Fourteen Councils, One Desk, No Ballot
Sometime this month, letters will go out to council leaders in the fourteen remaining areas of England, the ones spared judgment in March, when Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Hampshire learned that forty-three of their counties and districts would be dissolved into fifteen new unitary councils. Hundreds of councillors' seats go with them. One leader, informed of the shape his authority would take, used the word "barmy." He was not being intemperate. He was describing, accurately, a boundary drawn somewhere he has never been invited.
The housing communities secretary, Steve Reed, explained in March that decisions on each area had been made "on a case-by-case basis, on its own merits, respecting the differences of local circumstances and local people's views." Translated: a minister and his officials looked at a map, drew some lines, and are describing the result as bespoke tailoring rather than what it is, a department working through a list. Local people's views were consulted. They were not binding, and in Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk and Hampshire they were overridden in every case where they conflicted with the department's preferred number of councils.
The case for doing this at all is not stupid, and deserves stating properly before it is dismantled. Two-tier local government, county on top, district below, both taxing and both confusing the resident who cannot say which one collects the bins, is a genuine muddle inherited largely from 1974. The County Councils Network's own modelling, produced with PwC, found that unitary councils built to a population of 500,000 or more could save £1.8 billion over five years, chiefly by ending the duplication of social care administration. Fold that into a government racing to build 1.5 million homes by 2029, and a single planning authority replacing three squabbling ones looks like plain good sense.
Except the government did not do that. It set the 500,000 threshold, then granted itself "flexibility" on it, and every county subsequently proposed councils well below the line: Essex splitting into five, Hampshire into four, Norfolk and Suffolk into three apiece. The CCN's own analysis, the one ministers cited approvingly when the threshold was announced, warned that splitting two-tier areas into smaller unitaries below 300,000 would cost £850 million over five years and save nothing. The government is proceeding anyway, with the exact fragmentation its own commissioned evidence said would wipe out the savings it used to justify the reorganisation.
Britain has run this experiment before, twice, and both results are on the public record. The 2009 wave replaced thirty-one districts across seven counties with single unitaries, Cornwall, Durham, Northumberland, Shropshire and Wiltshire among them, each decided by a minister, none by a referendum. Between 2019 and 2023 the same pattern repeated in North Yorkshire, Somerset and Cumbria: three counties turned into four councils by ministerial order from Robert Jenrick, at a net cost of 553 councillor seats. A 2020 review of fifty years of evidence on council mergers, by Copus and colleagues, found no consistent relationship between the size of a unitary authority and its efficiency, effectiveness or cost. Bigger is not cheaper. It is just bigger, and further away.
None of these new authorities, whatever their size, gain any power the old ones lacked. The Local Government Information Unit's survey of every unitary created since the late nineties found none had received new devolved functions distinguishing it from an ordinary district or county council. They are the same species of body, merely fewer of them, covering more people each. This is the detail that gives the whole exercise away. It is not devolution, the word stapled to the government's own white paper, since nothing is being devolved. It is consolidation, and the two are opposites.
Consider Thurrock. Bankrupted in 2022 after a council chase for £500 million lost on speculative business deals, it now has £200 million of that debt written off by the Treasury specifically to smooth Essex's reorganisation.
A council that failed catastrophically at self-government is being financially rescued, by a decision no elector made or could have vetoed, so that a restructuring nobody in Essex asked for can proceed on schedule. If you wanted a single image for how this state now works, you could do worse.
This is, one might note in passing, at least the fourth attempt in twenty years to solve English local government by redrawing its boundaries rather than giving it anything to do. A nation patiently refining its model, or one that keeps reorganising the furniture because moving the furniture is the one thing it is still permitted to decide.
Follow the audit trail on any single new council and it terminates the same way every time: not at a local referendum, which nobody held; not at a manifesto commitment naming these boundaries, which no party made; but at a minister's desk in Whitehall, weighing submissions from officials against a spreadsheet of transition costs. Reed signs what Jenrick signed before him. The residents of the new Greater Norwich council will vote for their new authority for the first time in 2028, two years after the shape of it was fixed by people none of them elected and few of them could name.