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The current hiatus in local government reorganisation (LGR) has created uncertainty for everyone in affected councils, but this is possibly most acutely felt at the top of authorities.Some chief executives had originally given assurances to remain in post until the process was completed, postponing career moves or retirement plans.This will have been offered not only to provide senior politicians with assurance that their hands would be held through the ordeal, but also to provide continuity and certainty for staff at a time of tumult.Speaking to The MJ, one chief who has postponed retirement plans said: ‘It's other people I'm more worried about, as I know that my decision affects the decisions of a lot of other people because I'm providing that stability at the moment.‘It becomes increasingly hard to hold onto staff if you've got continued uncertainty.'The same chief added: ‘My family's giving me quite a lot of grief about it at the moment. But from an organisational perspective, the first question everybody asked me when we got the pause was "what are you going to do?"‘Because it's about the stability I provide and I'm also caught by my sense of duty to the organisation and to the residents and my personal need to have a retirement.'Another chief emphasised the impact on stakeholder relations.‘As a chief, you've got relationships with key investors, with key businesses, and I didn't think it was helpful in terms of the wider sustainability for the patch if you lose your chief, because they're unlikely to appoint a new one.‘If you go, you are weakening the team because you'd be constantly backfilling in a different way and the council as a place and a workforce would have been under-represented.'But the Government's decision to pause the process has opened up the need for a recalibration by those who had initially planned to see it through.One chief said there was a need for those chiefs who had given the councils a guarantee against the old timetable to ‘review what they meant' given the ‘goalposts' have been significantly shifted.‘I don't see how you could hold to that, because that's putting your whole career on hold.'Another council boss concurred that ‘there's a lot of people for whom the pause isn't helpful because it is another year and some of them probably wanted to go in say, one or two years and now it could be three.'‘I don't think they all definitely wanted to go in two years, but because the programme was put on them they'd all come around to going.‘They were supporting building new councils, but they knew in 2028 they were exiting stage left.'From a personal perspective this chief added: ‘It's stifled my career development over the last two years because I've been stuck, but on the basis that I could see a prize at the end.‘Now I'm very much thinking I want to decide my own destiny. So, if I can't make something work here, I'm now going to reignite my career outside of that.‘I can't have government deciding it. The White Paper was nearly two years ago. What have we actually done since then, other than Surrey?‘Before I've turned down jobs and opportunities because I wanted to be loyal to my area and there was a prize at the end.'Another chief in their mid-50s added: ‘You do think about how long you stay somewhere before you move again.‘I want to make sure for my next role that I have got another solid five years that I can give.'And, while a sense of frustration is evident for many of those chiefs in the maelstrom of LGR, one emphasised the impact on the wider workforce.‘How many people are thinking about buying a house or starting a family?‘It's so disrespectful. It's not just seniors. This is having an impact on all of the workforce.'Martin Tucker, managing director of local government recruitment specialists Færfield, sympathised with the plight felt by council workforces.‘They're now faced with the prospect of making career decisions on an unknown timetable.'Yet, he said anything that spreads out the previously planned tsunami of recruitment to new councils may prove a silver lining to the cloud of a stuttering LGR process.‘I think we were all wondering how the system would cope with 40 to 60 chief executive appointments all at the same time.'‘A timetable affecting so many places at the same time was an abnormal and unusual feature of the market over the last 20 years.‘We've always had places going through LGR and reorganisation over the last 20 years, but they've been discrete places. And although some of them have gone at the same time, it's never been on the scale that was proposed for the summer of 2027.'It remains to be seen what the policy rollercoaster government has strapped council chiefs and their teams into will have on their willingness to stick it out in a sector with endless bumps in the road, but Tucker is optimistic.‘In some respects, you could argue we're back to where we were probably two years ago, which is no LGR on the landscape, or talk of LGR but no certainty about its timing or its scale or scope.The prospect of vesting days falling at different times could prove beneficial to senior officers and recruiters alike.One affected chief said: ‘I think it is better to go in a phased approach. And even from a practical point of view about just ICT [information and communication technology], because there were some real concerns about the ability of Microsoft to be able to cope with everyone going live on the same day.‘Clearly, we're going to need to rely on recruitment agents to support the process and they would have been spread thin.‘And then I'm also not sure about the quality of the candidates that you'd have got to come through.'It remains to be seen what the policy rollercoaster government has strapped council chiefs and their teams into will have on their willingness to stick it out in a sector with endless bumps in the road, but Tucker is optimistic.‘My experience over the last 25 years is that there have been highs and there have been lows and local government chief executives, generally speaking, are a remarkably resilient bunch.‘Time after time, after a setback, they pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and get on with the job.'Aside from some people where their time of life, context and age suggest it is time to leave he added: ‘I don't think that this is a moment of some kind of mass exodus. I just don't think the sector has that kind of character.‘I think people will roll with the punches because they're in it often, almost always, because of their commitment to people, places and communities.'Nonetheless, that resilience and willingness to ‘roll with the punches' has been sorely tested in recent months.‘Everybody's got LGR fatigue,' said one chief. ‘We've just come off a seven-nil drubbing of a football match and it's hard to get people back on the pitch. That's what it feels like at the moment.'

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LEADERSHIP

Chiefs weigh up career costs of LGR pause

By Paul Marinko | 21 October 2026

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