligible for funding, have access to appropriate education and training
• 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
• Provision of statutory entitlements to provide free courses for adults

b. Working with employers and education providers in the construction sector to deliver bespoke training, sector workforce development activity and increase provision to grow and retain the local construction workforce.

c. Ensuring that residents who are over compulsory school age but under 19 or who are aged 19 or over, and for whom an Education, Health and Care plan is in place, have access to suitable education and training (sufficiency of places and diversity of provision).

d. Leadership and co-ordination and provision of services in the area to support young people (aged 19+) who are NEET, or who are at risk of becoming NEET, to access skills support which enables them to move into education, employment or training.

e. 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.*

f. DWP and the CA will work together on the joint actions and priorities identified in their local Get Britain Working plan, including relating to how they will work closely with the Jobs and Careers Service to ensure an integrated approach to local and national employment support and a locally responsive system that maximises outcomes for residents and employers.

* As agreed with GMCA, central government will pilot devolution of a broader set of Skills and Employment Support functions and funding to GMCA to support their ‘Prevention Demonstrator’ proposal, to include:

g. Responsibility for supporting individuals who face barriers to employment, including disabled people, people with long-term health conditions, and, at a minimum, other agreed disadvantaged groups who are economically inactive or at high risk of becoming so, to move towards, enter and sustain work through delivery of evidence informed personalised employment support, outside of healthcare pathways other than those agreed.

4. Housing and strategic planning

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. Environment and climate change

a. Overseeing the Local Nature Recovery Strategy to coordinate action, funding and monitoring for nature recovery and wider environmental delivery across the range of delivery partners in the region.

b. Retrofitting social housing; and all other residential buildings focusing on households at risk of fuel poverty in the local area.

c. 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.^{[footnote 2]}

6. Health, wellbeing and public service reform

a. Setting the regional ambition on homelessness, in partnership with local authorities, and develop regional structures to deliver these ambitions.

b. Encouraging a preventative approach to homelessness and rough sleeping.

c. Convening homelessness and rough sleeping partners, including in the voluntary, community and faith sectors, to strengthen services across the region.

d. Delivering, as appropriate, region-specific interventions that will enhance the statutory work of Local Authorities and relevant public sector partners with respect to homelessness and rough sleeping.

1. The Transport and Local Infrastructure functional responsibilities do not apply in respect of the Greater London Authority as transport funds are administered and delivered outside of the GLA’s Integrated Settlement. ↩

2. Central Government will extend the devolution of Buildings Retrofit to North East, Liverpool City Region, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire Combined Authorities and the Greater London Authority over the course of this Parliament. Funding for Buildings Retrofit is subject to the upcoming Warm Homes Plan. ↩