Contribution
It gives me no pleasure whatsoever to say that from start to finish, this Government’s approach to local government reorganisation has been nothing short of a farce. The Government first promised to publish their English devolution White Paper in November 2024. It was delayed until December 2024, with affected councils given three weeks over Christmas to decide whether or not to delay local elections. Last year, after the right hon. Member for Ashton-under-Lyne (Angela Rayner) was forced to resign from the Cabinet, her successor—and, as it turns out, her predecessor—assured us that reorganisation was not taking, and would not take, any longer than planned, and that elections scheduled for May 2026 would go ahead. The Government confirmed that twice in November 2025, yet the very next month announced that elections in some parts of the country would be pushed back as far as 2028.
Two weeks later, again in the run-up to Christmas, the then local government Minister invited another wave of postponements. In January this year, despite having promised not to delay elections in November, the then Secretary of State announced legislation to postpone 29 elections. The next month, days before the Department was due to answer for its behaviour in court, those postponements were withdrawn. Naturally, the taxpayer was left to pick up the tab for all those delays—a bill that runs into the tens of millions of pounds. That U-turn was announced during recess, so that Members of Parliament had to wait to question Ministers.
In March, there was another set of announcements and another set of legal challenges. In June, it was revealed in a pre-action letter issued by the Department that Ministers had ignored official advice over reorganisation plans. In July, just days before the right hon. Member for Makerfield (Andy Burnham) became Prime Minister, the previous Secretary of State announced a whole new set of reorganisation plans, with many Members given essentially no time to scrutinise the sweeping changes that were set to be imposed on their areas. We still have not seen the advice that informed those decisions, so will the Minister confirm today, in the interests of transparency, that that advice will be published?
In September, following updated and privileged legal advice, the current Secretary of State withdrew decisions for Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, and paused plans in most of the rest of the country. What a complete joke! Today the Minister talks of giving councils clarity, yet goes on immediately to say that all options and proposals remain under consideration, and that he approaches all decisions with an open mind. He cannot be serious. We are two and a half years into this process, and the Government had years in opposition to plan it. Why have these decisions not yet been made? How can we still be at the stage of keeping an open mind, and what clarity exactly have we gained from the statement?
The vast majority of councils are none the wiser after what we have heard today. The Minister talks of allowing the process to “run its course” and of giving “full and proper consideration” to each decision, but can he set out what will be taken into consideration? What role have party political objectives played in determining new local government boundaries? Have the Government received, at any point during the process, legal advice that indicates that political considerations were given undue weight in deciding new council boundaries? When can councils that have been left in the dark by today’s announcement expect some kind of verdict from the Government? Which areas will hear by Christmas, and what does “early next year” actually mean?
Given the Government’s record on meeting their own deadlines, I am sure that the Minister will forgive me for my scepticism. The real-world results of this endless delay are plain to see. People across the country are left without any sense of which council will be providing services in the year and years to come, while councillors and council officials have spent millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money planning and preparing for new authorities that might never materialise.
Notwithstanding the announcement that the Minister has made on funding, will he provide an estimate today of the total cost of this Government’s shambolic local government reorganisation? How much of that cost is being eaten by legal fees? The money spent on this farcical reorganisation process should have been spent instead on resurfacing roads, collecting bins and maintaining parks—core local government functions that people care about. For all the Prime Minister’s talk about local government, this whole approach to devolution has shown nothing but contempt for local democracy. Local voices have been ignored in the drawing of new council boundaries, and have been overridden by party political considerations. Again and again, the Labour Government’s approach to local government has been about imposing more government, pushing up tax, and stacking the deck in a cynical effort to gain political advantage. They should be ashamed.