When elections were postponed and then unpostponed earlier this year, I cited Marx (a cliché I know): history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce. When local government reorganisation (LGR) was paused in September, I wondered whether we'd moved beyond farce to the Theatre of the Absurd. After this week's announcement, I don't think I've anywhere left to go.
Back in September I set out four scenarios. LGR dead in the water. Partial LGR: going ahead in some places and not others. A Rewiring the State first approach: leading with devolution and following with reorganisation. Or muddled chaos, in which nothing much happens either way.
What we got this week, perhaps inevitably, was a bit of all four. Five areas (Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and East Sussex with Brighton & Hove) have ‘minded to' decisions and a path to vesting in April 2029. Everywhere else has had its decision withdrawn or is still waiting for one, with some answers promised before Christmas and others ‘early' in the new year. Devolution deals in LGR areas are to be finalised first, with 10 new deals said to be near completion.
So: partial reorganisation, devolution first, and a whole bunch of uncertainty for councils that have devoted huge amounts of energy and resource into the LGR decisions they thought they already had.
This announcement exposes a core problem with the way LGR has been organised.
The Government designed a process that invited contestation. It set criteria broad enough that almost any configuration could be argued for or against. It asked councils to work up proposals, often in competition with their neighbours. But it now appears to be proceeding only in the places where the risk of challenge was lowest. That now seems a fundamental design flaw.
The minister says the criteria remain valid and the process robust. Perhaps. Though many will be sceptical about this given how things have panned out so far.
And if the criteria haven't changed, it's hard to see what stops the same challenges returning when the next decisions are made. In September I worried about a legal doom loop. It feels like that's still a possibility.
Meanwhile, the world doesn't wait on the Government's decisions. District councils will now have elections in May which could introduce a new set of leaders who are not signed up to any of this. Several counties have already changed administrations since the options were submitted. And many districts have a financial plan predicated on ceasing to exist in May 2028. How do they manage now?
And there is the human factor. Those councils whose decisions have been withdrawn now have to decide whether to stand down expensive programme management offices (many already have). How easy will it be to stand these up again? How do you motivate staff and councillors if or when you do get a decision again?
All this before we've even considered the voters. How are they to make sense of this? We're going to be asking people to vote in a lot of elections over the next three years, including a General Election that might end up in 2029 being administered by electoral authorities that have only existed for a few weeks. It's a fine line between complexity and chaos.
Then there's devolution. In December 2024, Jim McMahon told leaders that reorganisation should not delay devolution. Steve Reed, as secretary of state later postponed mayoral elections on precisely the opposite logic. Now we seem to be back where we started, with devolution moving first and reorganisation following. That's fine. But a policy that arrives in the right place by going round in a circle doesn't inspire much confidence about where it goes next. As I wrote in these pages back in March, the problem isn't only policy content; it's cadence and consistency.
And if we are going to proceed with devolution, at least initially in some areas that will still be two tier, then that will raise questions about how far the voice of district councils features and how we avoid ‘orphaning' vital services such as planning and housing, not to mention the sort of place shaping services that are so important to the key 15 minute test: that is will people notice the benefit of devolution within a few minutes of their front door?
So where does this leave us? Council chiefs will do what they always do, making the best of a bad situation, building on the work they have done in the process and the relationships they have forged to drive improved ways of working. But there's clearly a sense in the sector that the window to get LGR back on track is rapidly closing and it's not clear that this week's announcements do enough to turn that around.
We urgently need a timetable for the remaining areas, certainty on funding, and honesty about what can realistically be delivered this parliament. Otherwise many in local government will remain sceptical about LGR being delivered in this parliament, or at all.
Back in September, I wondered whether the pause meant that LGR was effectively over? Not quite it seems. But government cannot allow it to stagger on as a sort of zombie policy: not dead but neither quite alive.
Jonathan Carr-West is chief executive of the LGiU
