Local Government Reorganisation

Debate between Lord Pack and Baroness Scott of Bybrook

Wednesday 25th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, the Government have sown confusion and imposed unnecessary costs upon the taxpayer by cancelling local elections, only to reinstate them weeks later and then seek to distance themselves from the consequences. What was presented as a firm and settled judgment has unravelled in short order, leaving uncertainty in its wake. That matters, because it is not an isolated U-turn or rethink or change of position; it joins a growing catalogue of reversals, each compounding doubt and carrying a financial price.

Stability in public administration is the foundation upon which local authorities plan, candidates prepare and citizens place their trust. Against that background, it is important to recall how we arrived here. The original decision to cancel these elections was taken by the Secretary of State. He defended it repeatedly in the other place, and the Minister defended it consistently in your Lordships’ House. In the press, the Secretary of State went so far as to describe the elections as “pointless”. Yet what was so confidentially asserted has now been undone.

Two issues now arise. The first is constitutional. Does the Minister accept that there should be strict limits upon the power to delay or disapply elections outside the most exceptional circumstances, such as war or public emergency? If she does, then, in the context of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, will she urge her colleagues to reflect upon the sentiment of the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Pack, and those in my name, which would limit the power of the Secretary of State to cancel elections by secondary legislation and constrain the power to alter the timings of local polls? It is notable that members of the governing party voted down those safeguards in the Commons.

The second issue is practical and goes to the heart of delivery. Local government is already navigating a demanding programme of reorganisation. Councils are restructuring governance, staffing, finance and service delivery. To remove and then abruptly restore elections in the midst of that process has inevitably diverted senior officers and members from their primary duty, which is the delivery of services to their residents. In other words, reorganisation requires focus, discipline and clarity. Instead, councils have been drawn into administrative uncertainty, legal contingency planning and accelerated preparations at short notice. That is not without consequences. It absorbs scarce managerial capacity and risks delay to the very reforms that the Government profess to champion. If community empowerment is truly the objective, one might expect the Government to strengthen local capacity rather than burden it with unavoidable disruption.

It is precisely because there are constitutional and practical consequences that your Lordships’ House is entitled to transparency on the costs of all this. Can the Minister therefore inform the House of the full costs of this regrettable sequence of events? What have been the expended legal fees on wasted preparation and the emergency arrangements that are now required to conduct elections at short notice? What support is being provided to local authorities required to shoulder these additional burdens? There is talk of £63 million, but is this on top of the already agreed election costs? Has an assessment been made of the impact upon council capacity and service delivery, and if so, will it be published?

The same need for clarity applies to the Government’s approach to election pilots. What is their present status? How many councils that initially indicated they possessed the capacity to participate later informed the department that they did not any longer have that capacity?

Taken together, these questions point to a wider uncertainty. Where does this leave the Government’s much-heralded program of reorganisation? Confidence in reform depends upon steadiness of hand and clarity of purpose. If Ministers will not answer fully and restore transparency, then we feel that serious reflection is required at the highest level. I would suggest that that is not at Secretary of State level, as he has been the person responsible for this unnecessary mess.

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, here we are again with a topic we have discussed and debated in different forms several times. I will do my best not to simply repeat the points made previously, particularly as it seems like each time we return to this topic, it is messier and more expensive. Although the outcome in the end is welcome—that all elections will be going ahead in May, as should originally have been the case—I think we can all agree that the route by which we have got here is a highly undesirable one. Therefore, having read the Statement that we are considering this evening very carefully, and having read Hansard for the debate on Monday in the House of Commons about the Statement, I have three particular questions for the Minister.

First, in that debate on Monday, the Secretary of State was asked whether, in the light of the latest legal advice and the Government’s current understanding of the legal situation, the Government believed that the cancellation of elections last May was legal. The Secretary of State was asked that direct question and chose not to answer it. We can all speculate why, but I hope that the Minister will be able to clear that matter up by giving us a direct answer on that.

Secondly, having looked at the reasons the Secretary of State gave in the Statement for cancelling elections, I think that they do not sit easily with what he wrote in the article published in the Times newspaper ahead of the consultation closing on potential cancellations. The Statement that we are considering this evening says that the cancellation of elections,

“should only ever happen in exceptional circumstances”.

That is a sentiment with which I suspect we all agree. But in the article in the Times newspaper, the Secretary of State said:

“They want pointless elections, Labour wants to fix potholes”.


The existence of potholes in need of repair is absolutely not an exceptional circumstance. It is a frustrating daily reality. It is really hard to see how one can reconcile the Secretary of State’s comments about wanting to fix potholes with the claim that these are exceptional circumstances.

Moreover, the Statement we are considering goes on at some length about how the Government were listening and consulting. Again, however, looking back at the article in the Times newspaper, published before the closure of the consultation over elections for this May, we see that it kicks off right from the very first sentence with a very clear steer that the Secretary of State thought that cancelling elections was a good idea. It goes on to make that point repeatedly in the succeeding sentences and paragraphs. So, given that that article, published before the close of the consultation, could be seen both to have prejudged the outcome of the consultation and to have given different reasons for cancelling elections than those considered in the consultation—all of which potentially would result in some legal issues about the validity of the decision—I wonder whether the Minister could again clarify matters by letting us know if the Secretary of State’s comments, both in that Times newspaper article and elsewhere, were a factor in the change in legal advice being given to the Government about the legality of the cancellation of elections.

Thirdly, turning to perhaps a more positive aspect, I absolutely welcome the comment in the Statement that the Government are willing to think again—particularly in the context of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill. I am sorry: the phrase is that the Government are “reflecting carefully”, which I hope means “thinking again” as well, about the amendments that have been tabled, such as by myself and by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, about the powers and the circumstances in which elections might be cancelled in the future. I hope, therefore, that the Minister will be able to tell us whether those reflections will be carried out involving a degree of cross-party discussion. Will they be carried out in time so that, if the outcome of those reflections by the Government is to decide that changes to the law are appropriate, we can do that on Report of that Bill?

English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill

Debate between Lord Pack and Baroness Scott of Bybrook

Committee stage
Monday 2nd February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 236 in this group is on perhaps a slightly more niche issue than the others raised so far in this group, but it is a detail of relevance which raises some important wider issues. The crux of it is the centralised control over the installation of cattle grids due to the powers reserved to the Secretary of State. The powers are primarily derived from Sections 82 to 90 and Schedule 10 to the Highways Act 1980, although there are other powers, such as those under the New Forest Act 1964.

Sticking to the Highways Act as the principal issue, it rightly requires local councils to consult appropriately before making decisions about the installation of new cattle grids, but it also gives very significant powers to the Secretary of State to have the final decision on such things. It is a legitimate question to ask: what is it about decisions over cattle grids that requires the special attention of the Secretary of State to make a decision on them? I think it is hard to argue that there are great strategic issues at play when making decisions over cattle grids, and indeed the expertise and knowledge that is necessary to decide whether on, say, a particular road, it would be appropriate, dangerous or necessary is very much local expertise and local knowledge. No matter how impressive a Minister may be in their depth of geographic knowledge of the byways of the roads around the country, that expertise will always best sit locally.

The Government’s White Paper was very promising on this topic. I quote it approvingly:

“It is costly, inefficient and patronising that the Secretary of State for Transport has to agree to a new cattle grid”.


I could not have put it better myself. In fact, I think I probably would have been slightly more timid in my choice of language, but, alas, despite that pungent language, the issue then somewhat disappeared. It has not been followed through in the Bill. Listening carefully to the Minister’s comments at Second Reading, it is pretty unclear why this issue has disappeared. I feel there is a slight degree of shadow-boxing on my part, hence the breadth of the amendment that I have submitted, because it would be helpful to tease out what has changed the Government’s mind from that pungent language in the White Paper to the silence in the legislation.

Although in a way it is undoubtedly not the most important of issues when it comes to devolution or transport, it is one of those issues that has wider relevance. Sometimes, improvements in government or public services come from big, grand, sweeping, important measures, but often, the improvements come from relentless incrementalism, the accumulation of small steps. This amendment certainly would be one of those small steps, but a useful small step in properly decentralising power, empowering local councils, acting as highway authorities, to take responsibility and, perhaps, also rather usefully, reducing the workload on central government a little. After all, one of the most common comments that Ministers and civil servants make is how overloaded and overworked so much of Whitehall and Westminster is. Cattle grids on their own are not enough to crack those problems, but devolving power over cattle grids would be a helpful step forward. I look forward to the Minister telling us how the spirit of the White Paper is going to be restored to the Bill on this topic.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Although his amendment does not say so, I assume the noble Lord is talking about cattle grids on highways. The majority of cattle grids are on people’s private land. I think the amendment would be better if it was clearer that it relates to highways, if it does.

Local Government Reorganisation

Debate between Lord Pack and Baroness Scott of Bybrook

Monday 26th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, we are considering today a Statement of real constitutional significance. It concerns the decision to cancel scheduled local elections, and in doing so, raises fundamental questions about where responsibility lies, how accountability is exercised, and how seriously we take the rights of the citizen to choose who governs them.

The Secretary of State has made no secret of his views. He has spoken of a system he regards as wasteful, of the need for greater focus and capacity, and of elections which he has described, in his own words, as “pointless”. If that reflects a settled judgment, noble Lords in this House are entitled to ask why it has not been stated with equal clarity here, and why Ministers have appeared reluctant to accept openly the consequences of that position.

At the centre of this lies a more troubling question. Are elections now to be treated as an optional feature of local democracy, to be set aside when they become inconvenient or administratively awkward? Elections are not a discretionary exercise. They are the means by which consent is renewed and authority sustained. They are an integral part of our democracy.

That leads, inevitably, to the issue of responsibility. By asking councils to make the request, Ministers avoid coming to the Dispatch Box to say plainly that they have chosen to deny more than 3.7 million people their vote. Is this not, in effect, a means of shifting a difficult and politically uncomfortable decision away from those who have in fact taken it?

This sits uneasily alongside the broader story of reorganisation itself. A year on from its announcement, there remains little clarity about boundaries, structures or timetables—by timetables, I mean for the whole project across the country. Councils are being asked to manage disruption and cost while certainty moves ever further out of reach. When it will happen seems still unknown by the Government, or, if it is not unknown, it is unannounced.

From our consideration of the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, we know that this legislation centralises powers, risks increasing costs for working people and leaves communities with a diminished voice.

Elections have been postponed before, but never on this scale and never in this manner. In the past, elections have always been postponed in a planned way, with plenty of time for councils to organise themselves and, particularly, plenty of time for them to talk to their communities who are affected and give them a voice and some clarity.

Democracy is not strengthened by avoidance nor protected by the quiet displacement of responsibility. If Ministers believe that elections should not take place, they should say so plainly, take responsibility for that choice and defend it openly. Surely the Government have learned from their mistakes at last year’s elections.

The Electoral Commission has been clear that scheduled elections should proceed as planned and that capacity constraints are not a legitimate justification for delay. I ask the Minister: why was the independent guardian of our electoral system not consulted before a Labour Government took the decision to cancel local elections, and what does that say about how lightly this decision was made?

Finally, will the same thing happen again next year?

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, the Government are presenting this latest round of election cancellations as an unexceptional administrative move that is justified by precedent, but I think that is fundamentally wrong. Cancelling elections should be a matter of last resort, triggered by global war or a domestic catastrophe. We should take pride in our commitment to democracy. We should have a pride that crosses party boundaries and enthuses Ministers about the value and preciousness of democracy. Instead, unfortunately, the Government seem to be treating elections as an administrative inconvenience, something to be brushed aside rather than cherished.

I could get all fire and brimstone and dust off grand quotes from Churchill, Gandhi, Lincoln or Fawcett, but, really, I am just disappointed by how lightly the Government seem to be treating this matter. Exhibit A is the comments of the Secretary of State, who said that fixing potholes was more important than running scheduled elections—no regrets, no apologies and no reluctance about cancelling but, instead, that poverty of low expectations, as if fixing potholes and running polling days are just too much and just not possible.

The Government claim that there is precedent for all that they are doing, but I have listened and read very carefully what has been said: all the peacetime examples that have been cited extended the time in office of councillors only by up to an extra year. But rather than one or two extra years, the Government’s plans will mean that many councillors, elected for a four-year term of office, will end up being in power for a full seven years—three years on top, in a completely unprecedented way.

This is not what the Government said they were going to do. The Minister said last March, when we were debating a previous round of election cancellations:

“We have no plans to postpone district council elections in 2026”. —[Official Report, 24/3/25; col. 1516.]


Likewise, the Minister also said that it was a

“postponement for 12 months only”.—[Official Report, 24/3/25; col. 1514.]

We are, of course, now in a rather different situation. That U-turn has not been justified by precedent, and certainly not by the need to fight the scourge of potholes; it is a U-turn, as the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, said, that flies directly in the face of the Electoral Commission’s very specific advice that

“we do not think that capacity constraints are a legitimate reason for delaying long planned elections”.

It also strikes me as being an unwisely short-term perspective to cultivate a culture in which elections are so often cancelled and in which terms of office that are meant to be four years get extended up to seven. Is that really a wise legacy to leave for a future Government of who knows what political complexion?

As the Government seem set on this course, let me ask three specific questions of the Minister. First, will the Government reimburse councils for the cost of preparing for elections that are now being cancelled? Secondly, given how much the Government have talked up the benefits of their plans to introduce elected mayors, which are part of the wider picture of election delays, will the Government publish estimates of the cost to economic growth of those delays in bringing in the elected mayors? Thirdly, given the importance of protecting our democracy—even in the face of potholes—will the Government commit to giving the Electoral Commission proper independence and removing the Government’s power to give it instructions over policy and strategy? That would show a real commitment to protecting and valuing democracy.