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Local government may still be reeling over the Government's bombshell decision to pause plans for local government reorganisation (LGR).But three council chief executives in Nottinghamshire are insisting that despite their disappointment they will ensure the county-wide work that is laying the groundwork for reorganisation will not be wasted.Adam Hill, Zulf Darr and Theresa Hodgkinson – respectively the chief executives of Rushcliffe BC, Browtowe BC and Ashfield DC – are adamant councils across Nottinghamshire will forge ahead and continue planning together.The news of the halt to reorganisation came out of the blue. Speaking together after a session at The MJ's Future Forum Midlands (FFM) event earlier this month, Darr says his professional and personal reaction was one of ‘significant surprise'.He adds: ‘We're a long way down the track, into the autumn. We're preparing for structural change orders. We've got teams embedded. We are really on track to implement the biggest change in 50 years.'The priority has been to manage communications and staff, ‘explaining exactly what's happened in a sensitive way', he says.‘We've done that through our individual councils and we did it collectively as well on a couple of Teams meetings.'Broxtowe BC is run as a minority administration by the Broxtowe Alliance, which formed after a group of councillors split from the Labour Party. With a Cabinet meeting scheduled the day after the Government's announcement and different views on reorganisation across the political spectrum, he says ‘it was really a challenge for us senior leaders to manage that comms and manage it during a tricky 24 hours'.Hill, who used a session at FFM to highlight that civil servants had not given the sector a timetable for completing its review of reorganisation, says: ‘There's a real disappointment, isn't there? Because once we get behind it – and Nottinghamshire has proved it time and time again with the East Midlands Combined County Authority – we got ahead of it. We went at pace.'LGR has been approached in the same way as a collection of nine authorities, he adds.‘We've arranged secondments from the different authorities into the project management team. However, this is drawing resources away from each of the authorities at a time when their workloads are already changing. As we move forward, we'll need to focus our resources on LGR.'Many of the new team started in their new roles on the day of the announcement of the LGR pause. That was ‘unsettling for all of the workforce… because we've been working to get everybody into that single vision that this is now going to happen. Whether you like it or don't, it's happening. So let's get behind it.'Hodgkinson says that ‘despite different opinions and different views [on LGR], the nine chief executives have worked extremely collaboratively together'.Underlining the depth of the collaboration so far, Darr says 300 managers across the county were planning to meet at a Starting Well conference to prepare for the communication and engagement around LGR.He says: ‘Adam Hill did a really good job leading the HR workstream. The agenda was set up and there were some great ideas. So we've had to – sensibly, really – pause that'.Hodgkinson adds that since the LGR pause, senior leadership across Nottinghamshire's councils are continuing to meet and the opportunity now is ‘a year's breathing space' for transitional transformation.Councils have been focused on getting to a ‘safe and legal' position for an original April 2028 vesting day in April. Hodgkinson says: ‘We'll be able to say, now that we have all the workstreams, what are those true transformational items that we can do?‘We'll actually be able to start doing that transition and transformation, bringing teams together and building on the culture that we are starting from.'She adds: ‘Zulf Darr says the Starting Well conference was all about setting our culture now. Part of bringing cultures together is actually putting teams together that are going to work together and deliver in different agendas.'Hill says that all the authorities are now looking at shared space. ‘If I wanted to go and work in Broxtowe, there's a desk there I can go and work at with the HR team because I'm HR lead.‘Actually we're saying no, it's no longer one authority. It's no longer [about] coming just to Rushcliffe. It's about coming into the LGR space within Rushcliffe… It's about that belonging.'Getting ready for vesting day will involve four streams of work focused on ‘safe, legal, transformational and operational'.He concludes: ‘Rather than getting into vesting day and asking: "How do we transform", we'll have a whole framework around that transformation. So, we'll already be ahead for the future.' The proposalsThree separate proposals for two new unitaries in Nottinghamshire and Nottingham were put forward to the Government last November.The first, from Bassetlaw, Gedling, Mansfield and Newark and Sherwood, is for two unitary councils comprising the current areas of Sherwood Forest and Nottingham and South Nottinghamshire.Nottingham City Council's proposal is for a South West unitary to include Nottingham, plus 15 wards from Broxtowe, 15 wards from Gedling and 17 wards from Rushcliffe. The second unitary – North and East – would comprise Ashfield, Bassetlaw, Mansfield, Newark and Sherwood, plus five wards from Browtowe, four wards from Gedling and seven wards from Rushcliffe.Nottinghamshire CC and Rushcliffe's proposal is for a Nottingham City unitary comprising Nottingham, Broxtowe and Gedling, and one for Nottinghamshire to include Ashfield, Bassetlaw, Mansfield, Newark and Sherwood and Rushcliffe.Ashfield DC and Broxtowe BC did not submit a proposal, while Rushcliffe clearly sees its future as part of a Nottinghamshire-facing unitary.

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Getting ahead of council reform in Nottinghamshire

By Ann McGauran | 22 September 2026

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