2.1 Background
Despite these significant opportunities, experience to date – supported by this programme’s analysis - indicates that if LGR is not designed and delivered in the right way, there is a risk that it has a detrimental effect on outcomes for residents and on costs for taxpayers. Following a decade of funding reductions and increased demand for services, the risk to service continuity, quality, and cost is further heightened as government embarks on a much wider reform agenda across both local government finance and service delivery.
Through the English Devolution White Paper, published in December 2024, the government has embarked on the most radical overhaul to council structures in a generation, with ambitions to end the current two-tier system of local government by 2028. While the scale and pace of change envisaged is unprecedented, local government reorganisation (LGR) is not a novel concept, with unitary authorities having been created at numerous points over recent years. Through this experience, the sector has developed an in-depth understanding of the significant opportunities that can result from reorganisation, as well as the challenges that are often presented. Previous reorganisations have demonstrated that the creation of a new unitary authority can deliver the opportunity for a local area to not just put in place a ‘safe and legal’ model, but rather to fundamentally transform the way in which residents are supported in their area. Merging county and district authorities at the right scale can create a system that is preventative and resident-centric by design; leverages community assets and housing services that better support the most vulnerable residents; delivers reduced operating costs; and brings greater coherence to place-based public service reform. This should result in a system which is more efficient, effective and integrated.
Nowhere is this more relevant than in people-based services.
These services, comprising some of the most important delivered by the state, often to its most vulnerable citizens, include adult social care, children’s services, home to school transport, public health, and special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Core revenue spending on these services, which are largely statutory in nature, is growing year-on-year and is forecast to account for almost three quarters of spending need in two-tier areas by 2029/30. 1 Any reform to local authority structures will therefore have the greatest impact on these life-critical services, particularly in scenarios where the disaggregation of county-wide services is under consideration.
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