![](https://emergencyservicestimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ESS-Button-resized.png")
On 31st July the Cabinet Office published Rewiring the State, a statement setting out the government’s vision for devolution in England. Most of the coverage has focused on the increase in the number of Mayors and on the transfer of powers to them.
What isn’t getting nearly as much attention is the commitment to make fundamental changes to the governance of emergency services. Changes that have implications for accountability and which raise important questions about the public’s role in decision-making.
The Cabinet Office statement says the government will give areas more local democratic control over public services ‘from health to policing to education’, including through new Deputy Mayor roles with responsibility for key services. To make that work, it commits to aligning public service boundaries by the end of the Parliament: new local police units matched to local authorities, and regional police forces, fire and rescue services and Integrated Care Boards aligned to strategic authority boundaries.
Where scale demands it, that alignment may be to several strategic authorities rather than one. Alongside this, funding for preventative services will be pooled and budgets set around places rather than departments.
The direction of travel
None of this comes out of the blue. The English Devolution White Paper, published in December 2024, set out the ambition to align police, fire and health boundaries with strategic authorities, and established that, where geographies match, Mayors would by default take on Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) and Fire and Rescue Authority functions. That framework was placed on a statutory footing by the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act in April 2026.
In November 2025, the Home Office confirmed that PCCs will be abolished at the end of their current terms in May 2028, with their functions passing to Mayors. In areas without an elected Mayor, the functions will be managed by Police and Crime Boards made up of council leaders.
This model is not new: the Mayor of London has held policing powers since 2000, Greater Manchester since 2017 and West Yorkshire since 2021, with South Yorkshire and York and North Yorkshire following in 2024. What Rewiring the State adds is a firm end-of-Parliament deadline and, crucially, a commitment to making the boundaries line up.
The reference to ‘regional police forces’ fits with a separate white paper published in January this year, From local to national: a new model for policing, which proposes reducing the number of forces by merging today’s 43 territorial forces into larger regional units.
Rewiring the State now ties that consolidation to the wider devolution map. Taken together, the two agendas point towards fewer, larger police forces, each aligned to a strategic authority and accountable to a Mayor rather than a standalone commissioner.
Big budgets, big risks
For the services themselves, the implications are significant. Policing is typically the largest single function a Mayoral authority holds, bringing substantial budgets, operational risk and public scrutiny. Fire and rescue governance is smaller in financial terms but no less sensitive: fire services are deeply rooted in their communities, and their identity is often intensely local. Folding both into strategic authority structures, on a common boundary, is a major undertaking to deliver within this Parliament.
It is also not without risk. When the previous government sought to transfer PCC functions to the Mayor of the West Midlands, the move was overturned in the High Court after a challenge found the consultation underpinning it was inadequate. That case is a useful reminder that structural change of this kind is only as durable as the process behind it.
The need for consultation
This is where I would sound a note of caution. Reorganising where policing, fire and health sit is not a technical exercise. It changes who holds power over services that people rely on in their worst moments, and it touches trust, identity and the everyday relationship between communities and the state. Changes of that magnitude only work when the people affected are genuinely brought into shaping them.
Yet the same statement that promises this reorganisation also signals a retreat from consultation. It proposes to replace ‘consultation by default’ with new forms of participation, and to consider revoking what it calls ‘performative’ statutory duties to consult. There is a fair point buried in that language: too much consultation has been box-ticking, arriving after the real decisions were taken. But the answer to poor consultation is better consultation, not less of it. The larger and more sensitive the change, the stronger the case for bringing people in early and for real.
An opportunity to engage
Done well, the prize is real. Services built around places rather than institutions, with pooled funding for prevention, could change how effectively those services work together and improve how people experience policing, fire and care. Done in a rush, without meaningful engagement, the same reforms risk weakening accountability and community trust at the very moment that trust is most needed.
The detail will come this autumn, when the government publishes a white paper setting out the alignment of public service geographies and the timetable for change. For emergency services leaders, it may be wise not to wait. You have the opportunity to engage early, and to insist that the public is engaged too.
*This article was co-authored by Simon Angelides, CEO and Dr Zoe Cookson, COO of The Consultation Institute.
To read similar articles, check out our Leadership channel.
