New fiscal powers for local leaders and communities are opening up opportunities for culture, creativity and heritage. We explore what the roadmap means for our sectors and how we might help shape what comes next.
Earlier this year, Culture Commons helped secure culture’s rightful place in England’s devolution framework. Now the financial arrangements backing devolution are starting to take shape—and with them, a more practical conversation about what places could do differently.
Published alongside last week’s Budget 2026, the Fiscal Devolution Roadmap sets out a funding model intended to give local and regional leaders greater freedom to plan, invest and pursue their own policy priorities.
From April 2027, Mayoral Strategic Authorities will receive a share of business rates income and benefit from growth in their regional tax base. Assigned income tax revenues will follow from April 2028. Alongside these changes come an Overnight Visitor Levy, new Good Growth Funds and additional funding to build institutional capacity.
Read alongside the government’s Rewiring the State cabinet statement, the roadmap gives greater substance to Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s commitment to move from devolution by deal to devolution by default. The vision for more locally integrated decision-making, focused on how services are experienced on the ground, is beginning to acquire the financial foundations needed to deliver it.
Throughout Culture Commons’ work on cultural devolution, we have argued that new responsibilities need resources and expertise behind them. Our research found places struggling to bridge the gap between cultural ambition and delivery capacity. Transferring further responsibilities without addressing that gap would compound the problem and simply be an outsourcing of difficult decisions.
The roadmap begins to address that concern. Some revenues will replace existing grants, so greater autonomy should not be mistaken for an equivalent increase in funding. But more predictable resources and greater spending flexibility could help places connect cultural ambitions with decisions about skills, transport, regeneration and investment over longer periods.
With culture now recognised within the devolution framework, greater financial autonomy gives regional leaders more scope to act on that mandate. The opportunity for our sectors is to help shape how those resources are used. Four developments - and the choices they open up - are particularly relevant to the proposals we have been advancing with our partners.
1. A new route from visitor spending to cultural investment
Our Bill recommendations called for an Overnight Accommodation Levy to connect visitor spending with the cultural and heritage assets that help attract it.
The proposed Overnight Visitor Levy would give all Strategic Authorities a discretionary power to raise revenue from paid overnight accommodation. Local leaders are expected to be able to set out investment plans by March 2028.
That opens a consequential local conversation. How much should support the festivals, collections, performances and historic places that bring visitors? How should benefits reach residents and communities across a region? A cultural allocation will need evidence, collaboration and an agreed purpose. There is an opportunity to develop those approaches now.
2. Greater scope to connect fragmented funding
Our research described councils and organisations assembling support from separate pots with incompatible timetables. The effort involved drains capacity that could otherwise support delivery.
Greater regional flexibility offers scope to connect investment around shared priorities. Mayors could help align public funding, commercial activity and philanthropy, adding value to the resources already supporting cultural life.
The test is whether that coordination produces more sustainable provision: stronger organisations, better-supported workforces and programmes that can develop beyond a single funding cycle.
3. Investment tools that could support larger ambitions
Good Growth Funds would bring funding tools together and align public financial institutions, pension funds and private capital behind regional priorities.
The package includes £165 million in 2027–28 for places with mayors to establish funds, plus £120 million in incubator capital for areas moving towards devolution. A £1.5 billion mayoral borrowing facility is planned from April 2028.
For culture, potential applications include heritage reuse, creative workspace and regeneration. Eligibility and delivery arrangements remain to be developed. Cultural partners therefore have an opportunity to help shape credible investment proposals—and establish how buildings will be sustained by viable operating models, skilled people and cultural activity.
4. A reason to get cultural governance right
Rewiring the State explicitly envisages greater local influence over cultural investment, including possible changes involving funding currently controlled by Arts Council England, while protecting individual cultural funding decisions from political interference.
Our proposed Culture Forums and Cultural Ecosystem Plans offer a practical starting point. They could connect councils, ACE, Historic England and other national bodies with businesses, practitioners and communities: agreeing priorities, coordinating investment and identifying where regional collaboration adds value.
Local authorities must gain capacity and influence through this process. Regional coordination should help them achieve together what they cannot achieve alone, with artistic independence and public participation built into the arrangements.
Help shape how these opportunities work
These developments give fresh purpose to the Open Policy Development Platform on cultural devolution that Culture Commons is building.
Partners will bring their own priorities into a shared programme: developing approaches to visitor-levy investment, strengthening cultural planning, exploring funding models and testing how regional collaboration can support local cultural life.
Our role is to connect evidence and experience in places with national and regional policy development, giving partners opportunities to develop proposals together, test them in practice and bring the findings to decision-makers.
We welcome organisations, authorities and funders interested in contributing. To explore how your priorities could help shape the programme, contact contact@culturecommons.uk.