The ghost at the devolution feast has been given a chair
Culture made it into the Devolution Act after all. But competence is permission, not duty, and for most small venues the lease matters more than the grant ever did.
When The Stage spoke to regional theatre leaders about the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, the complaint was simple. Culture wasn't in it. Steve Mannix at Colchester's Mercury called it a "potentially serious crisis", with up to £268,000 a year at risk. Douglas Rintoul at the New Wolsey warned that everything would hang on the "political persuasion" of an incoming mayor. Stephen Crocker at Norwich Theatre put it best: culture risked "becoming the ghost at the devolution feast".
Here's the bit worth knowing. The lobbying partly worked. The bill became the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act on 29 April 2026, and culture now sits in section 2 as a named area of competence for strategic authorities, alongside transport, housing and skills. Mayors can own it. Some will appoint someone to lead on it.
Want the full Act text? Good luck to you:
What hasn't happened is the part that actually protects a budget. Competence is permission, not duty. There is still no statutory obligation to fund a theatre, and Equity's tracker puts local government arts spending in Britain down 55% since 2010, from £1.19bn to £539m. When a council is choosing between statutory social care and a discretionary arts grant, permission loses every time.
So what does this mean for a village hall or a 142-seat volunteer venue that never sees a revenue grant anyway? Two things.
First, the decision makers are changing address. The officer who knows you, signs off your grant or quietly waves through your licence may be absorbed into a new authority within the year. Find out which one you'll sit in and when its first strategic plan is being drafted, because the priorities written into that document now will shape the next decade of local funding.
Second, watch the "one theatre per area" thinking Mannix flagged. Amateur venues rarely appear in those sums at all, which is both a protection and a danger. Most of us don't live on subsidy. We live on a lease, a peppercorn rent, a shared car park, a building owned by somebody else. Councils reviewing property portfolios are a bigger threat to us than any funding round.
If you know which combined authority you're about to land in, tell us. If you don't, that's this week's job.
