Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, whether her Department has made an assessment of the total cost of the Government's plans for local authority re-organisation.

The English Devolution White Paper sets out the overall case for local government reorganisation, including referencing the 2020 PwC report, “Evaluating the importance of scale in proposals for local government reorganisation”, for the County Councils Network, which 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.