Local Government Reform in Essex is now firmly on the Westminster agenda and all councils (county, unitary and district) are facing compulsory euthanasia, to be replaced by a handful of mega-unitary authorities. Does it make sense? Is bigger necessarily better?
In an article published in Municipal Journal Uttlesford’s chief executive, Peter Holt, exposes the fallacy that size matters. “The top performing and most financially stable authorities are those that have taken tough decisions over many years, invested wisely, performance-managed effectively, and led with passion and integrity.” There is no correlation with size.
Municipal Journal 10th March 2025:
Official data gathered by Uttlesford DC for the District Councils’ Network undermines the Government’s argument for large unitary authorities, says Peter Holt
We now know that Essex is one of the areas that has made it onto the Government’s Devolution Priority Programme. Its population of 1.85 million is therefore set to see the biggest churn in local government structures since the early 1970s with both a new Mayor elected in May 2026, and its 12 districts, upper tier county and two smaller unitaries in Thurrock and Southend replaced by a new set of unitary councils in either 2027 or 2028.
We’ve also had the ministerial invitation to submit initial proposals for Local Government Reform, with helpful additional detail about the criteria that will be used to assess bids – especially important where there turn out to be competing proposals. Not much new though on the vexed question of size – still an expectation of 500,000+, but with the same broad exceptions trailed.
As a single proxy indicator for financial good health, plotting those authorities with S114 notices or having applied for capitalisation directives, they are pretty evenly spread from small through medium to large to the very biggest.
To describe the debate locally amongst these 15 authorities about optimum unitary size as ‘somewhat lively’ would be an understatement worthy of Sir Humphrey.
The good news round here is that all 15 Essex councils are talking. We’re meeting regularly at both a council leader level and at amongst officers – not only the chief execs but also through existing networks of chief finance officers, monitoring officers, housing directors, planning directors and so on.
On the question of ‘how many new unitaries?’ the 15 have at least narrowed down the early options to either two, three, four or five new councils to be established, and are working with Grant Thornton to illustrate and analyse different models, with one particular model an early favourite of the clear majority of the 15.
Some of the 15 councils have already broken cover and publicly indicated their preferred alignment, based around five unitaries with an average population of just over 360,000. And of course with a population of anything like 360,000, that would put a new council into the top quartile of unitaries, so it’s more in Essex a debate between big and super-big rather than big versus small.
Basildon (Labour led) were first off the blocks, announcing that they’d like to merge with neighbouring Thurrock (so long as the obvious debt issues can be satisfactorily worked through). Next came the leaders of Braintree (Conservative led), Colchester (Lib Dem led) and Tendring (Independent led) with their joint statement pinning their colours jointly to a shared mast.
Not everyone holds this five unitary model as their favourite though, and some believe passionately that a smaller number of even larger new unitaries would better deliver in the future for local people.
Always a fan of following objective evidence, we in Uttlesford went looking for objective evidence to answer the question: when it comes to unitaries, is big better?
Sadly, we found very little evidence to help objectively answer this question, so we’ve begun to compile our own, looking firstly at four key criteria: financial stability and sustainability, children’s services performance, adult social care performance, and housing landlord performance.
Real world actual performance feels like a good place to start, even if we understand a caveat similar those financial services adverts which say: ‘Past performance doesn’t guarantee future results. Your money may be at risk etc. etc.’
So we started with the most impeccable and unarguable source of qualitative data: government published league tables and inspection results from Ofsted, CQC and the Regulator of Social Housing.
Here’s what we found. When plotting all of the current 130+ unitary authorities in England against population size, and then layering on these data sources, we can instantly see whether there is any correlation between these four criteria and how big they are.
Spoiler alert: zero correlation. Nil. Nada. Zilch.
As a single proxy indicator for financial good health, plotting those authorities with S114 notices or having applied for capitalisation directives, they are pretty evenly spread from small through medium to large to the very biggest.
Overlaying Ofsted ‘overall effectiveness’ judgments in the most recent authority-level children’s services inspections, shows that the ‘outstandings’ ‘goods’ ‘requires improvement to be goods’ and ‘inadequates’ are spread pretty evenly across unitaries by population size. (And yes, I am acutely conscious of the dangers of over-relying on single word judgments, but one has to start somewhere.)
Layering on CQC inspection scores for authorities adult social care performance, there is less data from the new CQC regime yet, but what there is spreads the ‘goods’ and the ‘requires improvements’ fairly evenly across unitaries by population size.
And adding the data for top, second, third and lowest quartile results for all unitary housing landlord authorities from the recent Regulator of Social Housing Tenant Satisfaction Measures [TSMs], once again shows no link between top, second, third or lowest quartile scores and unitary population size.
There are of course plenty more piles of beans to count in search of evidence to support any argument for or against super-big unitaries than these. In the meantime though, the debates about optimal size remain seemingly subjective rather than based on any obvious solid foundation.
The top performing and most financially stable authorities are those that have taken tough decisions over many years, invested wisely, performance managed effectively, and led with passion and integrity to put improved resident outcomes first – none of which are a factor of population size.