Reforming local government has been a rather fruitless endeavour since devolution – to the extent that a few years ago I added the absence of reform to a list of failures of devolution.
Despite dissatisfaction with the current unitary authority system – and the role of town & community councils – the system inherited from the UK Government in the 1990s remains stubbornly in place.
The issue go much deeper than the map, of course – all of which will be looked at in more detail here.
The only people who will be able to properly answer this are those who were in the room making the decisions (or not as the case may be) – though you can make a few educated guesses.
The up-front cost
One of the arguments in favour of reform is that it would save money in the longer run; the Williams Commission suggested £60-80million-a-year2. This meant reforms would pay themselves off within 2-4 years through greater economies of scale, selling-off excess property and land and a reduction in senior staff.
However, the WLGA’s analysis (carried out by Deloitte and based on the council mergers to form Cornwall Council)– suggested an upfront cost of anything between £200-£400million3. The expected savings were also disputed.
This may have spooked the Welsh Government, Senedd Members and individual local authorities.
Uncertainty
The reform agenda was at least partly driven by cuts to local government funding brought on by the Conservative-Lib Dem UK Government’s austerity drive (more on this later). “Efficiency” became the watchword, along with “having to do more with less” and the logic – when council departments were being put into special measures – was that “bigger is better”. Instead of giving councils more money, you merge the councils and budgets to pool expertise and resources.
It also coincided with big changes to Welsh law – the Social Services & Wellbeing Act 2014, for example – that were overhauling council-run services. There was always a lingering doubt in the background about whether the councils delivering these services would even exist by the end of the implementation period.
“Leaving it to councils to decide to merge voluntarily is a big concession to local knowledge and local autonomy in decision-making, but turkeys aren’t going to vote for Christmas. Like it or not, this process had to be top-down if it was ever going to happen across Wales, even with the risk that such actions would cause irreparable damage to relations between councils, the WLGA and the Welsh Government.”
Job losses
Councils and the WLGA went to great lengths to say how much uncertainty the reform agenda was causing council staff – particularly officers and managers, who probably would’ve been the first to go following mergers.
Whichever way you look at it, refuse collectors, school catering staff and caretakers ought to be indispensable to any council and ought to find no problems transferring to a new authority. A line manager whose job is duplicated in councils about to merge wouldn’t be as secure. TUPE wouldn’t be so easy.
There was an expectation that most roles would be lost through retirement, voluntary redundancies or department reorganisations. With the prospect of compulsory redundancies (amongst a highly unionised workforce), there was perhaps a background threat of significant industrial action. That’s before considering the cost of redundancy payouts for senior white-collar staff (though this was factored into the Williams Commission’s cost estimates).
Weak leadership and the inability to agree on a single way forward
As demonstrated earlier, the Welsh Government, Senedd and other interested parties couldn’t agree on a single way forward or even agree on the number of merged councils. The constant reshuffling of ministers out of the local government brief – each with their own views – won’t have helped either.
Leaving it to councils to decide to merge voluntarily is a big concession to local knowledge and local autonomy in decision-making, but turkeys aren’t going to vote for Christmas. Like it or not, this process had to be top-down if it was ever going to happen across Wales, even with the risk that such actions would cause irreparable damage to relations between councils, the WLGA and the Welsh Government.
As early as the WLGA publishing its counter-proposal the process was in trouble. It was the clearest indication that councils weren’t unanimously on board with the plans and were quite happy to keep the status quo – whether that’s because of concern about the levels of uncertainty the Williams Commission caused or a even a certain level of self-interest (what council would want to abolish itself?).
Carwyn Jones set the deadlines and talked tough – he was adamant there needed to be fewer councils – but he could never follow it through; neither could his Minister at the time, Lesley Griffiths4.
Leighton Andrews seems to have had the clearest vision for what he wanted to do but ran out of time and lost his seat in 2016.
Two subsequent local government ministers were far more sympathetic to the WLGA’s views – Mark Drakeford and Julie James – and we are where we are; no significant changes. The fact no councils have used their powers, via the Local Government Acts of 2015 and 2021, to voluntarily merge speaks volumes. The reforms that have been introduced since have been window dressing in comparison.
“Reform slipped off the political agenda quietly because it was overtaken by events – the biggest one being Brexit. Instead of fiddling with local government, the Welsh Government and Senedd quickly found themselves fiddled with. They didn’t have the time, patience or resources to change the local government map while dealing with EU withdrawal too.
“So we got a watered-down version of reform with a few gesture policies thrown in to keep the likes of the Electoral Reform Society sweet such as reducing the voting age to 16.”
It became politically awkward
Mergers became a political hot potato. Perhaps the most high-profile example was the “purge” of Labour councillors in Bridgend who disagreed with the Cabinet’s decision to pursue a merger with the Vale of Glamorgan over Neath Port Talbot (an NPT merger being the Williams Commission recommendation).
Other local authorities were more amiable – a voluntary merger between Conwy and Denbighshire was talked about long after the Williams Commission’s recommendations were shelved.
Nonetheless, mergers ought to have resulted in a cut in the number of councillors. Councillors and prospective councillors are often the infantry in election campaigns – they’re the ones you’re most likely to see on the doorstep. Any moves to piss them off (and Labour stood to lose the most in a cut to senior elected positions and councillors) would no doubt have hurt the re-election chances of Labour MSs and MPs.
The opposition parties don’t come out of this well either. It seemed as though the Conservatives supported the principle of reform but never turned that into a serious set of alternative proposals.
The Lib Dems came up with some constructive arguments against elements of the reform agenda at least, but nobody paid any attention to them as they were on the precipice of Clegg-induced irrelevance.
Plaid Cymru’s strategy made the right diagnosis (“the question ought to be ‘What should local government do?’ Not, ‘How many councils do we need?'”) but proposed combined regional authorities whilst retaining the existing 22 local authorities. All of that sounds awfully familiar (Corporate Joint Committees).
Other matters became more important
During the early 2010s, local government reform was one of the most keenly debated topics in Welsh politics. Those seem like tame constitutional debates compared to the ones we have now.
Reform slipped off the political agenda quietly because it was overtaken by events – the biggest one being Brexit. Instead of fiddling with local government, the Welsh Government and Senedd quickly found themselves fiddled with. They didn’t have the time, patience or resources to change the local government map while dealing with EU withdrawal too.
So we got a watered-down version of reform with a few gesture policies thrown in to keep the likes of the Electoral Reform Society sweet such as reducing the voting age to 16.
In some cases, it could have been a blessing in disguise. If local government reform was pursued on the original Williams Commission timetable – coming into effect in 2017-18 – then councils and Cardiff Bay would be doing all the merger transition work whilst dealing with the implementation of the Future Generations Act, Brexit fallout and a few years later a global pandemic.
2. Commission on Public Service Governance & Delivery (January 2014). Full Report (p100). Available at: https://gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2019-01/commission-public-service-governance-delivery-full-report.pdf
3. BBC Wales (15th January 2014). “Warning merging Welsh councils could cut 15,000 jobs.” Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-25730619
4. BBC Wales (19th June 2014). “Council mergers in Wales must bring ‘profound change’.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-politics-27904808
