What the plan to scrap Lancashire County Council means for next year's local elections

The possibility of scrapping next May’s vote was opened up by the government last week when it revealed its intention to abolish all local authorities in ‘two-tier’ areas like Lancashire.

The move will result in the county council – and Lancashire’s 14 district and standalone councils – being wiped from the map in the foreseeable future. They will be replaced with, at most, four new authorities which will be responsible for delivering all council services across vast expanses of the county.

In spite of the short shelf of Lancashire County Council in that scenario, the government indicated that their “assumption” was that any local elections due next summer would nevertheless go ahead.

However, speaking in the Commons after the launch of the devolution white paper last Monday, local government minister Jim McMahon said local polls could be postponed if an authority set to disappear under the forthcoming revamp “actively approach[ed]” the government to say it wanted to discuss proposals for a new council set-up. He has since written to leaders in areas including Lancashire to tell them that he needs to know by 10th January if they want their elections to be cancelled.

But the LDRS understands Lancashire County Council does not intend to engage with the government over so-called “reorganisation” before that deadline – meaning the vote to elect 84 members to serve a four-year term at County Hall should go-ahead, even though the authority itself is likely to have disappeared before their tenure is up.

Ahead of the white paper being published, the county council’s Tory leader, Phillippa Williamson, sent a letter to Jim McMahon urging him not to let the growing clamour for a simplified council structure in Lancashire – recently advanced by the majority of the county’s Labour MPs and the party’s district leaders in Preston, Chorley and South Ribble – to derail the timetable for Lancashire devolution.

That was a reference to a request by the minister back in September to bring forward proposals by next autumn for ways in which the county’s current devolution deal – due to come into effect early next year – could be deepened in order to give Lancashire more power and cash than is currently on the table.

It came with a heavy hint that reorganisation would be part of that process – even before the publication of the white paper – with an invite for the county to explore all possible “governance models that reflect the geography, economy and political landscape of Lancashire”.

While the abolition of the county council now appears certain, the LDRS understands there is no plan for the authority to hasten that moment in any attempt to steal a march on others by influencing the shape of the handful of replacement councils to be created.

Such a manoeuvre would, in any case, be complicated by lack of agreement amongst all 15 Lancashire leaders about when, how – and even whether – such wholesale changes should be made.

The white paper called for local areas to work together to redraw the local authority landscape in their patch rather than come up with “competing” proposals for a shake-up.

A group of Lancashire Labour MPs last month called on the government to cancel the county council elections next year and impose a new council structure, given Lancashire’s long history of failing to agree over anything to do with devolution.

Jim McMahon stressed in the Commons last week that any proposed new council arrangements in Lancashire and elsewhere would have to go through a period of public consultation before being implemented. He said the government would “not take a view” on the geographical boundaries of suggested new authorities until it was at the point of making a final decision, which would also include an assessment of the consultation results.