The urban district council reinvented

Around local government reorganisation (LGR) there is a quiet battle going on between the Government’s views and the views of a number of councils and organisations regarding how the 'local' in the new local government landscape should operate. That is, alongside the neighbourhood governance as contained in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, whether it is a good idea for the existing city, borough and district councils to be establishing new local councils for their core areas. 

Having accepted that the criteria set by Ministers, even where flexed, will mean most district and neighbouring smaller unitary councils will disappear, councils’ minds will be turning to what comes next. In considering the new unitary district areas now emerging, it is an entirely natural and proper for those councils and their members to be looking at how the perceived gap that is thereby created may best be filled. By gap, we mean the number of local councillors that will be lost and the perceived democratic deficit which that will cause, the accompanying fear of loss of locally focussed services and functions and the potential disappearance of assets, including access by locals to their town halls and facilities. For those that associate their council’s unparished urban core with being the geographical, economic and administrative centre for the area, this is accompanied by a feeling of loss of pre-eminence and representation, as well as a loss of civic focus, history and traditional prestige, for which the establishment of charter trustees alone may not suffice.

The answer from a number of councils facing dissolution and becoming a predecessor council is to undertake a community governance review and thus create new local councils for their formerly unparished urban areas. These are the areas which may also have a special expenses area precept for the council to administer in lieu of a parish precept. Whilst they have been seen as the council’s main urban area for their city, borough or district, the prevailing view was that there was no real need for the areas to have a local council; a view which changes with the onset of LGR. This view of LGR is accompanied by a call for a follow-on transfer of assets to the new or established dominant local councils (to prevent those assets being subsumed into the new council’s wider area policies, use or disposal) and a further call for micro or double devolution. 

The answer from Government, however, is that these actions by councils are not necessary because of the plan for a new statutory duty for the unitary councils to introduce ‘neighbourhood governance’, and Ministers have advised against creating new statutory local authorities for which they see there is little fiscal or political control. To quote the official response in the LGA answers to such questions, the Government states that:

“We recognise the value that town and parish councils offer to their local communities, but they are independent institutions and are not a substitute for meaningful community engagement and neighbourhood working by a local authority. ... Areas considering new town or parish councils should think carefully about how they might be funded, to avoid putting further pressure on local authority finances and/or new burdens on the taxpayer. 
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Local authorities may wish to collaborate with town and parish councils to determine how they can most effectively contribute to service delivery under future arrangements. In doing so, they should consider the financial and administrative support required by town and parish councils and should seek to minimise the potential impact of new responsibilities on local taxpayers through increases to parish precepts.”

Guidance accompanying the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill describes the new duty as being to establish effective neighbourhood governance, in that: 

“The main goal of neighbourhood governance is to move decision-making closer to residents, so decisions are made by people who understand local needs. Additionally, developing neighbourhood-based approaches will provide opportunities to organise public services to meet local needs better.
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Local authorities can still set up town and parish councils, and town and parish councils which exist now can continue. Our guidance will say how neighbourhood governance structures can work well with town and parish councils. Town and parish councils are independent of local authorities. We want to make sure that all local authorities have a way of working with people in their neighbourhoods, so they are not relying on town and parish councils to do it.”

How is this to be done? Area committees and forums, as they have been established since being granted their powers in the early 1990s and then after the 2000 Act, have been steadily dismantled by many councils over the last few years. These traditional arrangements have been seen by many as being something of a redundant talking shop, given few actual powers with the exception of some local budgets, which in turn were sometimes seen as depriving ward councillors from utilising ward budgets of their own, and which have therefore fallen prey to seeking savings in austere times. So, the question is how can this view be turned around by central government diktat?

To help answer that question the Government is now undertaking a survey of what is currently being done, over a short three week period, stating that:

“This survey has been designed to gather evidence to review existing local authority-led neighbourhood governance structures and to explore different approaches and their effectiveness. 
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“Our review is focused on local authority-led neighbourhood governance structures. The operation, powers and funding of town and parish councils will be outside of the scope of our review. However, the review will consider how effective partnership working between tiers of governance can be encouraged.”

So, having been reminded by NALC and others of the work existing local councils and councillors already do, a delicate balance is to be achieved between the local council and new unitary council regulations for neighbourhood governance. 

As a number found, new and large local councils don’t always work as well as their establishing sponsors hope. The Government has a point, in that the very advantages that new local councils bring may prove to be their problem, at least as far as the principal council is concerned. With the pressure to take on or top-up on devolved powers and functions from the principal council, the larger local council can qualify as a best value authority and apply their general power of competence in addition to the ordinary powers and duties of a parish council, not always appreciated across the area. There are instances of poor governance but, unlike principal councils, there is no recourse to the ombudsman service. There is currently no cap applied to rises in council tax precepts (although the reserve power remains and is considered annually) and there are stated to be several local councils that introduced not just a large increase but a threefold rise in their precept in 2025, arguably hardly noticed against the wider council tax demands. Not least, local councils will all be statutorily independent authorities, so are free to disagree with the upper tiers of local and central government. 

Milton Keynes pioneered a policy in the early 2000s that the whole of the area was to be parished, which includes a town council purely for the shopping centre district of the city centre (CMK Town Council). This then became the model that is said to have led to the legislative framework for community governance reviews and the establishment of local councils under the 2007 Act, including in London for the first time. In practical terms, it also meant several of the local councils becoming of sufficient size that they counted as one of the National Association of Local Councils’ (NALC) list of ‘super-councils’, which they define as those local councils having an annual precept over £1 million or an annual turnover over £1.5 million, of which in 2024 there were 124. The result being local councils with significant responsibilities, functions and staff, including liveried vans and the rest, and what one might easily refer to as the urban district council reinvented. This was the place where councillors who want a future seat on the unitary council, or had lost their seat, honed their skills in throwing the occasional brick. As one of the local councils expressly used their increased precept to establish a fund for judicially reviewing the decisions of the city council (just in case, of course), but then used it, I can say as the monitoring officer at the time who was on the losing side of the local council led judicial review, it is not always a comfortable situation to find oneself in.

All of that, however, is rather the point. It is no small coincidence that the creation of new urban local councils, and the local reaction of many to LGR, is the accompanying feeling that the new unitaries are too big, too distant and too remote from a local populace and with too few elected members to perform what is felt to be the councillor’s proper local representative and political functions, particularly when beyond the metropolitan areas. In this context, it is worth bearing in mind that the entire country and nation of Iceland would not qualify as having a sufficient population base to be able to form a new council in England according to the Government’s original criteria. 

A sense of place and history also counts in this equation. Whilst it may be said the setting up of charter trustees as a result of LGR works in some places, fulfilling the civic and ceremonial functions of the old city or borough charter for their mayor or lord mayor as in Carlisle or the City of Chester, that is not a universal view. Civic history and tradition matters; look at the Guild of Mace Bearers (yes it exists) and their colourful and variable regalia, as supported by the National Association of Civic Officers (NACO) for whom many of us owe a huge debt in showing us how to perform such civic activities. Several newer town councils therefore proudly include in their principal purposes that they “run the mayor’s office” as inherited from the former borough council. 

One can also point to highly successful local councils, as NALC rightly does, with excellent reputations and who celebrate innovative best practice. What is missing they say, is better organisation, regulation and an ombudsman service for the local councils and their 10,000 plus current councillors. Those leading the way are, for example, heralding the first LGA corporate peer reviews earlier this year. 

The creation of new local councils for the urban cores of former districts, cities and boroughs has thus established itself as a firm trend in the wake of new unitary councils. Who will win out in this structural argument will depend a lot on what ‘neighbourhood governance’ will look like. 

In the meantime, previous areas undergoing local government reorganisations have resulted in a number of the predecessor councils leaving a legacy to the new unitary of new local councils for their main towns, a trend which does not appear to be slowing down. The last round of LGR included, for example, the likes of Scarborough Town Council, established only as of 1st April 2025, following the dissolution of Scarborough Borough Council and the creation of the new unitary council of North Yorkshire.

Local politics will also play its part. When the new unitary North Northamptonshire Council came into being in 2021, it brought with it new town councils for the urban core of three of its predecessor district councils (the fourth having already established town and parish councils throughout). Following the 2025 elections, where the unitary council became Reform controlled by some margin, each of those new councils held their elections at the same time with differed results, with Corby Town Council (population 68,000) having a strong Labour majority, Kettering Town Council (pop. 50,000) having an almost entirely Green membership and Wellingborough Town Council (pop. 43,000) just shy of a Conservative majority. 

Size is also not a barrier to this process. Northampton was previously the largest non-metropolitan district in the country by some considerable measure. Finding itself within the enlarged area of the unitary council of West Northamptonshire, its previously unparished urban core now forms the boundaries of Northampton Town Council, which covers a population of 130,000 and has become the largest local council in the country. 

As for this round of LGR, that there is now the choice of one or both systems on offer may well alter the balance of the conversation. That question now facing the predecessor councils being, is it better for the future of the urban core area for us to establish a local council right now, or is it better to forego that in favour of a waiting to see what will be offered by the intended neighbourhood governance arrangements alone, once that requirement becomes law, and what is seen as the best policy outcome once they are part of the successor new unitary? 

This question will be especially prevalent for those districts containing the smaller central or county towns yet to be reorganised, including the likes of the cities of Gloucester, Cambridge, and Norwich. It may also be a question for a number of current unitary councils, which could yet find themselves subsumed into a larger unitary area on the other side of LGR, like Peterborough or Brighton & Hove. This may yet happen to larger  cities, the likes of Nottingham or Leicester, who have found themselves included in the LGR proposal invitation. These councils will then need to ask themselves the question of whether they would see their core areas as simply a continuation of an unparished centre to an enlarged metropolitan area, akin to Sheffield City Council (which has several parish and town councils around its core) or the reorganised Cheshire West & Chester Council for example, or to follow Northampton’s example and begin to produce a suite of very large towns and cities with a local council at their heart. 

This all begs the question of what happens to the local government and political landscape when urban local councils of this kind and size exist, sitting within a structure of unitary and strategic authorities above. Keeping in mind that these local councils would hold a bigger population count than many unitary and metropolitan or London borough councils that currently exist, as is the case with Northampton Town already, how these new urban local councils will impact upon the political landscape as they gain their footing post-LGR and start to flex their individual and collective muscle is an intriguing question to say the least.

Whether we will see a dominant model of neighbourhood governance following LGR and the coming into force of those provisions in the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, without a plethora of new and large local councils being introduced, or will see the number of new local councils continue to increase is a conversation that remains ongoing. If the latter turns out to be the case, we have little doubt that these councils, through their relative large size, financial weight and political willpower, will go on to morph the parish council model, perhaps fundamentally changing the intended new unitary and strategic authority structural landscape by inserting into it a version of the old urban district council reinvented.

Currently, our best guess is that, regardless of what ministers are currently saying and what the Bill and nascent Regulations are likely to require of the then universal unitary principal councils, the process of community governance reviews, asset transfers and requests for devolution of functions to follow is a process unlikely to slow down anytime soon.

Bevan Brittan is currently advising a number of councils in relation to LGR, including those involved in establishing charter trustees, undergoing community governance reviews, or undertaking asset transfers to local councils.