A dry bit of law published on legislation.gov.uk will land rather closer to home than it first appears. From Thursday 29 October 2026, one more highways power moves from the Secretary of State to England's devolved mayors, giving combined authorities a direct say over whether councils in their area can charge undertakers for street works. According to legislation.gov.uk, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 (Commencement No. 3) Regulations 2026 were made on Monday 26 October and signed by Transport minister Justin Madders. For northern mayoral areas, it is another small but real shift of decision-making away from Whitehall.

In plain English, the change is about who gets to approve charging schemes when works are carried out in roads maintained by highway authorities. The explanatory note says paragraph 2 of Schedule 9 amends sections 74A and 74B of the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991 so the power can move from ministers to the mayors of Mayoral Combined Authorities and Mayoral Combined County Authorities. That is technical language for a simple point: the sign-off can now sit closer to the roads being dug up, closed off or coned off, rather than being held centrally in London.

For northern areas with established mayors, that matters even if the wording looks narrow. Street works charges are one of the few tools councils can use to push utilities and contractors to plan better, finish faster and think harder about the cost of disruption. Any move that lets local leaders approve those charging arrangements themselves is another step towards transport decisions being made by people who have to answer for queues, bus delays and hit to town-centre trade. Anyone who has sat at temporary lights on a weekday morning will know this is not just legal housekeeping.

It is also the sort of devolution measure that often gets missed because it arrives in the form of a statutory instrument rather than a big speech. But this is how power usually shifts in England: not in one dramatic handover, but bit by bit, with ministers letting go of one function at a time. For combined authorities across the North, that still counts. Whether the area is built around a big city region or a wider county deal, the principle is the same: if the disruption is local, the approval power should be local too.

The change is not universal. The regulations make clear that where a highway authority is not part of a mayoral combined authority or a mayoral combined county authority, the Secretary of State remains the appropriate authority for approving charges under sections 74A and 74B of the 1991 Act. Whitehall also keeps that role where an application is submitted before the first mayor for an area has taken office. So this is not a clean break across England. It is a split system, with devolved areas getting one route and non-devolved areas another.

There is a second caveat. The order only brings part of Schedule 9 into force on 29 October 2026. It commences paragraph 2, along with the linked elements of section 26 and paragraph 1 of Schedule 9, but it does not commence paragraphs 3 and 4. That matters because commencement orders are what turn an Act from a promise on paper into something that affects day-to-day decisions. A law can be passed months earlier, but it only starts to bite once ministers switch on the relevant provisions.

The government says this particular move is not expected to cause a major shock. The note attached to the regulations says no separate impact assessment has been produced because no, or no significant, effect on the private, voluntary or public sector is foreseen, although a wider assessment was prepared for the parent Act. Still, there is a political point here that readers across the North will recognise. The English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 was meant to pull authority out of the London machine and place more of it in local hands. From Thursday 29 October, this order does exactly that in one narrow but concrete area of transport policy.