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This week's announcement of a delay to local government reorganisation took almost everybody by surprise – even those closely involved with the policy in Whitehall.Late on Friday, officials from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) were refusing to talk about the mounting judicial reviews from councils that were threatening to bring down its unitarisation project.Around Monday lunchtime, rumours started to swirl but were quickly dismissed as out of the question by sector experts.It was council comms chiefs who were among the first to hear decisions on four areas were being withdrawn, with a further 16 paused, amid a ‘rapid review'.Racing to meet legal deadlines, MHCLG had been forced to respond to the courts and issue a press release even before announcing the news to Parliament.Many council chief executives found out about the unexpected reorganisation review from their press officers or sector colleagues in a flurry of what's app messages.Some council staff who have been directly affected by reorganisation heard on the news, which later drew an apology from one MHCLG official.Senior sector figures were left dumbfounded before the shock was replaced by growing anger, despair and frustration at the hours of work invested that they feared would now be wasted.The chaos continued the next day with a sector call with local government minister Jim McMahon, who was forced to repeat his introduction on realising that scores of attendees were left sitting in a completely different virtual room.‘This is not a place we would have chosen to be in anymore than you would have', McMahon is understood to have told the sector sheepishly.‘Give us time to work through that. We are doing it in good faith; there's nothing going on in the background here. This is a genuine attempt to get it right.‘We want to do the right thing for the right reasons in the right way.'But even McMahon's attempt to reassure the sector that much of their work would not be wasted has already caused more confusion and despair.The minister is understood to have initially suggested to the sector the review would take place over the Parliamentary recess for political party conferences, with a ‘clear view' on the way forward after six weeks.But it is believed McMahon was quickly contradicted on the call by his own officials, who rushed to insist there was ‘no commitment' on a timeframe for the review – partly because civil servants had not even advised ministers on its terms of reference.One council chief executive in an affected area said: ‘They've announced a review without knowing what the process and timing of the review will be. ‘They could have done this [reorganisation] in a way that would have avoided any risk of judicial review by putting it in an Act of Parliament. ‘The real reason [for the review] is that they were going to lose most or all of the court cases. Someone in the legal department needs firing. I think for those that have in good faith been trying to implement what the Government said it was trying to legislate for will be very angry.' Realistically, even if the review is wrapped up by mid-October, as McMahon originally suggested, it will leave no time for shadow elections to take place next year, meaning reorganisation will now not happen until May 2028 at the earliest.Communities secretary Angela Rayner told Parliament on Monday the Government was ‘still committed' to reorganisation ‘but with people'.What that means remains unclear, but all options are yet again back on the table.

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POLICY AND POLITICS

Behind the scenes of this week's reorganisation debacle

By Dan Peters | 10 September 2026

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