The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 (Transitional and Saving Provisions) (England) Regulations 2026 were made at 4.43 pm on 29 April 2026 and came into force on 30 April 2026. The instrument, made by the Secretary of State under section 108(9) of the 2026 Act, is a short but important piece of legal housekeeping as the wider devolution legislation begins to operate. For Policy Wire readers, the central point is continuity. The regulations do not create a new devolution model or confer fresh powers on councils. They set out which earlier rules continue to apply in limited cases so that existing combined county authority work is not unsettled by the arrival of the new Act.
Regulation 2 deals with consultations already carried out under section 46(3) of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023 before the 2026 Act was passed. Where that consultation related to regulations establishing a combined county authority in the area of a listed council, the amendments made by section 4 and Part 2 of Schedule 1 to the 2026 Act are switched off for the purpose of making those regulations. The listed councils are Essex, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Portsmouth City, Southampton City, Southend-on-Sea City, Suffolk and Thurrock. In practice, proposals affecting those areas can continue to be processed on the earlier statutory footing if the consultation step had already been completed before the new Act was passed.
This is a transitional provision in the strict legal sense. It preserves the pre-existing route for a defined pipeline of devolution regulations rather than forcing those schemes back through a revised legislative process. For local authorities, governance officers and devolution teams, that reduces the risk of delay, repeated consultation or argument over which version of the law governs a live proposal. The drafting matters because Chapter 1 of Part 2 of the 2023 Act was extensively amended by the 2026 Act. Without a saving provision, councils and officials could have faced uncertainty over whether consultation work already completed remained legally sufficient. The regulations are intended to prevent that break in continuity.
Regulation 2 also applies sections 102 and 103 of the 2026 Act to these 2023 Act regulations as if they had come into force before those sections themselves commenced. The parent Act describes those sections as covering the saving of orders and regulations relating to combined authorities and combined county authorities, and the power to make consequential provision. That places earlier-style CCA regulations for the named areas within the Act's broader transitional machinery. For practitioners, the point is procedural rather than political: the government is making clear that regulations completed under the earlier route should still benefit from the Act's saving and consequential protections.
Regulation 3 addresses a separate interpretive point. Schedule 18 to the 2026 Act amended section 424(1) of the Greater London Authority Act 1999, which is a definitions provision. The new regulations state that those amendments do not apply for the purposes of section 44 of the Local Audit and Accountability Act 2014 or section 23 of the Local Government Act 2003. In plain terms, the revised Greater London Authority definition is not being allowed to flow through automatically into those two provisions. The effect is to preserve the existing interpretive position for the relevant audit and local government finance legislation, despite the wider definitional changes made elsewhere in the 2026 Act.
The explanatory note says no, or no significant, impact on business, charities or the public and voluntary sector is foreseen, and refers readers to the impact assessment prepared for the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026. That is typical for a narrowly technical instrument of this kind, where the principal policy assessment sits with the parent Act rather than the transitional regulations themselves. Even so, the measure has operational value. For affected councils, legal advisers and officials in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, it resolves a basic implementation question: whether work already done under the 2023 Act can still be relied on after the 2026 Act changed the statutory scheme.
The regulations were signed by Miatta Fahnbulleh, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The timing is notable. The instrument was made and signed on 29 April 2026 and took effect the following day, showing that ministers wanted the transitional position settled immediately as the main Act began to come into force. The practical reading is straightforward. If a qualifying CCA consultation had already been carried out before the passage of the 2026 Act, the government intends that process to continue under the earlier rules for the limited purpose of making the relevant regulations. Outside those saved cases, and subject to the wider commencement arrangements, the new devolution framework introduced by the 2026 Act remains the governing position.