Eight principles for two reform programmes
A draft LED Confidential manifesto for the English and Scottish local government reform programmes. David Marlow and Mike Spicer · LED Confidential · 8 September 2026 · ledconfidential.co.uk
England has paused its local government reorganisation programme. Scotland has just opened a consultation on one. Neither programme has been explicit enough about what the reform is for.
This is our answer, and we would rather you argued with it than agreed with us.
Six days apart, both of the UK’s largest local government systems put their own structure back on the table — and did it in opposite directions.
England, 7 September — four reorganisation decisions withdrawn, the rest of the programme into rapid review, while ministers insist the devolution timetable and the 2028 strategic authority deadline stand.
Scotland, 1 September — a three-month consultation opens on restructuring councils “too small to be strategic” or “too big to be local”, with regional economic powers promised and the funding question unanswered.
Between them sits the Rewiring the State white paper, fiscal roadmap, and Autumn Budget still to land.
What follows is the accumulated position of twenty months of LED Confidential — not a reaction to last week. Eight propositions we believe can assist LED and placemaking policy makers and add real value to your work on LGR over what has become a post-summer LGR crunch time.
1. Reform has to be for something - and that something must give greater prominence to inclusive, sustainable growth and cohesive placemaking
Test any structural proposal for whether and how it enables better jobs, healthier lives, decent housing and functioning urban and rural places in your geography and your communities. Neither programme has required a proposal that answers that as its primary question. Make it the centrepiece of yours.
2. Economic geography matters
Arbitrary population thresholds and claims of historic legitimacy are ways of avoiding the functional economic area conversation. Every council is simultaneously too small for some functions and too big for others: strategic transport, planning, skills, social care and community wellbeing each have their own optimal scale, and no single boundary satisfies them all. So, the question is never whether an authority is the right size. It is which functions this geography serves well, which it serves badly, and what is being done about the second list. Don’t let administrative convenience ever be your major argument for the second list. And if it is, present its real costs, even if qualitatively, in your LGR appraisals.
3. Don’t let LGR end in tiers and cross-boundary conflict
The unitary myth has been by far the biggenst red herring of England’s latest LGR. If the right scale always depends on the function, tiers are not failure. Failure is tiers that exist as plateaus, unable to collaborate up or down.
Non-metropolitan England is abolishing districts and counties to remove a tier while adding strategic authorities above and neighbourhood boards below. Scotland has ruled out new layers of administration and new politicians before setting out what the redesigned local tier is actually for. Be honest: residents will end up with four or more tiers whichever way the reviews land. Pretending otherwise buys the disruption of reorganisation without the coherence it is supposed to deliver.
→ Clarity — not every function has one unambiguous home, but each review ought to be able to say which tier is accountable for which part of it.
→ Alignment — the tiers should nest, and where absolute coterminosity is impossible the boundaries should be as closely nested as they can be made.
→ Synergy — design each tier to make the others more capable rather than duplicating or blocking them. Subsidiarity has to work upward as well as down.
→ Cross-border collaboration – Include mechanisms for strengthening inter-Strategic Authority collaboration on shared geography and thematic interests
4. Dynamic, cohesive communities need a layer with real agency
This is where both programmes are most exposed. England has an under-specified community empowerment strand in the Devolution and Community Empowerment Act; Scotland has community wealth building on the statute book without the resources or the applications to deliver it in practice. Make the review about democratic renewal, not democratic tidying. Agency means powers and resources held locally, not consultation rights exercised upward. Both reviews are an opportunity to make a real step change in ‘walking the talk’ by outlining the approach to neighbourhood governance, double and triple devolution, with as much rigour as the other reorganisations.
5. Address the capacity constraints explicitly
The binding constraint on both programmes is the small number of officers who can run a safe, legal transition whilst also doing a day job. Morale and commitment in England will have taken real hits from the latest changes, and the issues in Scotland are not dissimilar, albeit for different reasons. Add the prospect of administrations changing mid-transition - a live possibility in a five-party landscape - and the case for funding capacity properly rather than muddling through becomes hard to argue with. If both governments want empowered intermediate tiers and local authorities to come at this with renewed vigour, fund capacity building up front and commit to transition funding for emergent structures.
6. Involve the other public service geographies integrally
Principle three was about tiers above and below you. This is about the services alongside you. Health, police, fire, skills, transport and many environmental and cultural services determine the real operating geography of a place as much as any council boundary. Redraw one council map out of six public service maps and very little has been reformed in outcome terms. In Scotland the health change (fourteen territorial boards becoming two, with a separate islands arrangement) is the larger structural event, and the one that re-plumbs the place-based health and inactivity agenda. Refresh your public services and anchor institution collaboration now so you are able to respond to White Papers and Holyrood proposals coherently and purposefully.
7. Money follows purpose but a reform that leads with savings has none
After the unitary myth, the myth of financial savings has been the most acute and overblown claim of England’s current tranche of LGR. Aggregate savings claims are the tell: a programme that can only justify itself this way has not decided what it is for, the savings have a poor record of arriving, and in any event they will be no more than a rounding error alongside Fair Funding 2.0 and serious fiscal devolution to strategic authorities. Finance still matters and has to be on the table at the same moment as structure — but as the enabler of a purpose, never as the purpose itself.
8. Measure the purposes, not the plumbing
Reorganisation dissolves organisational memory as well as structures. If you want to evaluate reform against the outcomes it claims, you have to define and capture those measures now — while the current organisations still exist and the people who understand the data still work in them. Ensure what is measured goes well beyond efficiency. Prioritise outcomes places need. The risk is not a shortage of data. The risk is that the wrong data becomes the only data.
Four things we would ask of both governments
→ Permit asymmetry — and say so out loud. Require every proposal to state its own reform purpose and welcome the fact that those purposes will differ from place to place. The structure that suits a coastal district with an inactivity problem is not the one that suits a growth corridor. Both programmes are drifting towards a template; say plainly that a place departing from it, for reasons it has set out, will not be marked down for doing so.
→ Require solutions that strengthen inter-tier working, neighbourhood governance and community agency. As a condition of approval, not an aspiration in the guidance. No proposal should get through that leaves the neighbourhood tier undefined or treats collaboration between tiers as something to be sorted out after vesting day. This is the one that decides whether reform reaches the communities it is being justified by.
→ Fund the transition capability up front and commit to transition funding for the emergent structures. It is the binding constraint on both programmes, it is currently carried as an assumed overhead, and it is dispersing while everyone waits.
→ Measure baselines against the stated purpose before vesting day. Whatever purpose a place declares under the first ask, make it define and capture the measures that would show whether that purpose was achieved now, while the organisations holding the data still exist.
A draft manifesto asking to be told where it is wrong
This was written within 48 hours of the Rayner announcement, drawing on twenty months of LED Confidential. We know there are no singular right answers. Tell us if any of the eight are wrong, and what you are being asked to do this autumn that we have missed. We will update it as the white paper, the fiscal roadmap and the Scottish consultation land. We will credit contributions that change our minds.
Click on the pdf below to access the LEDC LGR content archive - episodes and blogs explaining how our eight principles, two myths and four asks have emerged - and suggesting how England and Scotland role players can deal with them.
David Marlow (Third Life Economics) and Mike Spicer (PolicyDepartment), co-hosts LED Confidential, the local economic development podcast.
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