Dr David Jeffery is a senior lecturer in British politics at the University of Liverpool and author of Whatever Happened to Tory Liverpool.
The Labour government has released its English Devolution White Paper, which includes local government reorganisation. The government will move to merge all two-tier councils – those areas with a district council and a county council – into single unitary authorities.
These new authorities must have a minimum population of 500,000 million people. For context, the average population of a district council is currently 115,000.
Although some MPs are privately very annoyed by some of the proposed mergers, the response from the Conservative Party has been muted. But given the Conservatives’ own love for unitarisation – there were 353 local authorities when the Conservatives came into office in 2010 and now there are just 317 – it seems unlikely the party would oppose the move in principle, even if it may quibble with certain specific cases.
This would be a mistake. The Conservative Party should oppose unitarisation for two reasons: ideological and party-political self-interest.
Ideological
Conservatives should naturally be distrustful of centralised power and the same should apply on the local level. This is especially the case when there is very limited evidence for the two most common purported benefits of unitarisation, namely that larger local authorities are more effective at delivering services than smaller ones and that it saves money.
Local government has to deliver a range of services and there is no logical reason why we would assume all of these services are best delivered across the same geographic level. Indeed, a 2006 report published by the then Department for Communities and Local Government found no evidence for a single optimal size of local government when looking at performance, user satisfaction, value for money, and administration costs.
Taking performance as an example, they found four different relationships at play:
- a positive linear relationship, whereby the bigger the local authority the better the outcome – e.g. on the proportion of household waste recycled;
- a negative linear relationship, whereby the bigger the local authority the worse the outcome – e.g. reviews of child protection cases;
- a u-shaped relationship, whereby an increase in local authority size was associated with worse performance, up to a point – e.g. the proportion of council tax collected;
- and an inverted u-shape relationship, whereby an increase in local authority size was associated with better performance, up to a point – e.g. educational qualifications of looked-after children.
As such, for two-tier areas the push for unitarisation will necessarily mean that some services will be delivered in a less efficient manner than is currently the case.
The second argument, that this reform will save a significant amount of money, also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The County Councils Network – an organisation which represents unitary authorities – argues that unitarisation would save £2.94bn over five years, or around £0.6bn a year. This sounds like a lot of money, but it represents just 0.5% of total local government expenditure in 2022/23. Indeed, the total five-year projected savings would not even cover the local government budget gap for the single year of 2026/27.
Even if we take proponents’ arguments at face value, the money saved is negligible – and that if it actually materialised, which is by no means certain – a 2015 study found that previous rounds of unitarisation failed to achieve the purported cost savings, reflecting studies covering other countries.
So the move to unitarisation will mean some services are delivered less efficiently but it provides no certainty that there will be cost savings.
Party-political
The second reason to oppose these reforms is that unitarisation is bad for the Conservative Party on the ground. The party is due for a drubbing in the locals, compared to when these seats were last up for election in 2021, but an election defeat is not the only way the Conservative Party can lose seats.
It is no secret that Labour tend to do better in our urban areas – typically already covered by unitary councils – and the Conservative Party tends to do better in our more semi-urban and rural areas – typically areas with a two-tier system. Moving to a unitary system not only means fewer elected representatives overall, but also fewer Conservative councillors.
Take North Yorkshire Council, for example, which has existed as a unitary council since 2023. It replaced the North Yorkshire County Council alongside the seven district councils of Craven, Hambleton, Harrogate, Richmondshire, Ryedale, Scarborough and Selby. Under this reform, the 301 district and county councillors covering the area were replaced by 90 unitary councillors and the Conservatives lost roughly 130 councillors in the area (down from around 180 to around 50).
Why is this bad for the party? Councillors are the lifeblood of their associations, acting as a loyal core of the membership and reliable and experienced campaigners. It is a strategic error for the Conservatives to support unitarisation because, at a time when the party struggles to get members out to campaign, these reforms effectively remove this loyal cadre of campaigners.
Additionally, the reforms mean that there are fewer people to cover a given ward – instead of both county councillors and district councillors all covering a patch during elections, under these reforms it will just be the unitary ward councillors. These reforms are a direct threat to the Conservatives’ local government base.
Furthermore, unitary authorities are more likely to have all-out elections rather than the more traditional ‘thirds’ cycle. This can be devastating for a party if the all-out election falls on a bad year electorally – as is likely to be the case for the Conservatives over the next couple of years – because a party can be wiped off the electoral map in one go, whereas under the thirds model parties have time to regroup.
Once a party has suffered a terrible wipeout on the local level, it becomes more difficult to keep activists together and focused when the next election is four years away compared to when it is just one year away. This happened in Liverpool in 1973, which saw the sudden decline of the Conservative Party as an electoral force in the city (and which you can read more about in my book Whatever Happened to Tory Liverpool).
Overall, then, the policy of unitarisation is a bad one – it was a bad policy when the Conservatives carried it out, but at least they did it on a case-by-case basis. The policy of forced unitarisation under Labour is even worse, representing the moving of local power away from the people in the name of ‘devolution’, a true example of Orwellian doublespeak.
The Conservative Party should oppose this vigorously both for the benefit of those who live in two-tier areas but also for its own sake.
Dr David Jeffery is a senior lecturer in British politics at the University of Liverpool and author of Whatever Happened to Tory Liverpool.
The Labour government has released its English Devolution White Paper, which includes local government reorganisation. The government will move to merge all two-tier councils – those areas with a district council and a county council – into single unitary authorities.
These new authorities must have a minimum population of 500,000 million people. For context, the average population of a district council is currently 115,000.
Although some MPs are privately very annoyed by some of the proposed mergers, the response from the Conservative Party has been muted. But given the Conservatives’ own love for unitarisation – there were 353 local authorities when the Conservatives came into office in 2010 and now there are just 317 – it seems unlikely the party would oppose the move in principle, even if it may quibble with certain specific cases.
This would be a mistake. The Conservative Party should oppose unitarisation for two reasons: ideological and party-political self-interest.
Ideological
Conservatives should naturally be distrustful of centralised power and the same should apply on the local level. This is especially the case when there is very limited evidence for the two most common purported benefits of unitarisation, namely that larger local authorities are more effective at delivering services than smaller ones and that it saves money.
Local government has to deliver a range of services and there is no logical reason why we would assume all of these services are best delivered across the same geographic level. Indeed, a 2006 report published by the then Department for Communities and Local Government found no evidence for a single optimal size of local government when looking at performance, user satisfaction, value for money, and administration costs.
Taking performance as an example, they found four different relationships at play:
As such, for two-tier areas the push for unitarisation will necessarily mean that some services will be delivered in a less efficient manner than is currently the case.
The second argument, that this reform will save a significant amount of money, also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The County Councils Network – an organisation which represents unitary authorities – argues that unitarisation would save £2.94bn over five years, or around £0.6bn a year. This sounds like a lot of money, but it represents just 0.5% of total local government expenditure in 2022/23. Indeed, the total five-year projected savings would not even cover the local government budget gap for the single year of 2026/27.
Even if we take proponents’ arguments at face value, the money saved is negligible – and that if it actually materialised, which is by no means certain – a 2015 study found that previous rounds of unitarisation failed to achieve the purported cost savings, reflecting studies covering other countries.
So the move to unitarisation will mean some services are delivered less efficiently but it provides no certainty that there will be cost savings.
Party-political
The second reason to oppose these reforms is that unitarisation is bad for the Conservative Party on the ground. The party is due for a drubbing in the locals, compared to when these seats were last up for election in 2021, but an election defeat is not the only way the Conservative Party can lose seats.
It is no secret that Labour tend to do better in our urban areas – typically already covered by unitary councils – and the Conservative Party tends to do better in our more semi-urban and rural areas – typically areas with a two-tier system. Moving to a unitary system not only means fewer elected representatives overall, but also fewer Conservative councillors.
Take North Yorkshire Council, for example, which has existed as a unitary council since 2023. It replaced the North Yorkshire County Council alongside the seven district councils of Craven, Hambleton, Harrogate, Richmondshire, Ryedale, Scarborough and Selby. Under this reform, the 301 district and county councillors covering the area were replaced by 90 unitary councillors and the Conservatives lost roughly 130 councillors in the area (down from around 180 to around 50).
Why is this bad for the party? Councillors are the lifeblood of their associations, acting as a loyal core of the membership and reliable and experienced campaigners. It is a strategic error for the Conservatives to support unitarisation because, at a time when the party struggles to get members out to campaign, these reforms effectively remove this loyal cadre of campaigners.
Additionally, the reforms mean that there are fewer people to cover a given ward – instead of both county councillors and district councillors all covering a patch during elections, under these reforms it will just be the unitary ward councillors. These reforms are a direct threat to the Conservatives’ local government base.
Furthermore, unitary authorities are more likely to have all-out elections rather than the more traditional ‘thirds’ cycle. This can be devastating for a party if the all-out election falls on a bad year electorally – as is likely to be the case for the Conservatives over the next couple of years – because a party can be wiped off the electoral map in one go, whereas under the thirds model parties have time to regroup.
Once a party has suffered a terrible wipeout on the local level, it becomes more difficult to keep activists together and focused when the next election is four years away compared to when it is just one year away. This happened in Liverpool in 1973, which saw the sudden decline of the Conservative Party as an electoral force in the city (and which you can read more about in my book Whatever Happened to Tory Liverpool).
Overall, then, the policy of unitarisation is a bad one – it was a bad policy when the Conservatives carried it out, but at least they did it on a case-by-case basis. The policy of forced unitarisation under Labour is even worse, representing the moving of local power away from the people in the name of ‘devolution’, a true example of Orwellian doublespeak.
The Conservative Party should oppose this vigorously both for the benefit of those who live in two-tier areas but also for its own sake.