Interim local government reorganisation plans submitted by all areas by the deadline of March 2025 revealed at least 53 separate potential unitary configurations across the 21 areas that were invited to submit proposals. The disaggregation of county services was put forward as a formal option in all but one county area. 2 Based on analysis of these plans and formal proposals published since, it is expected that almost every county area will have a submission for at least one unitary council with a population of below 500,000, with several including unitaries with populations of below 300,000. Individual areas are evaluating, or formally proposing, options for the creation of between one and five new unitary councils, depending on the size of the LGR geography. The breadth of emerging proposals and competing options raises significant considerations over the optimum scale for delivering these people-based services. In turn, it also brings to the forefront of the debate the significant and serious risks and challenges associated with the disaggregation of county-wide services where more than one unitary council is created in an area. Previous work by PwC and the County Councils Network (CCN) has estimated the one-off and recurring costs of splitting up and duplicating county-wide services in different reorganisation scenarios. 4 However, the challenges associated with disaggregation in people services stretch beyond the direct financial impact of the potential savings profile from LGR, with many of these not explored in detail within previous reports. 3
These include the potential upward pressure on unit costs due to reductions in purchasing power; workforce deployment and the recruitment and retention of staff; reductions in provider capacity and placement sufficiency; and risks to the continuing quality of services. All these factors will have a major impact on the stability of care services and may even risk the sustainability of some or all of the new councils themselves, given the proportion of local authority budgets that will continue to be devoted to people services.
2.2 Purpose
To explore these implications in more detail, CCN has worked with Newton on an extensive programme of work to assess the potential impact of LGR on local authorities’ people services. Specifically, this work has explored the impact of the geographical footprint and population sizes of new unitary councils on the costs, opportunities and risks associated with the disaggregation of county-wide services. The purpose of this report is to provide new and original quantitative insights on how demand, cost, and quality of councils’ people services will be affected by the geography and population scale of new unitary councils. Alongside this, through engagement with senior practitioners in adults’ and children’s services and with county Chief Executives, it has qualitatively analysed benefits and risks of reorganisation for these critical services, and explored how these may be maximised and mitigated.
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