Re:View 6 June 2025
Director of Policy and Research
Quote of the week
“We are deeply concerned to hear media reports in recent days that the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, as an “unprotected” department, may face significant cuts to its budget next week … It is now imperative that the Government seizes the opportunity at the Spending Review to meet the scale of its housing ambition.”
Florence Eshalomi, Chair of the Housing, Communities, and Local Government Select Committee, in a letter to Chancellor Rachel Reeves
Welcome back to our revamped newsletter, the Re:View!
It’s a good moment to check in on one of the many (many, MANY) big policy changes that are being driven by Angela Rayner’s MHCLG – namely, local government reorganisation.
In case you need a reminder, Government has made the decision to reorganise all of the remaining ‘two-tier’ council areas in England. That means it’s the end of the road for more than 160 District Councils, which will be merged with each other and with big ‘upper-tier’ Counties to create new Unitary Authorities, each with a target population of around 500,000 citizens.
In all of these areas, councils were required to come up with their own sets of interim plans for how reorganisation should play out – how many new successor councils should be created? How big should they be? And over what geographies?
This week, MHCLG has come back with a high-level response to these plans, which offers important clues about Government thinking as we await the arrival of the English Devolution Bill. Despite the ambitious (to put it mildly) timeline, there is a clear message that these transformations should also be “a catalyst for local public service reform” and be informed by “substantive engagement with residents, businesses, and organisations in their area.” Further, the reorganised councils should “facilitate devolution”, and “deliver genuine opportunity for neighbourhood empowerment”.
These are all highly desirable, and it’s right that a reorganisation process should take all of these things into account. But there is also likely a trade-off between these objectives and both the speediness and scale of the planned reforms. It is hard to engage communities or think strategically about devolution within a hurried timeline (NB. councils were given about six weeks to pull together their interim plans).
It is also going to be a significant challenge to sustain “strong community voice” and “neighbourhood empowerment” when reorganisation will effectively move many aspects of governance further away from communities. In our recent paper, Local, Actually, we suggested that a rebooted system of “neighbourhood councils”, including combined Parishes on a larger collaborative footprint, would be required. This week, Jim McMahon has made the case for ‘Neighbourhood Area Committees’ as a way of “hardwiring local community engagement into their own structures”.
These committees, usually led by the relevant ward councillors and capable of drawing in community organisations and parishes, could be helpful as new, larger councils try to work closely with citizens. But they could also be little more than talking shops that do not fill the gap that most of England experiences at the scale of local community governance. Neighbourhood Area Committees should be treated as just the starting point for real hyperlocal empowerment.
Read of the week…
This week, Power to Change – an organisation focused on the role and future of community businesses – published an interesting report on how Combined Authorities can work together with communities to help promote local growth. This is going to become more important as devolution continues to roll out. Combined Authorities will be expected to create the conditions for growth across the country – and as this report explains, they will struggle to do so if they do not work closely with voluntary, community, and social enterprise organisations
(Re:)Meet the team!
Each week, we will be reintroducing our readers to a member of our small but mighty Re:State team. This week, the spotlight is on…
Alice Semark, Researcher - @AliceKSemark, @alicesemark.bsky.social
Alice, tell us something about yourself that we might not know.
I’ve been working at Re:State since September 2024. Before that I was doing lots of working and travelling. I was a PPE student, with a focus on philosophy. My favourite philosopher is Descartes. His Meditations got me interested in philosophy when I read it at 16, and I studied it properly at the end of my time at university, which felt like going full circle. The fundamental point of philosophy is the study of arguments – and that’s incredibly useful for policy analysis: breaking reasoning down to its elements, finding the leaps in logic.
What are you working on?
Until this week, I have spent my entire time at Re:State working on our hospitals series as part of the Re:Imagining Health workstream. Now, I’m jumping into a big programme of work on social care policy, working jointly with our wonderful RTLS team.
Who is your favourite reformer?
Marsha P. Johnson, one of the key protesters at the first stonewall riot – a trans woman, an LGBTQ+ rights activist, and a great person to remember in pride month.
What gets you out of bed in the morning?
Fear of being late!