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A growing number of reorganisation-sceptics may be able to frustrate the process for longer with Whitehall pushing back when secondary legislation will come into force.The delay emerged as Reform UK, which gained more than 1,400 councillors and control of 14 councils in last week's elections, said it was ‘absolutely prepared to be awkward' on reorganisation.Today the Conservative leader of Harlow DC Cllr Dan Swords announced his council would ‘fight to block' reorganisation in Essex.For the four areas in the devolution priority programme, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) had said secondary legislation would be laid in Parliament ‘ideally before the summer recess'.But senior sector sources have now been told that secondary legislation will only be laid in the autumn and come into force before the end of 2026.One chief executive in an area facing reorganisation said: ‘It beggars belief that it [the Government] can't draft four orders and promise to get them tabled in Parliament before the summer recess so they can be approved in September. It is not even promising that the orders will come into force before December.‘MHCLG is in a mess. The ministry should up its game if reorganisation remains a priority.'Secondary legislation – in the form of structural change orders (SCO) – is the key legal mechanism that turns a reorganisation proposal into reality.A Whitehall source said: ‘This [timetable] was always subject to a number of factors including receiving the required information from councils and complexity of drafting.‘Our intention remains that those SCOs will begin their Parliamentary process before recess, with councils receiving near final drafts of their orders in July. These would then be laid in the autumn and come into force before Christmas. This should not affect the overall programme timetable, and we still expect shadow elections for these areas to be held in April 2027, with new unitary councils going live in April 2028.'Although the timetable for creating unitaries has not changed, councils opposed to reorganisation will have no legal obligation to co-operate until the secondary legislation comes into force.Former District Councils' Network chairman Lord Fuller said voters had ‘given two fingers to the suggestion that local councils should be thrown up in the air and reconfigured'.He added the mandate for reorganisation had ‘fallen away not least because the councillors who promoted this have all lost their seats'.Chief executive of think-tank Localis, Jonathan Werran, added: ‘Some will have a political incentive to foot drag and in that time anything can happen. If you're adding delay you're adding doubt.‘Reform at local and national level will have little to no desire to play ball with either devolution or a local government reorganisation programme in which they have provided no input and have little to gain from.'One senior sector source said: ‘Without SCOs you'll be relying on voluntary governance arrangements for longer, which causes issues where one or more council is not fully on board. There is potentially quite a lot councils can do to frustrate the process.'Another sector source added: ‘It's a problem. You can't set up joint committees until the SCO is laid and you can't enforce a s24 order on spending restrictions, so it potentially pushes all their work back.‘The joint committees need to approve the implementation plans, the workstreams to benchmark all the services, the appointment of your interim statutory officers and your constitution, members' code of conduct and various other basic infrastructure for the new council.‘The most likely outcome is that they'll push officers twice as hard to meet the deadlines despite having three months less time to do it. It's breakneck speed already.‘The short-term solution is voluntary joint committees but that takes political agreement from all parties and doesn't have quite the same teeth.'

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REORGANISATION

EXCLUSIVE: Whitehall delay to reorganisation legislation

By Dan Peters | 13 May 2026

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