Moving the deckchairs

Duncan Bowie tries to uncover the logic behind government plans for local government reorganisation and strategic planning

Much attention has been given to the establishment of new mayoral structures with directly elected Mayors in city regions and, more recently, in May this year, in county areas such as Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire. These Mayors still operate within two-tier political structures, with lower-level tiers of local government. The government, however, intends to move to a single-tier local government structure, with all councils becoming unitary authorities responsible for all local government services. This means that district councils are expected to merge with county councils. In some cases, for example in Surrey, it is expected that two unitary councils will emerge, with the existing county council divided into two. In practice, most urban-based district authorities will be subsumed into larger, dominated county-based authorities.

The logic of this is unclear. While previous governments were enthusiastic about strong regional leadership, with executive Mayors on the American model, and this has worked reasonably effectively in London, Greater Manchester and West Midlands (centred on Birmingham), these Mayors have mainly been strategic with service delivery left to the lower tier authorities – boroughs and metropolitan district councils. Moving to a unitary approach means that single authorities (with or without directly elected mayors) will be responsible for services such as adult social care and childcare (traditionally county council functions) and housing, planning and waste collection (traditionally district council functions).

The logic of this approach is not explicit.  Whitehall seems to think it will be easier for central government to deal with a smaller number of local authorities and that larger authorities will mean economies of scale. Yet, the government has produced neither evidence for their assumptions nor any impact assessment for implementing their new approach. Local government reorganisation is always messy – not only will there be significant service disruption, but there is a risk that specialist staff will be lost. Moreover, there will be significant redundancy costs, as roles are combined.

There is also the question as to what services are best run at different scales. While there is a case for strategic planning being operated at a city region or county level,  planning decisions relating to individual developments may best be made at a more local level, by officers and councillors familiar with the site. There is also the risk that service delivery will be centralised to county towns, with local service hubs such as housing management offices closed. The proposals therefore involve a centralisation of service delivery and decision-making rather than localisation.

Where the logic fails is, however, most serious at a political level. Urban districts are more likely to be Labour-controlled than county-level authorities. Labour has been keen on city and city regional Mayors in the past because the majority were likely to be Labour. London has been Labour for 17 of the 25 years since the establishment of the mayoralty in 2000 (although technically Ken Livingstone was an Independent for his first four-year term). Greater Manchester has had Andy Burnham, and West Yorkshire, Tracy Brabin, while the West Midlands mayoralty was captured by Labour earlier this year. Teesside under the Tory Ben Houchen was the exception (together with the Cambridgeshire Peterborough mayoralty in 2017 and 2025, though not in 2019) as being Conservative.  But in 2025, with the introduction of new county-based mayoralties, the pattern changed, with Reform winning mayoralties in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull and East Yorkshire.  With Reform also winning control of ten councils (of which seven are county councils), surely the government will rethink its proposal to transfer more powers to county-level authorities by abolishing district councils, many of which are currently Labour-controlled. It is perhaps not surprising that many local Labour councillors are not enthusiastic about the government’s approach.

From a strategic planning perspective, there is logic in having strategic planning on a larger than local scale, but transition to the new regime is not going to be quick.  Not all local authorities agree on which local authorities will merge, and central government does not intend to force mergers. Some areas which were expected to progress to unitary arrangements fairly quickly are not doing so – for example, Kent.  Now Kent County is Reform-controlled, there will be even less enthusiasm for Labour-controlled Kent districts such as Medway, Thanet, Dover or Canterbury to dissolve themselves.

Moreover, outside London and the city regional combined authority groupings, there is no structure for regional planning. The government’s new requirement for ‘Spatial Development’ strategies is likely at county level, although the government has as yet to set out the geographical areas these strategies will cover, though regional planning frameworks, abolished by the coalition government in 2010, are still necessary to set a context for planning at a more local scale, and we still have no national spatial framework or regional strategy from the national government, so the new arrangements, when fully implemented, will still be incomplete.  The government has devised a messy way of moving the deckchairs, which will shift political power away from local Labour councils, while not facing up to the real challenges of local government, i.e. that nearly a third of councils are going bankrupt and service quality continues to fall. This is hardly the best way to get voters to vote Labour, either locally or nationally. Merging a group of councils which are in effect bust does not make for improved services unless the new body is better resourced.