Same service, five different ways

A practical guide to process harmonisation through local government reorganisation. Free, 36 pages, no sales call attached.

Nineteen areas of England now have reorganisation confirmed, producing 56 new unitary authorities. Most vest on 1 April 2028. The map is drawn.

What wasn’t decided is almost everything else: which systems survive, whose processes become the standard, how services actually get delivered on 2 April 2028, and who owns the answers.

If you work for a council that ceases to exist in 2028, or for one of the authorities replacing it, you have somewhere between eighteen months and two years. Somebody has told you there are savings to deliver. Somebody else has told you the priority is that nothing breaks on day one. Both are true, and they pull in opposite directions.

This paper is about the work that sits between them.

What’s in it

• Why the savings number probably doesn’t describe your area. The £2.9bn came from a report commissioned by the county lobby, not from government analysis — and the updated version of that same modelling shows a landscape of smaller unitaries costing £850m rather than saving anything.
• Why you can’t map it all, and how to decide what not to map. A four-way merge involving county functions produces somewhere between one and two thousand predecessor processes. Three questions triage most of them.
• Start with a register, not a map. Councils already built one of these for GDPR without mapping a thing. It takes weeks rather than years, and it outlives reorganisation.
• The splitting problem. Most writing about reorganisation assumes councils merge. In eighteen of the nineteen areas, something is being carved up instead — and splitting is the harder problem.
• The work only the dying council can do. There is critical knowledge that has to be captured before vesting day, and nothing making it happen. Torridge voted down £400,000 of transition funding in July 2026 by a single vote.
• How to evidence savings you didn’t sign up to. After 1 April 2028 the predecessor position is unrecoverable. The baseline has a deadline.
• A one-page checklist you can print and take into a programme meeting.

If you want the shorter version of the argument first, it’s in the national picture across all nineteen areas and in what reorganisation looks like in Devon and Gloucestershire.

Who wrote it

Andy Sandford has spent over a decade working with councils across England, Scotland and Wales on process mapping, service redesign and building improvement capability in-house. Local government is the only sector We Are Lean and Agile works in. The analysis here draws on the Secretary of State’s own decision letters, the PwC modelling behind the national savings figure, and published council papers.

It isn’t a critique of reorganisation. That argument is over. It’s a guide to the part nobody has written down yet.

Download the paper