Despite no mention in its manifesto of local government reorganisation (LGR), the Government decided not only that it would abolish tiers of local government to create huge, anonymous unitary councils – councils so far from any notion of local communities that most will have points of the compass in their titles to give a rough idea where the hell they are – it also craftily handed responsibility to councils to sign their own death warrants by producing reorganisation plans.
All so English local government, already the biggest in Europe could become even bigger. In doing this it misses the point, that if English councils are already the biggest, why aren't they the best? And it fails totally to pay any attention to how smaller and tiered local government systems across the globe manage so well, while similarly dismissing the mountain of evidence that shows bigger does not guarantee better.
As part of the process, which shows little, if any, understanding of the problems of local government and how making councils bigger just means they are bigger, it yet again seeks to delay inconvenient elections by asking 63 councils faced with LGR to apply (as happened in 2025) to postpone the 2026 elections for a year. In a deflection worthy of Maradona's ‘hand of God', it's not the Government you see, but the councils that want to do this to ‘release capacity'.
It seems to have passed the Government's attention that councils only need ‘capacity' because they are swamped by a pointless and damaging ideologically driven reorganisation propagated in the face of the findings of 50 years of international independent academic research that shows bigger doesn't mean better.
Anyway, that ship filled with inconvenient anti-merger evidence has sailed to be smashed on the rocks of awkward elections. A quick search for postponed elections shows the practice is not unusual across the globe, but it does, on occasions, put you in some unsavoury company. Maybe the centre has just been emboldened by cancelling local elections during the Covid pandemic; or shifting, admittedly only by a month, the 2009 locals to coincide with the European parliament elections; or how easy it was to delay the nine sets of local elections in 2025; or delay the mayoral elections planned for 2026.
There's a bit of a pattern here, isn't' there? Local elections – well they don't really matter do they? Public accountability, democracy, people choosing who they want to be governed by locally - none of that matters if we can save a few bob and ‘release capacity'. It doesn't matter one jot how much local elections cost, or what capacity it takes – that's the price of democracy and we throw that away at our peril.
Why not delay LGR instead? After all it's the Government that has imposed the ridiculous timescales on councils and caused the capacity crisis, which could easily be solved by scrapping the whole LGR nonsense and having an independent inquiry into how the powers, freedoms, autonomy and financing of local government across the globe operates and how to keep local government local.
The 50th anniversary of the Layfield Committee Report on local government finance is in 2026, what a good time to launch an inquiry into the real problems of local government that reorganising and dispensing with local elections won't solve but financial devolution will. Elections can go ahead while that committee sits.
It's not just me and a few extreme localists and democrats that see the sinister technocratically inspired cancellation of another set of local elections. There has been a hail of criticism from councillors, political parties, the media and, tellingingly, the Electoral Commission's chief executive who did not see the Government's reasons for delay as 'legitimate' and condemned the timescale for postponement.
The importance of voting is enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1985 Council of Europe Charter of Local Self-Government, and the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in which Article 40 states that 'every citizen has a right to vote... at municipal elections'. None of these would surely be something our human rights lawyer and Europhile PM would want to breach.
Is the Government running scared of electoral meltdown if local elections went ahead? Well, trade minister Sir Chris Bryant has said that's a conspiracy theory – so you know it's true! Of course they're worried about electoral Armageddon. So, did they make this offer to councils because of that? A little bit, yes, but mainly because the centre has utter contempt for local democracy, local accountability, local voters and local government.
But, here's an election friendly solution – have the 2026 elections as normal and allow all the county and district councillors elected to sit, for their four-year term, on the new unitaries. Ok, we may have to wait a few years more to make all those wonderful savings that we have been told a cull of councillors will bring, but there'll be no electoral delay. Don't laugh – it's been done before.
So, will these be the last delays? Not likely, especially as the last few unitary councils created took between two and two and a half years from proposals to creation day.
But, the whole process is one that is ill-thought through, bizarrely chaotic, shows no regard or respect for local government or what it does and – with yet another cancellation of inconvenient elections – is embarrassingly anti-democratic.
The whole business is to the eternal chagrin of the Government and those in local government enthusiastically supporting the destruction of the ‘local' in local government.
Christmas, for local government, has been cancelled – along with some local elections which we will know at the end of January. What we already know, however, is that for local government it isn't going to be a happy New Year.
Colin Copus is Emeritus Professor of Local Politics at De Montfort University and Visiting Professor at Ghent University
