Labour promised 'ambitious reforms', but it was fixing things that were not broken. And the moral: focus on what matters and stop making stupid mistakes.
What were they thinking? Labour inherited the worst of everything, including prisons beyond breaking point, court backlogs as bad as NHS waiting lists, children cast into exceptional destitution, the National Grid unable to cope with demand, reservoirs unbuilt while sewage poured into rivers, high debt, no money and deep public distrust in politics. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves were honest about what they found.
So what on earth can have seized them, within months of taking over, to decide this was a good time for a gigantic English council re-disorganisation? Angela Rayner, who was in charge of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government at the time, kicked it off in December 2024. But why, when councils are near-bankrupt and crippled by the ballooning costs of social care and provision for children with special educational needs and disabilities?
Steve Reed, the local government secretary, boasted to council leaders this week that it will "deliver the most ambitious reforms of local government in a generation". But what for? Local government reform wasn't in the manifesto. Until it was legally challenged - because the reorganisation would have delayed local elections in 30 places in England - it barely featured on the political horizon because it had no political purpose. Few people know much about what responsibilities fall to different layers of local authority and national government - which is why mayors are a good idea, putting an identifiable person in charge. Few people bother to vote: average council election turnout in 2024 was 30.8%, not much changed over recent decades. There was scant political mileage in this, but great organisational risk.
The shake-up merges districts into county councils, creating unitary authorities in some areas, with neighbouring councils merging in others. Given the country's present cynical anti-politics state of mind, voters might suspect this is some kind of crafty gerrymander that will favour Labour. Not at all. On the contrary, scores of towns and cities with a distinct political identity, many with universities, which usually vote Labour, Liberal Democrat or Green, will be swallowed up into large surrounding counties that traditionally vote blue. Oxford, Cambridge, Ipswich, Norwich, Exeter, Reading and many more will disappear as civic entities, losing their identities as they are melded into counties of opposing politics. No wonder neither the Tories nor Reform put up objections to the plan itself.
How did this happen? The suspicion is that the idea came from another of those dusty files sitting around on civil service shelves and was brought forward to an innocent new government as a fresh idea temptingly promising "efficiency" and "savings". The NHS goes through such a process with almost every new health minister - just look what George Osborne was sold by the Treasury in his early omnishambles budget of "good ideas", such as the pasty and the static caravan tax.
Bigger can always be made to sound more effective, but there is rarely good evidence for that. Most organisations can be presented as untidy, but tidying them up usually makes things worse. The vast cost of the reorganisation itself is rarely computed, including the time wasted for hundreds of thousands of employees as they are forced to reapply for old jobs under new brass plates.
Goodness knows what evidence Rayner and the rest were shown to persuade them to create this huge turbulence. There is no evidence that unitary councils do any better than areas with both district and county councils, according to Tony Travers, local government expert at the London School of Economics. He tells me: "There's no evidence that Hampshire, with its district councils, is better or worse governed than, say, Buckinghamshire or other unitaries." The House of Commons library research is also inconclusive: "It is not clear from available evidence whether unitary councils save money compared with a two-tier system," says Travers.
Perhaps what tempted Labour was a chance to pander to anti-politician public sentiment. Rayner's original white paper laying out the proposal in 2024 boasted that it will mean "fewer [local] politicians". That is a blunder that runs against the spirit of devolution, localism and reviving neighbourhoods. In a fragile democracy in which so few participate, with barely 2% of the electorate belonging to one of the three main parties, the valiant foot-soldiers of democracy are those willing to be councillors or to run local parties and create the actions that bind local communities together. MPs rely on their councillors, and their local parties all but collapse when they lose too many of them.
The government's new Pride in Place strategy will rely on councillors. But this council plan, as it boasts, means there will be many fewer. Travers says we already have many fewer elected representatives than most similar countries and our councillors have been vanishing fast, "from 75,000 in 1965, to only 11,000 that will be left after this". Each councillor will be under far greater pressure, with fewer of them to represent larger councils of half a million people. Reed has been boasting about a figure of 5,000 fewer councillors than there are currently, but he ignores the fact that people tend to like them. Polls reaching far back have always shown that voters trust their councillors twice as much as they trust Westminster politicians.
Another U-turn could stop this now, at least for most councils that have yet to begin their great upheaval. But that might bring even worse chaos. There is a lesson here for all governments: royal commissions are a good idea when considering major technical change. There was no need to dive into this when there was no public demand, no lobbying or any interest in local reorganisation - and plenty of time to explore it first.
What makes this so perverse is that local government does urgently need reform of the appalling council tax system and a review of all property taxes. Councils desperately need reform of social care, which is bringing them to a state of near collapse: where is the promised national care service? Instead, we have a "tidying up" that has finally exploded into a row about delayed elections. The government was not cheating when it let councils decide whether to hold an election for councillors who might be in post for just a year in mutating councils, but it was easy for Reform and the Tories to make it look that way.
This has all the hallmarks of a great distraction, a displacement activity from the impossibly difficult and intractable problems the government faces. The elections bill published last week has a great void at its centre where electoral reform should have been. Fiddling with the borders and electorates of councils looks almost like a toy version. Labour knows all too well that leaving in place the electoral system that allowed the party to win a mammoth majority on a slender vote is holding open the door to Reform to do the same. It may make little difference to the cataclysm Labour expects in May, but it gave Nigel Farage a needless fillip to claim a win for democracy by challenging delayed council elections and winning.