In the excitement of appointing a new Prime Minister, the Manchester Mayoral election, and Count Binface’s adventures in Clacton, the government’s proposals for local government reform in England have been overlooked by the media. This is a pity, as the implications of the changes will stay with us for a long time. How local government is organized affects how efficiently services are delivered to residents, and what they cost. Mathew Hulbert pointed out eloquently in LDV a fortnight ago that the government’s proposed changes are not a technical administrative reform, but a profound political change.
The motive behind current government policy is to replace two-tier local government with unitary councils. Fair enough, fashions change. The process started when Angela Rayner was Minister. She aimed for unitaries with a population of around 500,000. When Steve Reed took over, he favoured smaller councils. What neither of them favoured, unfortunately, was an impartial, evidence-led way of deciding what council boundaries should be. This has led to political manipulation almost to the extent of gerrymandering, and proposals for councils with no roots in community. Local councils with absurd boundaries have caused political ructions in many counties. One of the craziest examples is in Lincolnshire.
There are two obvious ways of establishing unitary authorities in the area. One is to have a unitary Lincolnshire County Council based on the present authority. This would have a population around the size Angela Rayner originally wanted for unitaries. The other is to return to the pre-1974 pattern of three unitary councils based on the historic “Parts” of the county: Lindsey, Kesteven, and Holland, with a separate council for the city of Lincoln. That would provide more compact unitaries, of the size Steve Reed seemed to favour.
Instead of backing either of these alternatives, Reed, in one of his last actions as a minister, favoured a self-serving piece of gerrymandering put forward by Lincoln City Council. Their proposal splits Lincolnshire into two unitary councils. One is the City of Lincoln, enlarged by the inclusion of many well-to-do commuter villages around it. This council would include most of the industry in the county, the Cathedral, and the two Universities. Many of the most prosperous settlements in the county would be drawn in, and the city council would have the last word on development in the rural area surrounding the city.
What does the proposal suggest for the rest of this historic county? Well, um, nothing really. The government just suggests lumping all the rest into a new unitary council called Rural Lincolnshire. This would start at a huge disadvantage. It would encompass the less prosperous areas of the county and would lack a coherent identity. With an economy based largely on agriculture, it would have a low revenue base but an expensive need to serve a huge and sparsely populated area. Transport links mean that, paradoxically, its HQ would probably have to be in the city rather than in its own area.
This proposal fails to make economic or geographical sense. It means a loss of institutional memory, and condemns rural communities to loss of opportunity while the city becomes bigger and richer. And there is no sign that people want this. Evidence of consultation is sadly lacking. The Lincoln City proposal, after lots of turgid management-speak, makes the amazing admission that there has been no scientific survey of public opinion “to avoid confusion and engagement fatigue”. bit like cancelling a General Election to avoid voters getting tired of thinking, then.
Lincolnshire is not the only area where crazy decisions are to be foisted on unsuspecting communities. Devon is an egregious example, and there are others. But two gleams of light flicker on the horizon. One is that judicial reviews of some of the government’s decisions are now being sought, and so there may be more critical scrutiny. The second is that the minister responsible is Angela Rayner once again. Can she be persuaded to re-think her predecessor’s policies?
Either way, we need LibDem parliamentarians – peers as well as MPs – to take this issue up much more energetically than they have so far. They will find many of us ready to help. Good local government has been a keystone of Liberalism since Joseph Chamberlain’s time. When the consequences of this reorganization become evident, wouldn’t it be fine if we could show we were on the right side of history?
* Nigel Lindsay is a former Liberal councillor in Aberdeen and a longtime activist in the party, but considers himself an internationalist first and foremost.
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11 Comments
Thank you, Nigel. I agree entirely. I understand that Devon is considering judicial review along with some other Councils, including Portsmouth.
The decisions for Lancashire merit your word “egregious”. It jams together two towns, Burnley and Blackburn, which are hereditary rivals, going back at least to 1642 and now played out at football matches which are a considerable strain in the Lancashire Constabulary. That is as bad, if not worse, that the failures of the 1972 Act with Sefton, Kirklees and Sandwell as well as the Avon, Humberside and Cleveland fiascos. (I was in the unusual position in 1974 and later of trying to work with all the new Social Services authorities in England (including Lincolnshire) and saw the cases where they didn’t work and still don’t because of the lack of identity and economic coherence). It also creates a new authority (Lancashire, Preston, Ribble Valley) which has a large chunk of Wyre across the middle of it.
Burnham should understand this from Greater Manchester where it would have been a major mistake to put Bury together with Bolton or Rochdale or, even worse and as Burnham knows, Bolton and Wigan. He has the chance to pause the process, which would certainly be more use to Labour than continuing as at present in East Lancashire, which would create the most deprived authority in England. Even with a Burnham bounce, the outcome of an election in this new area could well be a Reform majority with Labour and Muslim Independents as the main Opposition parties.
I’m not sure that the reappointment of Angela Rayner is necessarily cause for hope. It became clear during her statement and answers to MPs questions that she had very little understanding of the process and seemed to think that the new councils would be up and running this year.
I suspect local government minister Jim McMahon was the real brains behind it, and he sadly has not returned.
I missed out that I’m referring to her statement in parliament about the postponement of the 2025 county elections.
In North Staffordshire we have a proposed boundary between North and South which makes no community sense. It retains a dividing line in Newcastle-under-Lyme which crosses half way down a large cul-de-sac and part of Trentham, the villages of Hanchurch and Beech who communicate with the Northern urban area are in South Staffordshire; the Moorlands constituency will become split between North and South as their MP has already complained about. This, in spite of the fact that North Staffordshire as proposed will have less around 460,000 residents, while South Staffordshire will have 58,000.
Personally I am convinced that a two tier system is what we actually need so that we preserve a reasonable strategic authority across North Staffordshire, while preserving more local decision-making within the current district and city authorities. The cost of this in financial terms can be paid for by employing less staff and decision-making in Whitehall.
One thing we should bear in mind is that Andy Burnham seems genuinely convinced of the need for adopting proportional representation (although he will have difficulty in driving this through against the opposition of the Labour hierarchy). This of course means multi-member constituencies. Assuming that the average is about 6 to 8 members elected per constituency (an exception would be the Highlands & Islands, where the sheer land area means going down to a 5-member constituency), we are talking of just under 100 Westminster constituencies in total (a suggested scheme provides about 80 multi-member constituencies for England, 9 for Scotland, 5 for Wales and 3 for Northern Ireland). Clearly we should be welcoming any move towards PR (although we should continue to push for adopting STV), a Liberal aim for more than a century. But we need to consider how the new multi-member constituencies will be drawn up. In many cases, existing counties are of the right size (e. g. a multi-member constituency for Cornwall would have 6 members, equal to the existing six single-member seats), and will make excellent and easily-identified areas which should gain the support of the voting public. Clearly the most populous counties will need dividing into a number of multi-member constituencies, and in some case the constituency will require some juggling of borders to create areas with appropriate electorates. This might hopefully have some ramifications for local government reorganisation.
Nigel Lindsay raises some substantial questions about local democracy and accountability. I hope the parliamentary party will take the matter up as a matter of urgency before it becomes too late.
I’m grateful for all these comments. As Gordon Lishman and Nigel Jones have shown so clearly, nonsensical local authority boundaries are being proposed in many areas. Reorganisation should produce an improved situation if the stress and disruption it causes are to be justified. This clearly is not happening. When will our Leader and parliamentarians pursue this issue with the energy it needs?
Let’s be honest here. The whole thing is a political carve up, by an instinctively centralising and authoritarian Labour party, emboldened by a huge parliamentary majority in government, to strengthen its urban power base. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It is doing that by destroying every local district council (which are almost the only places where real local democratic representation can still exist in all its diversity) and replace them by huge Unitaries and even bigger combined authorities where a single elected mayor can take almost absolute political control with no checks or balances except an inevitably powerless scrutiny committee which he or she simply patronises and ignores once every month or so.
As an aside it will remove almost every possibility of there being councils where they (or the Cons) have to share power with the Lib Dems holding a balance of power by establishing a series of mini one party states.
Hence top of Starmer’s, Rayner’s and Burham’s Tick list – Entrench power, Stuff the Lib Dems, Forget the Cons – Job Done.
Thanks to all for a most interesting and relevant article and set of comments!
From the information and possibilities therein contained, is it the case that local government changes are based significantly more upon the personalities and wishes of individual ministers than upon facts, data and planning which is reasonably, objective and with consistent purposes etc.?
Hi Steve,
Nah,
Just one consistent purpose – Labour party advantage.
David
… and in addition.
Sorry David (Raw). It is all far too late now to stop it. It’s too late even for us to make a noticeable national protest about it, so people know when they find they
a) have no influence over their elected mayor,
b) find their local councillor has no longer anything like local, and
c) have a local council whose boundaries are totally arbitrary,
they know
1) who did it,
2) why they did it, and
3) it was the Lib Dems who fought against it.
It is the fundamental weakness of out policy making process. Lots and lots of stuff on how we will “build (an even more) free and fair society”, but nothing at all on how we will “safeguard” what we have already got – as in the very first sentence of the Preamble to the Constitution.
Sorry again,
David