Integrated Settlement

In April 2025, the West Midlands Combined Authority will be the first English region (alongside Greater Manchester) to receive an Integrated Settlement.

What is the Integrated Settlement?

Life before the Integrated Settlement was complex.

We received dozens of individual funds from Government, each with their own rules and targets. We and our local authority partners also had to spend a lot of time and resource bidding into competitive national processes.

The Integrated Settlement will change this for the better. It will bring together funding from government that relates to five functional responsibilities (Adult Skills and Employment, Housing and Regeneration, Net Zero (Buildings Retrofit), Transport and Local Growth and Place) into a single funding pot.

The first Integrated Settlement will run from 1 April 2025 to 31 March 2026, and will deliver a range of services and infrastructure projects. This includes driving forward schemes to turn brownfield sites into homes, maintaining the region’s bus network, funding skills and training provision, growing the Business Growth West Midlands support system for local businesses and making homes and buildings more energy efficient to reduce energy bills and carbon emissions.

What does it mean for the West Midlands, residents and businesses?

The Integrated Settlement will give us and our local authority partners greater control and choice over what we can spend devolved funding on.

This will help us to deliver more impact for the people of the West Midlands because we will be able to tailor our investments more closely to the region’s circumstances.

We will get a single pot of funding, rather than fragmented, standalone pots of funding. This will allow us to address complex challenges and opportunities that require a multi-pronged approach – like improving the economy or making progress towards reaching net zero emissions, for example.

We will have greater certainty over the funding we are likely to receive in future. This will allow us to address longer-term opportunities and challenges.

And for the first time, we will be able to move a limited amount of funding between policy areas – from one functional responsibility to another – so long as we can still deliver the outcomes we agree with government.

How much will the West Midlands get?

The first settlement for (financial year) 2025 will be £389 million. This figure includes over 21 individual funds from seven different government departments.

The links below give a breakdown of each of the funds that make up the Integrated Settlement and how our allocations were decided.

The funding for next year’s Integrated Settlement is additional to the £211 million for transport that was already devolved to the West Midlands as part of the City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement, which will be included in our overall settlement from April 2026.

This £600 million is not new money. It is money that we were expecting to come to the region from Government, in most cases to continue things we are already delivering. But through the Integrated Settlement, it will come to us with the advantages described above.

This is only the first Integrated Settlement. The Comprehensive Spending Review, expected in late spring 2025, will set out our allocation for 2026 and 2027.

The Integrated Settlement includes the majority of funding the region receives from government but isn’t the sum total of our budget, which also includes, for example, the transport levy paid by local authorities and Investment Programme.

How are local authorities involved?

Local authorities have and will be central to the development and delivery of the Integrated Settlement.

All seven constituent local authorities are developing Place-Based Strategies, which will set out their vision for how funding – from the Integrated Settlement and other sources – can be used to transform communities and places, building on their existing plans and visions.

Local authorities will also be central to delivering many of the projects and interventions that will be funded through the Integrated Settlement.

What will happen next?

WMCA Board will be asked to consider the terms of the Integrated Settlement, the ‘Functional Strategies’ that will explain how we propose to spend the Integrated Settlement and a number of formal funding decisions.
The WMCA will receive the first Integrated Settlement payment from Government on 1 April 2025.
In late spring 2025, the Government will confirm as part of the Comprehensive Spending Review how much money we will receive through the Integrated Settlement for the (financial) years 2026 and 2027.