“Before considering what the Local Government areas actually are, we must ask what principles might reasonably be expected to underlie the geographical arrangement^⁠1.”

When all is said and done this process will ultimately deliver new lines on maps, demarcating a new administrative geography. It’s fair to note that, as a country, we don’t have a great track record of civil servants from Westminster drawing lines on maps to determine the fate of communities². While that might sound a little over-dramatic, it’s one that bears pause. For, at its heart, what is this exercise if it is not ultimately about where to draw lines on maps. Draw them in the right place and those lines can connect; draw them in the wrong place and they can divide. Draw them too tightly around a city (ostensibly for political reasons) as with, say, Norwich or Hull, and the tax raising powers and ability to grow are significantly constrained. The success, the vibrancy of a city, is no longer in its own hands – it requires collaboration with those living in, and administering, the leafier suburbs. 

Draw them in places that doesn’t account for the future and we end up with oddities, such as how the growing Cambridgeshire town of Wisbech^⁠3 is in two counties and two districts. If coherent governance and growth is a priority, this is a problem. If we want similarly sized structures based on historical ceremonial (county) boundaries, you might think that this is a necessary casualty. 

These lines can be determined by many things. Geographical features might divide certain communities or bring others together. They might make service delivery tricky (read: more expensive) if, like rivers or hills, they offer natural barriers to movement, or we end up with refuse collections from two different councils going down the same street on different days. Infrastructure is often a guide to geography; it can indicate where people travel or the terrain is impassable or where industry is located. These are all factors to consider. In the 2000s we did a lot of work on functional travel to work areas, seeking to offer an option for restructure in Norfolk that made sense in terms of how people go about their daily lives and how local economies were geographically structured. That is still a logic I think carries weight.  

We also have to factor in sparsity, the inconvenient fact that makes service delivery expensive and more straightforward solutions complicated. It would take ten Norfolks to get close to the population of Greater London while at the same time it could swallow almost three-and-a-half Greater Londons within its border. People in the west of the Norfolk might feel affiliated with Norwich for football yet look to Cambridge for shopping. Many live closer to London or Leicester than the county’s second town of Great Yarmouth. 

Community therefore follows from geography – they are naturally intertwined. The invisible lines separating communities are often only known by those who live there. Lines between rival towns, or schools, or communities that support one football team and not the other. Communities with shared or diverse culture and history. Traditions and practices. Successes and tragedies. Where industry has once flourished and then collapsed, or where the economy keeps on ticking over. Stories of the pit closures in Fife in the 1980s were retold to me by residents with a sense of pain that betrayed the passing of the last forty years. Cromer and Sheringham are neighbouring Norfolk seaside towns and they have that in common, but to understand what it is like to live there is to understand what brings them together and what divides them. 

Any consideration of local government needs to have answers to these questions of place.  The issue of geography needs to make sense at multiple political levels, too, from the smallest units on up. In terms of political geography we need wards big enough that we don’t have hundreds of elected councillors in each Council, but not so big that the councillors are seen as remote from their communities. Councils that are big enough that they can operate effectively on behalf of their areas, but not so big that they become distant bureaucratic machines, built beyond their optimum operating efficiency. And regions that make sense to people because they offer a level of cohesion and co-ordination of those issues best addressed at a larger geography. 

Furthermore, given the need for local trade-offs to be be made on critical issues through the mobilisation of consent, a priority remains local democratic representation. Do we not want wards which elect councillors at a scale that make sense for these communities? If we want to support sustainable economic growth, do we not want these wards to aggregate up to a scale that makes sense for the way people across these communities interact and interrelate? And do we not want this to be at a scale that is sufficient for each local authority to be able to function effectively, recruit quality staff, operate on a sound financial footing, and truly be a champion for the places that they govern? 

These issues underpin considerations of subsidiarity: developing structures that allow for relevant issues to be addressed at the most appropriate level. Regions, for example, are the scale better suited to co-ordinating strategic issues (often infrastructure) such as the economy, housing and transportation. But what constitutes a region? City regions are one answer to this: Greater Manchester or Birmingham perhaps. Yet places like Devon or Norfolk are already de facto regions in their own right, given their geographical size, if not their population.

At the end^⁠4 of the day, does it really matter? Full disclosure: the geographer in me says yes, of course it does. Places matter. Counties matter. Districts matter. We grow up, go to school, marry in these places. Some remain in them for their lives. Others are more transient. Most simply want to find a sense of place to call their home and in which they can lead their version of a good life. 

But I do think that what people can expect, wherever they live, is clear knowledge of how to engage with their community, that their votes matter, that they know who represents them, that there are mechanisms for making difficult decisions affecting their communities, that local needs are addressed and that they feel their local facilities and places matter. In my final piece I’ll summarise my thoughts on how we might achieve this. 

<< Part 3 | Part 5 >>

Read all these blogs in a single article or download as a Policy + Practice paper here.

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¹ Maud, J and Finer, S.E. (1953) “Local Government of England and Wales” Oxford University Press (p31).

² See for example, the role of Cyril Radcliffe in partition, a tale tole in Episode 15 of Anita Anand and William Dalrymple’s excelled Empire podcast.

³ Interestingly the Redcliffe-Maud proposals would have negated this issue as it proposed a new ‘’.

⁴ and around 4,000 words later…