They’re apoplectic, incandescent.” And they have every right to be. The government has slammed the brakes on its unexpected reorganisation of local councils. This almost certainly ends the one-size-fits-all, politically damaging remapping of England’s councils, which was never forewarned in Labour’s manifesto.
Councils hired extra staff to manage gigantic mergers and changes on the running of social care, waste collection, libraries, special educational needs, children in care, roads and parks – absolutely everything sliced and diced, with hundreds of thousands moving jobs under new brass plates. Take Worcestershire county council. It just hired a local government reorganisation director on about £120,000 a year who started in August to abolish six district councils, dividing the county into two new unitary authorities.
But like everywhere else that’s paused, subject to “rapid review”, much of it is dead in the water. Facing legal challenges from objectors over proposals to reorganise councils in Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, the local government secretary, Angela Rayner, received new legal advice that the reorganisation may not comply with law. From the start, I could see no political purpose in her launching this fiendishly complicated restructuring that has now crashed.
On the contrary, it would have done Labour and the Liberal Democrats considerable harm. Under the original plan, progressive-voting urban strongholds would vanish as separate entities, absorbed into surrounding county councils with historically more conservative electorates. Rayner is not to blame for this.
Neither is Steve Reed, who took over the brief before Burnham reinstated her to it. Her focus and purpose are fixed on housing, as the motor to drive growth. It’s yet another misconceived Treasury pet project foisted on a new government.
Those closest to events have told me that the Treasury threatened to refuse funds for councils or capital for her housing targets unless she agreed to its plan. It took down a dusty 2020 PriceWaterhouseCoopers report from its shelves that purported to show that abolishing district councils and creating huge unitary authorities of up to 500,000 citizens throughout England would save money. Whose idea was it originally?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
