HM Government will not introduce primary legislation or a statutory instrument formally enabling the transfer of identified No. 10 / Whitehall functions to Greater Manchester before 2026-08-20.

Base rate for formal legislative instrument within 10 weeks of a major UK devolution announcement is approximately 0.04 — no historical precedent exists for this speed in Westminster devolution. Each framework independently arrives at NO through distinct mechanisms: Marxist reads the announcement as ideological surplus already extracted, making the instrument cost-with-no-return; Austrian reads bureaucratic rent-preservation and the knowledge problem in function-specification as guaranteeing lag; Keynesian reads institutional liquidity preference and animal-spirits substitution as the mechanism by which announcement satisfies the political demand without legislative commitment; Institutionalist reads path-dependent transaction costs and the prerogative basis of No. 10 functions as making the statutory vehicle legally novel and slow. No framework identifies a plausible accelerant strong enough to compress 11-18 months of historical precedent into 10 weeks. The pre-negotiated-SI scenario is the only credible falsifier, and there is no public evidence of it. Confidence is adjusted upward from the 0.82 framework average to 0.88 because the base rate is lower than any single framework implied, and because the evidence-against points all rest on unverified contingencies.