Questions over local government reorganisation options as survey deadline extended

Hastings Borough Council has extended the deadline for responding to the public consultation on the reorganisation of local government by a week. Questions are still to be answered about how some of the three options proposed meet the government criteria. Meanwhile the government has confirmed that it expects next year’s local elections to take place. Nick Terdre, text, and Russell Hall, research and graphics.

There is still time to respond to the public consultation on how local government should be reorganised in East Sussex once Hastings Borough Council and the other East Sussex authorities have been abolished in 2028. The deadline for completing the HBC survey has been extended by a week to Monday 7 July. However it’s already too late for the East Sussex County Council survey, which closed at midnight on 23 June.

Public meetings to provide information on local government reorganisation (LGR) and gather feedback from residents also ended with a workshop session at Concordia Hall in St Leonards on Wednesday 25th. HBC promises to publish the results of feedback from the survey and public sessions in due course. According to Cllr Julia Hilton, the LGR lead, over 600 responses had been received by last week.

Meanwhile members of the public have been invited to participate in a focus group to be held on the evening of Thursday 10 July. Interested parties are asked to contact the council by email.

Jim McMahon, the minister of state for Local Government and English Devolution at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, confirmed in late May the government’s intention to publish the English devolution bill before Parliament goes into recess on 22 July. The bill includes the provisions for abolishing the six existing East Sussex councils and replacing them with a unitary authority or authorities and installing a mayoral strategic authority for the whole of Sussex.

Mayoral elections are scheduled for next May, when local elections are also due in Hastings. Although this year’s ESCC elections were cancelled after ESCC, West Sussex County Council and Brighton & Hove unitary authority were accepted onto the Devolution Priority Programme, in recent guidance on local government reorganisation the ministry confirmed that “We have no plans to postpone any elections which councils are scheduled to hold.” Sixteen of the 32 ward seats will be disputed.

Questions for options

At HBC, as previously reported, three proposals are under consideration: the Greens and the Conservatives both favour a single unitary authority for East Sussex, as has also been proposed by ESCC (Option 1); the Labour group proposes dividing East Sussex into a coastal strip bringing together communities along the coast which tend to have shared characteristics, such as economies dependent on tourism  and fishing, as well as high levels of deprivation, and a largely rural inland area (Option 2); and the Hastings Independents’ suggest abolishing ESCC and establishing five unitary authorities based on the existing lower-tier councils (Option 3).

The government has set out six main criteria which proposals should meet, including establishing a single tier of local government for the area, and being of the “right size to achieve efficiencies, improve capacity and withstand financial shocks.”

When asked at a consultation meeting in the council chamber of 12 June how their options met the criteria, both Labour and the Hastings Independents claimed they did but failed to explain how.

Defining the coastal strip

The precise geography of Labour’s coastal strip option has yet to be decided. Cllr Judy Rogers told HOT the location of the boundary between the strip and the inland area, and how far west the strip will extend, is under discussion with Wealden and Brighton & Hove. “Once we know precisely the boundaries we will make them public,” she said.

In a ministerial statement on 3 June, McMahon said that the population level of 500,000 or more for a unitary authority was a “guiding principle.” On other occasions he has suggested that a population as low as 350,000 could also be acceptable, if a proposal presented advantages in other respects.

At a consultation meeting in the council chamber on 12 June, Cllr Rogers stated that the government has said that “actually 300-350,000 people is okay.” She told HOT that the government has sent written information mentioning these figures to council officers which has been openly shared at meetings on local government reorganisation, and that she had attended meetings with the government’s local government reorganisation team where they had been confirmed.

Neither the HBC communications team nor the ministry’s press office was able to confirm this information. Cllr Julia Hilton, the local government reorganisation lead, told HOT that no official communication had been received from the ministry mentioning a figure below 500,000. She pointed out that the ministry’s feedback letter in response to the interim LGR plan submitted by the council in March was unspecific on a minimum level, merely stating that “All proposals, whether they are at the guided level [500,000], above it, or below it, should set out the rationale for the proposed approach clearly.”

East Sussex has a population of around 550,000. If one of the unitary authorities in Option 2 had a population of 300,000, the other would have only 250,000.

According to the notional geography for Option 2 shown in the graphic below, which uses population data from the 2021 census and envisages a coastal strip running from Jury’s Gap in the east to East Saltdean in the west, the coastal strip population would total 317,070, but the inland area only 233,650.

By aggregating the most deprived areas in East Sussex with a low council tax yield, the coastal strip option may well also fail the test of a “sensible economic area, with an appropriate tax base.”

The point has been acknowledged by Labour, which listed one of the ‘cons’ of its proposal as its economic viability: “Coastal areas typically have lower council tax and business rates income so funding could be a challenge unless government commits to fairer funding.”

The Hastings Independents’ Option 3 runs into the same population issues. None of these councils has a population anywhere near even 200,000 — the largest is Wealden, with 164,653. The others each have between 90,000 and 104,000. HOT asked how this met the relevant criteria but has not received an answer.

One proposal per council

Labour’s Cllr Helen Kay claimed that councils can submit more than one proposal by the deadline on 26 September.”There doesn’t have to be just one proposal, there is a sense that we can have a number of proposals going forward, we don’t have to limit ourselves to just one,” she told the 12 June meeting.

Cllr Paul Barnett, leader of the Hastings Independents, said he agreed with her.

But a ministry spokesperson has clarified to HOT that while multiple proposals can be submitted from an area, a “council cannot however submit several proposals — it can only put its name to one proposal for unitary government.”

Cllr Julia Hilton told HOT that the question of multiple options does not arise in Hastings anyway, as the council only has funds to develop the business case for one. At the end of the day it will be up to the Cabinet, which consists entirely of Green councillors, to decide which of the three options will constitute the council’s submission.

Meanwhile Option 1 has the advantage of proposing a single tier of local government, as stipulated by the official criteria.

LGR funding

Some details of how the £7.6m provided by the government to pay for the cost of developing reorganisation proposals will be divided between the 21 areas in the current devolution process were made public earlier this month. East Sussex and Brighton get £302,024 and West Sussex £315,172.

The announcement said that the sum for each area should be equally divided between up to three councils. An HBC spokesperson explained that the council would not directly receive any of this sum as it would “primarily be used to support work undertaken across the whole of East Sussex”.

Clarification on which councils in East Sussex will benefit from the funding is awaited from ESCC.

Nevertheless HBC is incurring expenses in its LGR work, including in officer time and the cost of organising public meetings. A Freedom of Information request has revealed that HBC paid £37,500 for external consultancy between 11 May and 15 June. The council has engaged Local Partnerships, a publicly owned partnership body, to work on LGR.

 

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