LGR: Nineteen of twenty-one areas are now decided. The harder question starts now.

The Government has confirmed the shape of almost every reorganisation area. Reaching safe and legal by the deadline is the achievable part. Whether each new council will actually be financially viable is a different question, and the decisions taken over the next few months will settle it.

This morning the Government set out its decisions on the remaining areas of the local government reorganisation programme. Decisions have now been taken on 19 of the 21 two-tier areas, with only Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and West Sussex still under consideration. Across England, once every decision is taken, the number of councils will fall from 317 to a maximum of 173. In the areas confirmed today, 38 councils will replace 134, serving more than 15 million people. Elections to the new unitaries are scheduled for May 2027, and the new councils take up their responsibilities in April 2028.

The shape of the decisions matters as much as the count. Gloucestershire is the one single-county unitary, the surprise of the day based on decisions to date. In most other areas the Secretary of State has chosen more complex arrangements, several with four unitaries and Oxfordshire with three, and many carry boundary changes on top. Bar Gloucestershire, every one of those splits divides a county, and its services, into new organisations that do not yet exist.

Safe and legal is not the same as viable

Read the Government's own framing and you can see exactly where the risk sits. Councils themselves have projected net savings of around £1 billion by 2032/33, but the statement was careful to add a condition: the savings come “if the anticipated benefits are fully realised.” That conditional is the whole story.

Past reorganisations demonstrate Councils reliably reaches safe and legal on a fixed deadline. That is the statutory objective, and councils meet it. Financial viability for the new Unitary Councils is a separate question, and it is not delivered through the same work. Of the first nine new councils to come through this reorganisation process, all nine reached safe and legal. Only three were financially viable. The other six required Exceptional Financial Support, totalling around £300 million between them. Same programme, same diligence, very different financial outcomes.

The harder the split, the harder the viability is to see

The more complex the split, the harder that viability and new Council Blueprint is to see in advance. When a county is divided into three or four unitaries, its services, systems, contracts, assets and budgets have to be divided with it, and the hardest of those to divide are the large statutory people services. Adults and children's social care alone take somewhere between 40 and 60 per cent of a county's budget, and they do not split evenly. Demand, need, cost and provision are not spread neatly across a new boundary, and there is no process to reopen a budget allocation once vesting day has passed. Get the principles wrong could mean one new council starts with insufficient budget to meet its high-cost demand and starts life overspending from year one.

The technical detail here is unforgiving. Northamptonshire's children's disaggregation alone ran to 22 separate measures, covering care costs, the location of staff and services, care provision, income and support services, and questions such as ordinary residence to get to an accurate disaggregation. In Northamptonshire every 1% change in allocation meant a £1.5m difference in budgets allocation in children's alone. Every figure needs a method, a driver, a data source and an audit trail, because an external auditor will verify it.

This is the point Anna Earnshaw of F3 draws out of today's decisions. As DASS and lead director for the Northamptonshire reorganisation, and later the first chief executive of West Northants, she has both run this process and inherited its results. Her reading is blunt: the messier the option, the more exposed the new unitaries are, and the more they need a clear line of sight to their own viability and blueprint before disaggregation decisions are locked in.

None of this is a criticism of the councils or the officers involved. The difficulty is structural. There is so much to do simply to reach safe and legal that, regardless of the ambition, the reality is too often that teams carry their existing structures, systems and contracts across largely unchanged, and then start again on day one. Roughly 85 per cent of early-stage programme capacity goes on administrative process and just understanding the “as is” before a single transformative decision can be made, and transformation is typically delayed by two to three years as a result.

The clock is already running

The timing is the part that is easy to underestimate. The deadline does not move. Elections come in May 2027 and the new councils exist from April 2028, and that date cannot be extended. What can move is how much of the intervening time is spent simply reaching a starting position. Standing up a programme, agreeing governance across shadow authorities, appointing partners and then assembling a baseline by hand can absorb the opening months before a single viability decision is made. Because the deadline is fixed, whatever slips at the start compresses what is left, and the first things to be compressed are the financial and transformation decisions that determine whether the new council can afford itself. The clock started this morning.

Turning a fixed deadline into a head start

The opportunity is that the same data and evidence assembled to reach safe and legal can be used more effectively to design a new Unitary that is viable and efficient providing the foundations to transform from day one rather than year three. That is what the SMART: LGR Command Workbench is built to do. It consolidates predecessor council baselines, spreadsheets, system outputs, performance and policy information from each authority, and creates a real time picture of the new Council, rather than a snapshot that is out of date almost as soon as it is gathered. From that single source it does two distinct things: it builds the day one Unitary blueprint service by service, calculates the budget for each new unitary from the predecessor positions, and allows Councils to model disaggregation scenarios against those budgets. This way leaders and Shadow Councils can see the financial consequences of a split before they commit to it. Crucially, that picture can start being built now, in parallel with standing up the programme and appointing partners rather than after them, which is how a fixed deadline becomes a head start instead of a threat. For an area facing a three- or four-way division, that line of sight is the difference between spotting a viability problem in advance and inheriting one.

A fitting day to mark it

Today is also Artificial Intelligence Appreciation Day, which this year is as much about where AI earns its place as where it dazzles. This is one of those places. Not AI for its own sake, but AI doing something concrete and accountable: federating messy data from several councils into an auditable picture that helps protect the services vulnerable people depend on. That feels like the right thing to mark.

The map is nearly drawn. For the areas decided today, the work of building financially viable councils is only beginning, and the choices made over the next few months will shape their success for years. The deadline will not wait, so the earliest work is the work that pays back most. Getting a clear, current and defensible view of viability now, while the splits are still being formed, is the single most valuable thing a programme can do.

See it against your own numbers

If you received your areas decision today, if you are still waiting, or if you already had your decision in the previous tranche, the SMART: LGR Workbench can help you get ahead, and we can show you how.

A demo session will take your team through the value of the Workbench from start to finish, we will show you how it simplifies collecting data, building baselines and keeping them up to date, identifying and mitigating risks, modelling financial and disaggregation scenarios, and capturing transformation opportunities ready for your new unitaries to hit the ground running on day one.

Safe, legal, financially viable and ready to transform. Book a demo with the team.

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