The Labour government is understandably in a hurry but risks making a profound mess of local government and diverting effort from its new homes target.

A long. long time ago, when I was a civil servant, project and programme management was all the rage. Perhaps it still is, despite the bad press it got after the service allowed management consultants to set up numberless programme offices everywhere whose principal output was to demand “progress” reports from the people doing the work and to regurgitate these in full colour to programme boards. Personally I avoided them, particularly after a consultant appeared in my office to tell me that I couldn’t have my programme manager on my programme board because it was against PRINCE 2 rules. After being abruptly directed to my door, he was never seen again on my patch.

None of this is to suggest that I don’t see a role for well-conceived programmes and projects: on the contrary, one of my final roles in the civil service was as a reviewer in the now-departed Office of Government Commerce, an agency of HM Treasury. Small teams of us would descend on high-risk programmes and projects to find out whether they were being run properly. Highly enjoyable.

Which brings me to the present day. What is going on in the local government directorate of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) makes one wonder whether they’ve abandoned programme management (perhaps due to a surfeit of consultants?) or whether it never took root in the Ministry in the first place. Or perhaps its practitioners just don’t know how do it

However you look at it, local government in England has been overwhelmed by a series of MHCLG initiatives which purport to add up to a coherent whole, but – at least viewed from the coal face – do nothing of the sort.

For those readers wishing to look at a detailed study of the mayhem, the Exeter Observer team have produced an excellent deep-dive analysis of what is happening in Devon: read it here.

Currently the only public aims and objectives statement that I can find for the MHCLG is on the gov.uk website:

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government is central to the mission-driven government, from fixing the foundations of an affordable home to handing power back to communities and rebuilding local governments.

Setting aside the unfortunate image of senior civil servants in hard hats and boots digging in the mud, the statement encapsulates three distinct actual work streams:

• increasing the number of homes, with a target of 370,000 each year
• devolution, under which powers are to be devolved from Whitehall to local authorities and elected mayors
• local government reorganisation, seen from Whitehall – though possibly from nowhere else apart from public-sector-hating think tanks – as an essential pre-condition for achieving growth

The first of these is arguably the least controversial and is a key commitment in the Prime Minister’s Plan for Change. Given the belief that local planning authorities control the pace of house building (a long-held Whitehall view which glosses over the inconvenient truth that building firms, not councils, build most houses) it’s a bit odd that the government is distracting authorities from their housing task by a reorganisation, which is nowhere mentioned in the Plan for Change. Nor does the 2024 Labour Manifesto hint at the scale of upheaval to come.

Let’s be clear. To speed up housing delivery you do not need to abolish all the district-level planning authorities, which is what the government intends to do. All that is required in the public sphere is change to the National Planning Policy Framework of which a new edition was published in December 2024.

On devolution, the government set out its stall in a white paper published on 16 December 2024. Now call me old fashioned, but this did seem to be jumping the gun. White papers are supposed to be the product of extensive analysis, consultation and thought: indeed the Cabinet Office guidance on making legislation situates a white paper as follows: “the normal stages in policy development: a green paper discussion or consultation document, a white paper (major policy proposals set out in more detail) and one or more rounds of public consultation.”

So what did we get? For starters, a document using expressions such a “having skin in the game”. I had to look up its meaning.

Bearing in mind that a white paper is supposed to be a statement of government policy, the following sentence from it is a bit gob-smacking:

We will write to council leaders as soon as possible to formally invite proposals, setting out information on our criteria for sustainable unitary structures, how and when to submit proposals and how the government intends to respond to proposals

In other words, when publishing the white paper the government hadn’t a clue what sustainable unitary structures are or how it would judge proposals submitted to it.

Just how vague the government’s views are is exemplified by looking at policy on the size of the new councils.

On the unitary authorities the white paper states:

New unitary councils must be the right size to achieve efficiencies, improve capacity and withstand financial shocks. For most areas this will mean creating councils with a population of 500,000 or more,

And on strategic authorities:

Strategic Authorities should be of comparable size to existing institutions. The default assumption is for them to have a combined population of 1.5 million or above, but we accept that in some places, smaller authorities may be necessary.

I, and others, asked MHCLG what the evidence for these figures was. The response pointed to a 2020 report as support for the unitary 500,000 figure. The white paper explains:

Efficiencies: In 2020 a PwC report, “Evaluating the importance of scale in proposals for local government reorganisation”, for the County Councils Network, estimated that reorganisation of the then 25 two-tier areas to a single unitary structure would have a one-off cost of £400 million, with the potential to realise £2.9 billion over 5 years, with an annual post-implementation net recurring saving of £700 million.`

No mention of size there. However, the relevant section of the PWC report states:

Much debate has taken place as to the optimum size of the unitary authorities. Drawing on previous research from 2006, a population threshold of 300,000 to 800,000 has commonly been cited.

That’s helpfully precise.

In 2006 the then DCLG, a predecessor of MHCLG, published a study entitled Population Size and Local Authority Performance, carried out by the Centre for Local & Regional Government Research at Cardiff University. The fieldwork is now some 20 years old.

The conclusions of the Cardiff study were cautious:

• The impact of population size varies across services, and between measures of performance for the same service.
• The importance of size effects by service is as follows, in descending order: Leisure & Culture; Benefits; Housing; Environment; Social Services; Education. Thus the biggest spenders in local government show the weakest size effect.
• The relationship between population and performance is a complex mosaic, which means that proposals for reorganisation in each local area need to be considered separately, with particular attention to the size of the existing and new authorities.
• Nevertheless, the balance of the evidence suggests that performance tends to be better in large than small authorities

But PWC put a stronger spin on it, describing the work as:

a detailed statistical study into the relationship between the size of authority and its performance across several different metrics. These were Comprehensive Performance Assessment (CPA) results, service inspection, consumer satisfaction, Best Value Indicators and value for money.
They found that, in particular, inspection judgements tend to be above average in larger authorities and that the majority of consumer satisfaction measures were significantly influenced by size.
They concluded with a working assumption that large authorities are likely to perform better than small authorities, with over twice as many linear positive as linear negative size effects.

Interesting to note that the metrics which did apparently not improve with size – CPA, Best Value and VFM – are those of greatest interest to HM Treasury.

The cautionary notes in the original study have been set aside in the PWC summary. But then PWC and their ilk did not get rich by failing to give their clients what they wanted. Since in this case the client was the County Councils Association, the PWC spin is no surprise.

As for the posited 1.5 million population for a strategic authority, no evidence was offered by MHCLG.

One last thought about this shambles. On 12 December 2024 the government published a new version of the NPPF, which included new house building targets for councils to be included in their local plans. But the new framework introduced a new mandatory methodology for calculating the housing needs for each area. So the requirement for my home city of Exeter – which before 12 December 2024 was 642 new homes annually – is now 800. Since getting more homes built is a key government objective, this approach is reasonable, even welcome.

But here’s the rub. Transitional arrangements allow plans which are as advanced as Exeter’s to go forward for examination and approval using the pre-December homes targets. It requires a more imaginative mind than mine to see the value in spending 18 months more work on a plan whose sites strategy has already been overtaken by government policy.

I wish I’d been able to review the MHCLG programme plan for all this!