Ministers are reconsidering their options - but at what cost to the county?

Lancashire council leaders say the uncertainty and delay that has engulfed government plans to redraw the local authority map will damage services, staff morale - and even the democratic process itself.

The senior politicians hit out after ministers announced that they had ripped up a decision made in July to replace the county’s 15 existing main councils with four new authorities covering large swathes of the area.

That was supposed to mark the culmination of an 18-month, government-ordered process to determine a streamlined new local authority set-up for Lancashire.

It followed ministerial consideration of five options put forward by the current crop of councils suggesting the number - and geographical boundaries - of the organisations that should take their place from April 2028.

However, the government last month brought a dramatic halt to the proceedings, launching a review of the way the decision was reached in order to ensure it was lawful.

Local government minister Jim McMahon has now announced he will re-run the assessment of each of the options, which suggested between two and five new authorities, with two versions of a four-council configuration - including the one that was ultimately chosen.

That was set to lead to the creation of new ‘unitary’ councils for ‘North Lancashire’ (made up of the existing Preston, Lancaster and Ribble Valley authority footprints); ‘South Lancashire’ (Chorley, South Ribble and West Lancashire); ‘Pennine Lancashire’ (Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Hyndburn, Rossendale and Pendle); and ‘Fylde Coast’ (Blackpool, Fylde and Wyre).

However, the reassessment announced on Thursday brings all of the proposals back into play - and leaves the existing councils with no idea of how the already controversial shake-up will eventually shake down.

It also means they will each continue to function for a year longer than previously expected, with their abolition - as part of ‘local government reorganisation’ (LGR) - now expected to come in spring 2029.

Lancaster City Council’s Green Party leader Caroline Jackson told the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) the process had been “rushed” and resulted in “foreseeable legal complications” that would be felt by residents who did not support the changes in the first place.

“The government appears to have no idea that their ill thought-out plans for reorganisation have stolen our precious time and officer resources, which should be used for local priorities.

“We have local arts and culture to support, new waste disposal regulations to work on, climate change mitigation, economic development projects, work with young people, health, housing and leisure needs. All of these are affected and have proceeded more slowly as officers have spent their time on LGR.

“Mr. McMahon said in 2024 we had to get rid of counties and districts in order to stop people getting confused about them. Can he possibly understand the confusion our local residents now feel caught up in this shambles of a process?” Cllr Jackson asked.

It had been intended to stage elections for so-called ‘shadow’ versions of the new authorities in May 2027, in place of the scheduled votes for the existing councils, whose days were numbered.

Now, however, the current authorities that were due to hold polls next year - Blackpool, Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Chorley, Fylde, Hyndburn, Lancaster, Pendle, Preston, Ribble Valley, South Ribble, West Lancashire and Wyre - will do so.

The shadow elections will then take place in May 2028 and the new councils will run alongside those they will replace, during a near 12-month transition period that - at some stage - was always going to be part of the process.

However, Wyre Council leader Michael Vincent described that situation as “absolutely bonkers” - and said it risked making a mockery of the vote next spring.

“Ahead of an election in May, we will likely already know [the shape of] the council that is going to replace the one people are being asked to vote for.

“What is that going to do to [voter] turnout? How is that going to encourage engagement with local government and district councils?” Cllr Vincent asked.

He also told the LDRS that a combination of the shorter term-of-office for councillors elected to the existing authorities next year - who will serve two years instead of the usual four - together with the new councils looming on the horizon would make it difficult even to find candidates.

“At a time when the only thing everybody agrees on is that it's really difficult to get good people interested in standing for election - particularly when the hatred and the abuse we get online is genuinely sickening - the government has managed to make it as unattractive as they possibly can [for anyone to stand] in May.

“I'm not sure why any person would possibly consider putting themselves through an election in 2027 and not just wait for the unitary [shadow elections in 2028]. Nobody’s going to say, ‘I’d like to be roped into something that is already dead before I’m even elected’,” Cllr Vincent warned.

The Conservative leader of West Lancashire Borough Council, David Whittington - although a supporter of the originally chosen LGR option - echoed concern about the new timetable because of the practical problems it would pose during the remaining lifespan of the existing councils.

“Financially, it causes us a problem, because central government are cutting our funding. We got a decent grant for the current year, but there's a big reduction next year.

“We thought we could live with that because it'd be our last year, but now it isn't. So suddenly we're having to find millions of pounds for things we didn't think we would still have responsibility for.

“Also, when I became leader in May, there were things that I wanted to do, but realised couldn’t be done in the two years [before the council’s abolition] - so they were forgotten. But now we've got an extra year and so we've got to scrabble around and see what more we can achieve in that period,” Cllr Whittington explained.

He said the situation also added "another year of uncertainty for staff”.

“They won’t know where they are going to be based and how many will still have jobs [with the new councils]. Some may have made arrangements to retire in March 2028 [the original abolition date for their authorities] - and while they still can, [they might feel] some sort of moral pressure to to stay on for the extra year,” Cllr Whittington said.

Matthew Tomlinson, the Labour leader of South Ribble Borough Council, echoed concern about the “uncertainty” the delay caused for services and the staff trying to deliver them. However, he stressed that his authority would be focussed on maintaining a “high quality” operation in the remaining two-and-a-half years of its existence.

“Whether we get elected to the new authority or not, my cabinet are all of the view that when South Ribble goes, we want to be proud of our legacy and proud of what we hand over.

“But the way the whole thing has been handled doesn't reflect well on the civil service or the government,” Cllr Tomlinson said.

He said the situation was particularly galling because of the "spirit of togetherness” in which the existing councils had handled the potentially divisive nature of LGR.

“We all agreed on the things that we could agree on - and then agreed to disagree in some cases [over the actual options],” he said.

Preston City Council’s Labour leader, Matthew Brown, was equally unimpressed with way the process had panned out - but says the most important thing now was that the four-council option, which was backed by Preston, South Ribble, Chorley, West Lancashire, Lancaster and Ribble Valley councils, is once again the government’s choice after all five proposals are reassessed.

“It did have the most support [amongst the 15 current councils], so I don’t think it would make any sense at all at this stage [to change the decision].

“[The government] want to ensure that the process has been done correctly - and rightly so. But this uncertainty isn't any good for anyone.

“It’s just very frustrating that we're in this situation, but I'm really hoping that, by Christmas, we can be back on track with the [original option],” Cllr Brown said.

The LDRS approached the leaders of all 15 existing Lancashire councils for comment on the LGR delay.

‘We want to be sure we’re making the right decision’

Cllr Vincent said he believed the government rethink on LGR had been prompted by the realisation that it had failed to “do the job properly” earlier in the year.

However, answering questions in the Commons on Thursday, Jim McMahon suggested that the reassessment for Lancashire - and 13 of the almost two dozen other parts of England going through the same process - had been sparked by a change in the ministerial team in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) after a reshuffle by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham. While both Mr.McMahon and his boss - local government secretary Angela Rayner - had been in post at the start of the LGR process, they had returned to the backbenches for much of Sir Keir Starmer’s final year in office.

“The reason we carried out the review was to ensure that we, as the ministers who were making the decisions, were satisfied that the decisions were being made in a rational way, with the evidence base secured, and that where there were outstanding questions, we tested them in the process,” Mr. McMahon said.

“Obviously, we were not the ministers who made the decisions in July, so on coming back in, we needed to be absolutely sure that what we were putting our names to was correct.

“That may mean that the same conclusion is reached in many areas, but, importantly, that conclusion will be reached as a fresh decision. We are going to go through that process, which is why it is taking time.

“But if we had come here and said, ‘Do you know what? We have completed the whole programme review and the financial review, and we have done every single outstanding county in England in a few weeks,’ honorable members would have cast doubt on just how much time we had given to each of the counties and their proposals.”

The government will consider the results of a consultation it carried out earlier this year on LGR in Lancashire, but will not be opening a new one.

A separate, locally-led engagement exercise undertaken late last year, found that almost two thirds of more than 13,000 respondents wanted to maintain the status quo. They preferred to keep the current ‘two-tier’ division of responsibility for services between Lancashire County Council and the dozen district authorities, alongside the standalone councils for Blackpool and Blackburn with Darwen, which are already unitaries of the type LGR will usher in Lancashire wide - eventually.