Ministers have been unable to tell MPs what Labour’s stop-start reorganisation of English councils has cost, after withdrawing decisions for 14 county areas and pushing new councils back to 2029.
Jim McMahon has accepted that the pause he ordered left councils with costs and offered to meet them halfway. Fifteen areas still do not know what their councils will look like.
In a Commons statement on Thursday, the local government minister withdrew every decision on new unitary councils announced in July. In five areas, East Sussex with Brighton and Hove, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Warwickshire and Worcestershire, ministers are now ‘minded to’ approve the same or similar plans, subject to a fresh three-week round of representations and a vote in Parliament.
In nine others, Derbyshire, Devon, Hertfordshire, Kent and Medway, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire and Staffordshire, the July decisions have been withdrawn and all options are back on the table. Mr McMahon told MPs ‘it should not be assumed that the same proposal will automatically be selected’.
Those nine join Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, whose decisions were withdrawn in September, and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and West Sussex, which never had one. Mr McMahon promised updates on some areas by Christmas and an outcome for every area ‘by early next year’, which he later described as the February to March period.
The delay has a price for voters as well as councils. Elections in May 2027 will go ahead to councils due to be abolished, with elections to the new authorities in May 2028 and vesting day on 1 April 2029, a year later than planned. Only Surrey, where two new councils go live in April 2027, is unaffected.
Mr McMahon accepted that asking council staff ‘to stop working on the proposals has led to a cost being incurred by those authorities that would not have been incurred had we not decided to pause the programme’. Areas previously told they would get new unitaries will receive £450,000 for each one, half of the £900,000 transition support, within weeks. Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and West Sussex get £500,000 each.
He said the Government was ‘willing to meet them halfway’. What he would not give was a total.
The shadow Secretary of State, Katie Lam, called the process ‘nothing short of a farce’. She listed the delayed White Paper, the elections ministers said would go ahead and then postponed, the postponements withdrawn days before a court hearing, and the July decisions taken ‘just days before’ Mr Burnham became Prime Minister. She said the bill for the election delays alone ‘runs into the tens of millions of pounds’.
She asked for ‘an estimate today of the total cost of this Government’s shambolic local government reorganisation’ and how much had gone on legal fees. A second Conservative MP and the Liberal Democrat Alison Bennett asked the same question. Each time Mr McMahon said transition costs were set out in councils’ own proposals, and that the Government was meeting councils halfway.
Ms Lam also asked ministers to publish the advice behind the July decisions. Mr McMahon said it was ‘long-standing Government policy’ not to publish legal advice. He added: ‘we were not the Ministers who made the decisions in July’. Those decisions were taken by the same Labour Government before the change of Prime Minister.
In Worcestershire, where ministers are minded to create two councils, Conservative MPs described the timetable that voters now face. Nigel Huddleston said there would be district elections next year, a unitary election the year after, and possibly a mayoral contest. Dame Harriett Baldwin said residents ‘just want their bins taken out, their roads maintained’ and that the new council in the south of the county ‘will now not be created until 2029’.
Labour MPs raised concerns too. Josh Newbury said the ‘stop-start process’ had caused ‘deep frustration’ in Staffordshire, and James Naish said reorganisation ‘should never have been a term-one priority’.
On 7 September the Housing Secretary told councils to stop work on reorganisation while the review took place. Seven weeks on, ministers have published no estimate of what the programme has cost so far.
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