Another Case of Policy-Making Broken by Design
Council Mergers Without Cost Review
The BBC has revealed that the UK government did not commission its own cost review for the largest reorganisation of English councils in half a century. (article) Instead, the Ministry of Local Government relied on a 2020 PwC report for the County Council Network (CCN) to justify claims that billions could be saved. The problem? The CCN has since revised its analysis, now warning that the reorganisation could deliver no savings at all and in fact cost £850m over five years in some scenarios.
This is not an isolated slip. It is symptomatic of deeper failures in the way Britain makes policy, failures we at Enlightened Enterprise have already described in two recent essays: Public Sector Policy Making, Planning and Delivery For the 21st Century and Broken by Design and Beyond Repair: Why the UK Government Can’t Deliver and How to Fix It
The council merger story illustrates almost every flaw we have previosuly diagnosed.
1. Policy by Copy-and-Paste
The government based its financial case on outdated consultancy outputs, rather than producing rigorous in-house analysis. This is “policy by copy-and-paste,” where reports written years earlier for different contexts are recycled to justify political announcements.
Instead of stress-testing scenarios with updated data and stakeholder intelligence, ministers leaned on PwC’s 2020 models, even though local government finances and service demands have changed dramatically since then.
2. Political Storytelling Over Evidence
Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, told Parliament that reorganisation would “save a significant amount of money,” a claim that collapsed almost immediately once CCN’s revised figures came to light.
This is classic narrative-first policy-making. Announce a big reform with a headline promise (savings, efficiencies, accountability), and hope the evidence catches up later. But when the story is exposed as hollow, public trust erodes even further.
3. Lack of Institutional Learning
England has already experimented with “mega councils.” Many of them are now struggling financially, with ballooning deficits and stretched services. Yet instead of asking hard questions about what went wrong, Whitehall has chosen to repeat the same structural experiment, this time at even greater scale.
As we argued in Broken by Design, British policymaking suffers from a failure to learn. Each government treats history as irrelevant, discarding evidence from the last cycle and reinventing mistakes.
4. Ignoring Consequences and Systemic Risk
The CCN’s new analysis warns that if reorganisation leads to dozens of small unitary councils, taxpayers will face hundreds of millions in new costs while services come under further pressure.
This is not a minor accounting error, it is a systemic risk to local government capacity. Yet the ministry insists it was “not necessary” to commission independent analysis at the public’s expense.
This kind of blindness to downstream consequences is exactly why so many flagship reforms, from Universal Credit to NHS reorganisations, unravel in practice.
5. Exclusion of Stakeholders from Co-Design
Councils are submitting their own proposals, but the overall process remains top-down. Whitehall retains the final say, with no transparent participatory mechanism to weigh competing scenarios.
This reproduces the centralised command model that has failed time and again: London departments dictate reforms, local actors scramble to adapt, and citizens experience disruption with little say in shaping the outcome.
What this case shows, once again, is that Britain’s public sector is trapped in a structural pattern of failure. Policies are rushed, politically framed, consultant-led, and disconnected from real-world dynamics. The result is not only wasted money but deeper damage to trust in government.
A Different Way Forward
The alternative is not tinkering with better cost models or hiring more consultants. It is to change the way policy is conceived and developed.
That is where Participatory Learning Networks (PLNs) come in.
Co-creation rather than imposition: Instead of announcing top-down mergers, PLNs would bring together county councils, districts, service users, unions, and community organisations to map different governance options, testing assumptions in real time.
Continuous learning rather than one-off reports: PLNs treat policy as a process of ongoing adaptation, not a fixed blueprint. Costs, savings, and service impacts would be monitored continuously, with policies adjusted accordingly.
Systemic analysis rather than slogans: By integrating financial, social, and service data across stakeholders, PLNs can anticipate unintended consequences, preventing the kind of blind spots now exposed in the council merger debate.
Restoring legitimacy: When local people and practitioners can see their knowledge shaping policy, reforms gain credibility. They are not seen as “done to” communities but “done with” them.
Broken by Design, Confirmed by Events
The government’s handling of council mergers is a live demonstration of what we have been warning: that Britain’s policymaking machinery is not merely flawed but structurally incapable of delivering coherent, evidence-based, future-proof reforms.
Unless we build new participatory infrastructures for collective intelligence and systemic learning, the same cycle will repeat: bold claims, poor analysis, unintended costs, public disillusionment.
Council reorganisation could have been an opportunity to rethink how local government is designed and funded for the 21st century. Instead, it risks becoming yet another cautionary tale.
Whilst this is a British example it is not only a British problem. It is born of old and outdated ways of doing things which are all too common in other countries to. We need to lean the lessons from those who have found better ways and I hope readers will contribute those cases in the discussion.