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

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what assessment his Department has made of the potential efficiency savings of merging local authorities.

Our policy is to implement, subject to Parliamentary approval, any proposal made by councils to merge which we assess on the basis of information in the proposal as meeting our merger criteria, including giving greater value for many and yielding cost savings, which were announced to Parliament in a written statement on 7 November 2017 (HCWS232).