Angela Rayner has been reappointed Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, with Prime Minister Andy Burnham confirming her return to government on 20 July 2026. She previously held the role, and the deputy premiership, from July 2024 until September 2025, when she resigned after an underpaid stamp duty bill was referred to the independent adviser on ministerial standards. An HMRC investigation later concluded she had not acted carelessly or sought to avoid tax, and she settled the £40,000 owed without penalty.
Of everything she oversaw the first time round, devolution is where her fingerprints are clearest.
The devolution CV
Labour’s 2024 manifesto committed to “landmark devolution legislation to take back control”, deepening existing devolution deals and widening them to new areas – a pledge Rayner, as Shadow Housing Secretary at the time, also contributed to building. In government, she had the job of turning it into policy. Her department signed off devolution deals for Hull and East Yorkshire and Greater Lincolnshire that September, then followed it in December with the English Devolution White Paper, setting out a standing framework of Strategic Authorities open to any area by default. At the Convention of the North in February 2025, she confirmed that, under the Government’s new devolution priority programme, the whole of the North would have elected mayors by May 2026, drawing previously reluctant Lancashire into the mayoral system.
The legislative piece of the programme, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, was introduced under her name in July 2025. It had a contentious passage through the House of Lords, and by the time it received Royal Assent in April 2026, Rayner had already left the Department due to her unresolved tax affairs. Her successor, Steve Reed, saw it through to completion. The framework it created – Strategic Authorities, the mayoral model, the reorganisation programme now under way – is nonetheless one Rayner set in motion. The Act established a framework of Strategic Authorities, standardised tiers of devolved powers and routes to further devolution, alongside the wider local government reorganisation programme.
Skin in the game
In the past, Rayner has tended to frame her position on devolution around her own experience rather than as an abstract policy preference. At the 2025 Local Government Association conference, she described herself as someone whose own life was changed by local government, pointing to the Sure Start centre and council home that supported her as a young single mother. It’s the same instinct behind a line her department used when announcing the “Devolution Revolution” that was set out in the English Devolution White Paper: that decisions are best made by people with, in her words, “skin in the game”. It fits her own constituency too, Ashton-under-Lyne, within Greater Manchester, the combined authority most often held up across government as the model for other authorities to mirror.
A new address for an old argument
The devolution brief she returns to sits inside a different arrangement to the one she left. On the day of her reappointment, the Government confirmed, via a written ministerial statement to the House of Lords, that the Prime Minister is establishing No.10 North as “the engine room of devolution and growth across government”. The statement sets out a targeted transfer of overarching strategic functions: local economic growth and devolution strategy moves out of MHCLG, and local economic growth policy moves out of the Treasury, both directly into No.10 North, so that growth policy and regional empowerment are no longer handled apart from one another. MHCLG retains “some remaining functions” in this space, but strategic ownership of devolution policy no longer rests solely with Rayner’s department.
It’s not a change Rayner has argued against. In the weeks before her reappointment, while out of government, she backed Burnham’s plan for a Manchester-based centre of devolution, saying Whitehall “empires hoard their own power” and calling for “much deeper cultural change” in how Britain is governed. She went further, arguing that the devolution reforms she had introduced would “only reach its full potential if central government changes too, with No.10 driving it as a core mission.” In other words, No.10 North seems to align very closely with what she herself had been asking for. The open question, as the LSE’s Tony Travers notes, is whether the new unit can do what an earlier version of the same idea inside No. 10 struggled to: securing support across Whitehall departments, including from the Treasury, for the Government’s devolution agenda and more decentralised approach to overseeing its delivery.
The bit still on her desk
Devolution strategy might now sit mostly with No.10 North, but Rayner’s department will oversee major devolution programmes like local government reorganisation, so she remains closely involved in delivering this policy commitment. On the day of her reappointment, the House of Lords debated decisions confirming new unitary councils for 19 of the 21 remaining two-tier areas, with Cambridgeshire/Peterborough and West Sussex still undecided. Lord Jamieson, Shadow Minister for Housing, Communities and Local Government, questioned whether the Government’s own principles on population size and local consent had been applied consistently, and Baroness Pinnock, Liberal Democrat Lords Spokesperson for Housing, Communities and Local Government, said it was imperative that Rayner make reconsidering the decisions her first task in the role.
Let her Rayn begin
Rayner returns to a devolution programme she was largely responsible for building, and to a government that has made devolution an explicit priority under Burnham. Her own recent public comments suggest she supports both the direction of that programme and the creation of No.10 North to drive it. What has changed is the arrangement around her: strategic ownership of devolution now sits with a new unit rather than her department alone, and she inherits specific, unresolved objections to reorganisation decisions taken in her absence. Both will need to be worked through as the programme moves toward the local elections scheduled for May 2027.