'Unprecedented in local government terms' - The Local Government Commission's public consultation programme

The purpose of this article is to describe and evaluate the public consultation exercises mounted by the Local Government Commission for England under its successive Chairmen, Sir John Banham and Sir David Cooksey. The Commission was evidently proud of this aspect of its work, emphasizing repeatedly its unprecedented nature: in itself an unremarkable claim in the context of British local government structural reviews. This article suggests that, in terms of quality and value for money, as opposed to sheer scale, the consultation programme - and particularly the three principal tranches of MORI residential surveys - was less laudable. The article examines each of these surveys: the stage one community identity polls, which might have contributed to the government's intended 'community index', had the latter not previously been rejected by the Commission; the stage three option consultation surveys, the Banham Commission's instrument for the hybridization of English local government, which prompted accusations of policymaking by opinion poll; and the stage three 're-review' surveys for the Cooksey Com mission, which had already indicated its disinclination to accord local public opinion any special weighting in its deliberations. The article attempts to summarize, in two key tables, both the results and the impact of the Commission's public consultations, and in doing so to trace the progress of the review from an initially proposed 99 new unitary authorities, down to 50, then 38, and back up to the final total of 46.