The BBC has just exposed the Labour government’s so-called “local government reorganisation” for what it really is: a bodged, dishonest, anti-democratic con trick.

It turns out ministers – led by Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner – never bothered to commission their own cost review of the biggest shake-up of English councils in 50 years.

Instead, they parroted figures from a lobby group, the County Councils Network (CCN), whose claims of £2.9 billion in savings have since collapsed.

The CCN’s updated analysis now says the reorganisation could actually cost £850 million over five years and deliver no savings at all in some scenarios.

In other words: the entire financial case Rayner has been touting is nonsense.

Yet she still told MPs in June that the changes would save “a significant amount of money”.

This is either gross incompetence – or deliberate dishonesty.

The numbers don’t add up

The government’s case rests entirely on a 2020 report by PriceWaterhouseCoopers and the CCN.

But as the CCN itself now admits, if ministers go ahead with plans to split county areas into multiple unitary councils (some as small as 300,000 people), the result will be “hundreds of millions of new unsustainable costs for local taxpayers”.

Even the CCN – which supports reorganisation in principle – is warning that Labour’s version could worsen financial pressures, strain care services, and destabilise councils already on the brink.

Meanwhile the District Councils’ Network is aghast that no independent analysis has been commissioned at all.

Chair Sam Chapman-Allen called it “astonishing” and warned that Labour is pressing ahead with “mega councils” without a shred of up-to-date evidence to justify them.

So why is this happening?

A convenient way to cancel elections

Readers will remember that I warned about this back in December and again earlier this year.

At the time, I asked whether Labour was really reorganising councils for efficiency – or whether the real motive was to delay local elections it expected to lose catastrophically.

Now we can put more of the picture together:

Rayner told MPs in June that reorganisation would “save a significant amount of money”, but her ministry admitted (via Freedom of Information responses) it hadn’t done fresh, in-house analysis — relying on external work from PwC/CCN.

CCN’s updated 2025 work shows that if ministers opt for multiple smaller unitaries (58 councils with minimum populations of 300,000 across 21 two-tier areas), the change could cost around £850 million over five years with no long-term efficiency savings.

Even CCN — which supports reorganisation in principle — now warns that slicing counties into smaller unitary authorities risks “unsustainable” costs.

This isn’t academic. Essex is already a live test case: the county has tabled a three-unitary model; several districts are pushing five. In other words, central government may soon have to choose between exactly the kinds of options CCN says will make the numbers worse, not better.

Meanwhile, ministers have already pushed back local elections to smooth the path. The government postponed May 2025 contests in nine areas to May 2026 by statutory instrument (SI 2025/137). In total, 16 county councils and two unitary authorities requested delays; nine were granted.

The government line is that merging “brings services together under one roof” and will “save taxpayers’ money”. Both statements are beliefs, not findings, because Whitehall didn’t test the savings case itself.

Incompetence – or cover-up?

So let’s put it together:

• Ministers didn’t check the numbers.

• They relied on discredited lobbyist reports.

• They ignored warnings that their plans could cost money.

• They are delaying elections at the very moment they expect a drubbing.

• And they are stripping away layers of local democracy in the process.

That’s not reform. That’s an anti-democratic stitch-up.

If the savings case collapses when ministers choose the wrong scale — and they haven’t done their own modelling — then postponing elections is not administrative necessity – it’s political convenience.

Ministers can say “we’ll save money later” until they’re blue in the face but the current evidence says they haven’t proved it, and some paths will burn cash.

Until Whitehall produces a transparent, independent cost–benefit analysis for each configuration in each area — and submits it to public and parliamentary scrutiny before orders are made — the suspicion will linger that this reorganisation is as much about avoiding immediate electoral pain as it is about improving services.

And if ministers back small unitary authorities where CCN says the sums don’t add up, they’ll be doing it with their eyes open — and while haemorrhaging public money.

Angela Rayner and Keir Starmer must be held to account for this.

If Labour wanted to save money, it should have done a proper review.

If Labour wanted to strengthen democracy, it should have asked the people.

Instead, what we’re getting looks like an attempt to buy time, bury bad polling, and cling onto power at the expense of local democracy and billions of pounds of public money.

And that, dear reader, tells you exactly what kind of amateurs – or cynics – are running this government.

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