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Morning all

There are two different factors at work here - why these local elections have been postponed as against the policy of unitary authorities (it's called unitarisation but that's a horrible word).

The reason the process is taking so long is because of the timescale of statutory consultation and then the time for the Government to decide which of the options for local Government re-organisation presented is the one they prefer (why it has to be down to the Government I don't know, a local referendum would be better).

Surrey had its consultation last summer (ended in August I believe) but that was on two clear options - one for two Councils (West and East) and one for three (likely West, North and East). The Government then took three months to reach a definitive conclusion - this was mainly due to the complete clear out of the DCLOG Ministerial team in the wake of the departure of Angela Rayner.

Even with a final decision, there remains an Order which has to be laid before Parliament before the process can officially begin and that includes the elections for Shadow Authorities in May this year and the eventual dissolution of the existing County and Borough/District Councils in March 2027 by which time some of the County Councillors elected in 2021 will have served nearly six years of a four year term.

The process in other councils (Norfolk, Suffolk and East & West Sussex) has been incredibly slow with consultations still going on - it beggars belief it has taken so long and that's what we should be getting annoyed about. A second postponement of elections means Shadow elections in May 2027 and the dissolution of existing authorities in March 2028 meaning Councillors elected in 2021 will serve nearly seven years of a four year term.

With hindsight, the 2025 County elections in those authorities could and should have taken place and that is the problem.

There'sa wider debate about the role and scope of local councils and local Government but that's not why the elections this year have been cancelled - it's the process and for once you can blame Labour for that (though there were, as I recall, similar delays during the Conservative administrations). It's different when you look at places like Cornwall where the County simply swallowed up the Districts and Boroughs - the current model is creating new Councils and that creates legal and HR challenges.

“With hindsight” or clear lessons to be learned and saved as government record, to infirm the next upheaval in Local Government?

If I am understanding you correctly, you advocate speeding the process up by scrapping the lengthly consultation process? And if it’s going to be a lengthy process, don’t cancel elections? Know as foresight not hindsight how long the process realistically will take>.

I would counter, if you definitely know you are into last year, it’s performative and wasteful to hold elections for something abolished in 12 months, councillors abolished in 12 months. Instead bring in change managers as consultants to manage the change on time.

I’m not convinced a referendum would speed things up, or be strongly democratic way of deciding it. The only correct decision is to scrap having two councils at same time, and we elect councillors and governments to ensure the right decisions and strong government happen. When you put it out in a referendum the answer you get can be a lottery between the right way to proceeded and the wrong one. To argue for referendum on this, is at same time to trash the strong intellectual arguments for representative democracy as being stronger than “referendum democracy.” You can spot the mindless left and right wing Populists on PB, when they say give us a referendum on this. And no surprise the fact is Reform and Adolf Hitler both favour “referendum democracy” over representative democracy.

You do misunderstand me - there are three stages to the process.

First, the Councils themselves need to work up proposals, second, these proposals are put to a statutory consultation and third the Government reviews the result of the consultation and decides which structure will be the future organisation for local Government in the area concerned.

The problem I have is not with the process but how long it has taken. Norfolk, for example, despite being in the first tranche of Councils to be restructured, has only just reached the end of the second stage, the consultation, hence the need for a second postponement of elections.

I am convinced the Ministerial clearout of DCLOG last autumn has caused a lot of delay to the third stage of the process but there should have been a time limit to the first stage - the second stage is defined by law and I certainly wouldn't advocating reducing or limiting it.

As for your tirade against a referendum, well, yes, referenda have had a bad name since 2016 but my view was around having the referendum at the end of the consultation process rather than taking the outcome back to central Government and waiting 3-6 months to decide which way the Government would go. All that creates is uncertainty for staff (remember them?) and problems over longer term decision making such as funding for capital projects.

I'm certainly not suggesting holding elections in 2026 for an authority which will be abolished in 2027 and indeed I'll stretch that and say for those Councils in the first tranche, you could argue holding elections in 2025 with abolition scheduled in the spring of 2027 would also have been wasteful but that's not what has happened.

My argument is the postponement is NOT politically motivated to "stop" Reform or "save" Labour and Conservative seats but represents a failure to deliver a process to the timescale set out and that failure sits elsewhere.

Some good news this morning, Russia has got rid of 71% of its gold reserves since 2022.

https://x.com/kshevchenkoreal/status/2016907186749002198

It appears that, as with their oil, China is the buyer at a significant discount to market price.

Russia is slowly being hollowed-out as a country, they’re trying to fight a ground war and have run out of tanks. The entire Soviet stockpile of more than ten thousand tanks, all gone to give the Ukranians some scrap metal for recycling.

Reminded me: The gold Brown sold off for £3.5bn is now worth £50bn.

It's a bit silly criticising Brown, who instituted this sale many years ago. It would make more sense to criticise more recent actions: the Sunak government, for example, could have chosen to buy gold.

It seems to me that the local government election/funding problem illustrates a fairly diagnosable democracy problem along with a concept problem as well.

Firstly in any notionally democratic hierarchy a general rule applies, arising out of human nature: the higher level of the democratic hierarchy will always want to maximise its power and minimise its responsibility.

The conceptual problem in local democracy is that it is rational to want two incompatible things: local decision and accountability but also an absence of 'postcode lottery' about any local service we happen to want at any particular moment.

In respect of Westminster v local government this is fairly obvious. But because total state managed expenditure is a vast proportion of all activity from building nuclear submarines to park benches and playground swings it goes right down to the level of the village primary school and beyond.

Result: blame transference is one of the great creative industries of the democratic world. It is a social blight. Result: good well intentioned school governors (volunteers) and management etc spend long winter evenings exercising responsibility without power, while a thousand miles away well paid politicians exercise power without responsibility.

Underneath is the problem that local government has no constitutional basis and hence no security.

In most other democracies, the fundamentals of its local governance are set out in its constitution. For sure, constitutions can change - but that's normally an extended process with a series of hurdles to jump, and not something governments do lightly.

The absence of any formalised constitution in the UK means that local government exists and operates entirely at the whim of national government - it can be re-organised, abolished, have its election dates changed, have its funding cut or capped, all according to the political decisions of a majority party at Westminster, elected on 35-40% of the vote, and has next to no reliable funding sources of its own (other than, perhaps, parking charges - which in itself explains a lot).

There's perhaps a very gradual movement in the opposite direction with the introduction of regional mayors ?

And it ought to be acknowledged that the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, which is causing the controversy discussed in the header, does significantly increase powers devolved to the higher tier of local government.

I am just wondering if the increase in 'powers' is actually an increase in responsibilities and liabilities but without all the powers necessary to do them effectively.

The effective bankruptcy of local government is the result of a massive increase in statutory duties without any kind of corresponding increase in revenue raising powers. Trying to fund child protection from car park fees doesn't work, and when large scale capital projects fall apart- looking a the Tory disaster in Woking- the road to ruin usual takes less than five years. The forced merger of local government units dating back to the Saxons in England and the Middle Ages in Scotland has left local powers a shadow of what they were before the reorganisation in 1974/5. Neither do units such as West Cheshire or East Ayrshire command much local loyalty. This is yet another way the Conservatives smashed things up and failed to build anything viable to replace them. Reform talk the same talk but are even less aware of the problem, which is why they have been so shocked by how hard it is to change things, even if you can move flags around.

Local government reform is an increasingly urgent problem, but it is also a real hot potato and few outside the political nerdery are even aware of the scale of the problem. Spoiler alert: it is already in the hundreds of billions.

All these reforms of local councils seem to be designed to do one thing only which is to centralise more power and take accountability even fuirther away from the electorate. That goies for all the psat reforms under both parties as well. This is not a party political issue, it is a politician issue. The centre wants more power (whatever the party in power) and they will get it in the (often false) name of efficiency

I am in favour of Localism, important and as described by you - which is why I oppose this governments awful Police Reforms, centralise more power at expense of Localism.

But Conservative Government, and many Conservative councils are the architects of the ongoing local Government re-organisation for streamlining for fiscal efficiencies. One in three people in England live in area covered by two local authorities — two chief executives, two sets of councillors, two finance directors - this reform slashes the number of councillors by 5,000 gets rid of highly-paid senior roles too.

BUt the question is whether having a single chief executive rather than 2 will make anyone's services better or better value for money. I am damn near certain that I will get worse - and less acountable - services from a South Lincolnshire Council than I have been getting from South Kesteven District Council. I am equally certain that I will see no drop in Council Tax as a result of this reorganisation so I will be paying more for less. That will be the story across the whole of England.

Yep.

And no one has asked us.

Big win for the Scottish Lib Dems in the East Dumbarton Council by-election yesterday. SNP second, then Reform and Labour, then Green, Tory and a very minor party.

Apparently the East Dunbartonshire by-election was a disaster for the Scottish Tories who were looking to defend the seat but crashed into sixth place. There were mitigating circumstances as the man who was being replaced was jailed for romance fraud last year and was forced out.

It was real bad. I suppose another mitigating circumstance is that the ward is in a LibDem Westminster seat (was Jo Swinson's) which they are hoping to take in May for Holyrood. They will have been all over it. But it does show the vulnerability of the Tories in high status/high income areas to the LibDems. This is probably as close to Surrey as you get in Scotland.

Yes, I stayed there, just off the West Highland Way, last spring. It’s a pleasant, scenic area to the south of Loch Lomond and looked fairly prosperous to me. Yet within easy driving distance of Glasgow

Big win for the Scottish Lib Dems in the East Dumbarton Council by-election yesterday. SNP second, then Reform and Labour, then Green, Tory and a very minor party.

Apparently the East Dunbartonshire by-election was a disaster for the Scottish Tories who were looking to defend the seat but crashed into sixth place. There were mitigating circumstances as the man who was being replaced was jailed for romance fraud last year and was forced out.

It was real bad. I suppose another mitigating circumstance is that the ward is in a LibDem Westminster seat (was Jo Swinson's) which they are hoping to take in May for Holyrood. They will have been all over it. But it does show the vulnerability of the Tories in high status/high income areas to the LibDems. This is probably as close to Surrey as you get in Scotland.

Yes, I stayed there, just off the West Highland Way, last spring. It’s a pleasant, scenic area to the south of Loch Lomond and looked fairly prosperous to me. Yet within easy driving distance of Glasgow

The first count first preferences were

Labour and Co-operative Party. 650
Scottish Conservative and Unionist. 283
ReformUK 709
Scottish National Party (SNP). 789
Scottish Liberal Democrats. 1,744
Scottish Family Party. 35
Scottish Greens. 371

Which does suggest a fairly heavily blotted copybook for the Tories,

I've not heard of David Runciman until I came across this account of his thinking (by James Marriott), but his defence of democracy seems plausible. I like the example of WW1 France. Perhaps there's hope after all?

"Runciman’s thesis, roughly, is that any given week in a democracy looks like a clown show of dithering, delay, u-turns, squabbling and complacency. But from the longer perspective the chaos is effective — a symptom of democracy’s capacity to criticise itself, to change tack, to spread its bets widely, keep its options open and correct its failures.

"Democracies can just keep hitting “reset” in a way autocracies generally can’t. It looks like chaos (e.g. the last ten years of UK politics) in the short term. In the long term it’s often a kind of genius:

"In 1917, the penultimate year of the First World War, France got through four prime ministers. This looked unforgivably amateurish — especially when compared with the authority of Germany's “silent master” General Ludendorff. But after a series of duds France eventually landed on Georges Clémenceau, “Le Tigre” and the saviour of his country. Germany had no alternative to Ludendorff who would soon bring his nation to its knees.

"Liz Truss was bad. But just imagine if she was our dictator for life."

Yes. I would add to that that democracy is clumsy and limited. But all the other ways that autocrats vainly point to in attempts to show that they know what it is that people want (apart from those that don't even pretend to care) lack that special element of ever actually asking them.