'Absolute madness': No halt in shake-up plans to Nottinghamshire councils which is ‘days away’ from a decision

Nottinghamshire’s nine local authorities have been due for a re-shaping for more than a year, which should involve its multiple councils being scaled down to just two.

The government announced its Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) plans back in December 2024 to re-shape England’s two-tier council structure that split council responsibilities between lower-tier district councils responsible for smaller-scale services and upper-tier county councils that handle major services.

Nottingham City Council already exists as a unitary authority.

A few options have been put forward to the Government that could essentially involve two new unitary authorities being created for Nottinghamshire, which all involve some form of Nottingham city expansion as one unitary and another unitary covering the remaining parts of the county.

The government’s LGR plan has been criticised since it was announced, with Broxtowe Council’s leader, Milan Radulovic (Brox All), consistently calling for a ‘service-based review’ on shake-up plans and previous delays to councils agreeing with each other over options in 2025.

Despite a Government decision on LGR in the county due in days, Independent councillors on Nottinghamshire Council submitted a motion to call for a pause to the whole process in the authority’s full council meeting on July 9.

Coun Teresa Cullen’s (Brox All) motion mentioned Norfolk Council’s leadership halting its work with LGR, where the authority has submitted a judicial review over the plans, and stated the Government has made LGR decisions on councils outside of the original 500,000-population target for new unitaries.

It called on the authority to ‘believe’ the Government did not make a ‘significant needs based case’ and write to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to ask the government to ‘halt’ its LGR plans until a needs-based assessment for the shake-up was done.

The county council formally submitted its option for a Nottingham, Broxtowe and Gedling merger – with another unitary for the rest of the county – back in 2025.

Announcing her motion, Coun Cullen told the meeting: “We are now days away from hearing our fate.

"We are not here to simply implement Government policy, we’re here to represent the people of Nottinghamshire.”

She called LGR ‘a fundamental restructuring of local government that will affect services, staff, communities and local identity for decades to come’, adding: “Councils were initially told new unitary authorities should generally serve populations of around 500,000 people or more, whether we agree with that or not, that was the criteria, the criteria we put our proposals against.”

Coun Cullen made reference to recent news in neighbouring Derbyshire, where council officials have warned the savings previously forecast from LGR in their county have effectively disappeared.

Backing up the motion, Coun John Wilmott (Ash Ind) said he had ‘never seen a decision so disliked by the people we represent.

The whole LGR process was called rushed” by Coun Johno Lee (Con), with Conservative opposition leader, Coun Sam Smith later referencing the ruling Reform group’s 2025 local election leaflets previously standing against LGR.

Coun Liz Clunie (Lab) criticised the motion, questioning the amount of time and money wasted if the process was to be paused now and said council departments have already been incorporating LGR into their work to ensure a ‘smooth transition’.

She said: “There will be costs over the next few years but surely there must be savings in the long term as multiple layers of local government are removed and our residents deal with a single authority for all their services.”

The grounds for the Independents’ motion was called ‘absolute madness’ by Coun Mike Robertson (Ref), who said the Government were already clear in their initial LGR announcement that ‘some flexibility’ would be allowed for population numbers under new unitaries if ‘justification’was given.

Coun Mick Barton (Ref), council leader, said ‘doing nothing was never an option’.

He continued: “Both Broxtowe and Ashfield could have put an alternative proposal forward, but neither did.

“We knew from day one Broxtowe buried its head in the sand and hoped it would go away, just like the Conservatives.

"Reform got elected and we dealt with it within six months of being elected.”

This claim was refuted by Coun Cullen later in the meeting, referencing Broxtowe Council’s LGR resident survey which had around 12,500 responses – the ‘largest return’ in Broxtowe’s history.

Coun Barton agreed that representatives across different parties ‘didn’t agree’ with how the Government has dealt with LGR but said writing to them to halt the process ‘will do nothing’.

According to Coun Helen Faccio (Lab), more than 100,000 Leicestershire residents were estimated to have contacted the wrong council in their area for service support because they were confused over which authority was responsible for a service, calling the two-tier system ‘complicated, confusing, clunky’.

The motion was struck down with 38 votes against and 18 votes for.