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Why? That’s the mystery. Why go through the upheaval of a mighty local government reorganisation, merging hundreds of district councils with the counties above them, when it will exhaust capacity in already overstretched and near-bankrupt councils? It wasn’t in Labour’s manifesto – and its electoral system for mayors will do Labour untold damage.
It’s baffling to watch the government struggling with abolishing districts and reordering unitary councils, for no practical or political purpose. It looks like a displacement activity: everyone knows financially crippled councils need relief from the social care crisis, and reform of the hated council tax system in which Buckingham Palace pays less than an average house in Hartlepool. But this busy deckchair-shifting avoids those. Nor is there very much devolution in it.
Former Tory local government minister Eric Pickles was George Osborne’s axe-wielder, who nitpicked officials over the cost of their biscuits at meetings. But he said one wise thing: “I’ll have a pearl-handled revolver waiting in my drawer for the first civil servant who suggests another local government reorganisation.” Even so, abolition of district councils was begun by the Tories, with Labour completing it.
For example, in 2018 Dorset shrank nine councils into two, and cut councillors from 333 to 158. I have no idea how many councillors there should be, or the right size of councils, but Prof Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, the great expert, says no one else does either, not even him. “There’s no evidence that Hampshire, with its district councils, is better or worse governed than say, Shropshire or Buckinghamshire unitaries.”
England’s patchwork quilt of different-sized councils is untidy, but it hardly matters. Clumps of unitaries will be joined together to form combined authorities, mostly under directly elected mayors with more power over local transport, skills, housing and infrastructure, but no new money. Mayors are a good thing, identifiable champions of their region, with “king of the north” Andy Burnham the great exemplar. Tracy Brabin, Ben Houchen and Steve Rotheram are similar local galvanisers. But introducing more mayors never needed this reorganisation. A seasoned former Labour council leader and minister speaks for many when he tells me: “All this change won’t deliver a single new hospital ward, new affordable home, additional police officer or fill a pothole in the road.”
Politics requires parties and parties need grassroots that bind people together through selecting and campaigning for local council candidates. Parties with few local councillors tend to wither away. With waning trust in politics, the local matters. In polls since time immemorial, people like their local councils and councillors better than their MPs: voters trust councillors twice as much (though they are lazy about actually voting for them).
But Britain has relatively few elected representatives, “way out of line in councillors per head of population, with 19,000 councillors, while the French have 36,000 councils, yes councils,” says Travers. Ours have been vanishing fast: “From 75,000 councillors in 1965, only 14,000 will be left after this.” The white paper actually boasts there will be “fewer local politicians”, hardly encouraging political engagement. One aim is to save money but House of Commons library research finds: “It is not clear from available evidence whether unitary councils save money compared with a two-tier system.”
Each unitary must have a minimum population of 350,000, most to be 500,000. (That’s the size of Malta, which has 68 local councils.) Long lists of towns and cities with fewer than 350,000 people are being swept into larger areas of suburb and countryside. Look south of the Midlands and these include scores of Labour or Liberal Democrat councils, such as Reading, Oxford, Cambridge, Exeter, Ipswich and and more. Once subsumed into unitaries, then into clumps of counties, anxious Labour number-crunchers warn not a single southern mayor will be Labour or Lib Dem. Remember, these Tory/Reform mayors will control housing: what about Labour’s 1.5m homes? Brighton and Hove is typical: once swallowed into deep blue East and West Sussex, that mayor will be Tory/Reform.
The genius architects of all this haven’t (yet) reversed the Tories’ great gerrymander, when they imposed first-past-the-post elections for mayors and police and crime commissioners. If mayors were elected on the previous supplementary vote system, where you can mark your second choice, no mayor gets chosen without 50% of the vote. It obliges candidates to appeal beyond their own party, seeking second choices. Tories wanting that Sussex vote would need a candidate acceptable to Brighton’s second choices.
This policy feels drafted by the type of heroic cartographers responsible for colonial-era maps, neat lines and population counts, regardless of people, places, politics or identity. Scores of towns will be swept into shires they share no identity with. It’s not too late to put a freeze on this. Leave districts in place while a royal commission considers the great multitude of real local government problems, including council tax. Introduce mayors, but elected on the original system so candidates appeal beyond their tribe.
A government letter commands everywhere submit unitary plans this month: they must “meet transition costs over time from existing budgets”. This is a puzzlingly bizarre waste of effort for a government confronting herculean tasks wherever it looks. Labour MPs are just waking up to all this, especially the voting fiasco: time to reach for that pearl-handled revolver.
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Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
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