County Council outlines interim plan for Local Government Reorganisation in Hampshire  

An interim plan for LGR in the Hampshire and Solent region, published today (12 March 2025), will be considered by the Full County Council on 20 March, followed by the Council’s Cabinet on 21 March. This is the first step locally towards Government ambitions to replace the current two-tier council system with new unitary (all-purpose) councils, simplifying how councils are organised and run.  

For Hampshire, LGR will bring together the County Council, 11 borough and district councils and neighbouring unitary authorities into a number of new unitary authorities that will provide the same services as both county and district councils. How services are currently delivered to communities in Hampshire is not equally spread across all the councils that make up the Hampshire and Solent geographical area. The County Council is the single largest organisation of them all - responsible for the vast proportion of local government services and budgets across the area. Delivering vital services like social care for children and adults, public health, education, libraries, roads and registration, to transport, strategic planning, waste disposal, trading standards and countryside services, all of the County Council’s services benefit from its significant scale of operation as well as being deeply embedded in local communities and people’s homes. The Council has a significant duty as an upper tier local authority in Hampshire, and any LGR proposals that look to break up core services like social care and special educational needs support must take into account the grave responsibility of keeping the most vulnerable in society safe.  

The County Council has worked in collaboration with its Local Authority partners across Hampshire and Isle of Wight to develop the interim plan which will be jointly submitted to Government on behalf of all 15 councils by 21 March 2025. After this, further work will take place collectively over the coming months to agree final proposals to be submitted in the Autumn.  

The proposals will need to reflect key criteria set by Government around areas such as prioritising the delivery of high quality and sustainable public services to residents; being the right size to achieve efficiencies, improve capacity and withstand financial shocks; demonstrating that councils in local areas are working together on plans that meet local needs and are informed on local views; and enabling stronger community engagement and neighbourhood empowerment.  

Alongside these, and the joint principles being applied by Hampshire and Solent Local Authorities, Hampshire County Council is also working to a set of guiding principles which reflect its own key responsibility as the provider of the vast majority of local government services in Hampshire – to help inform County Councillors’ decisions to ensure the most effective and sustainable future structure for local government.  

No preferred proposal is being recommended to the County Council and its Cabinet, but three early options for Hampshire’s ‘mainland’ have been evaluated – comprising either two, three or four unitary councils. However, indicators show that a higher number of unitary councils does not stack up financially – costing the taxpayer more and weakening the financial strength of each individual council.  

Leader of Hampshire County Council, Councillor Nick Adams-King said: “LGR is not just about the merger of district councils, it includes the redistribution of the responsibilities of the County Council; most particularly social care, education, children’s services and highways and waste.  These services provide the vast proportion of local government services across Hampshire and the Solent, and we must focus on their attendant costs and risks. As one of the largest local authorities in the country, serving over 1.4 million residents, we currently deliver 85% of the council services people receive in the Hampshire, including across Hampshire’s schools.  

“In considering LGR for Hampshire as a whole, our overarching objective is to develop financially resilient organisations which can deliver and enable the best possible public services and ultimately the best outcomes for residents and communities. Our number one priority is to ensure that whatever local government structure is in place in the years to come, the needs of residents are front and centre of everyone’s thinking. It’s our responsibility to ensure that the services we deliver to residents continue to meet the needs of Hampshire’s citizens and are sustainable for years to come – no matter how these services are organised - so that everyone, and in particular those who are most in need, can keep accessing high-performing essential services, like they do today.  

“At this moment in time, there is no single preferred option for LGR. Instead, the outline position up for discussion by the County Council and Cabinet in the coming days sets out early thinking in this space, with latest data insights that present the accurate picture of the varied and thriving economic centres which now operate across more of Hampshire’s towns.  

“Our upper tier local government colleagues in Southampton, Portsmouth and Isle of Wight, and Hampshire’s 11 district and borough councils will also submit proposals at the same time as us. We continue to work in partnership with all councils over the coming months to cement our commitment to ensuring proposals reflect what will deliver the best local government public services for the future, for the people we collectively serve.”  

Hampshire County Council’s set of guiding principles for Local Government Reorganisation, reflecting its unique role as the provider of the majority of local government services in the region are:  

We will prioritise delivery of efficient, high quality public services, enhancing delivery through reform whilst avoiding unnecessary fragmentation of services.  

We will safeguard service users, including vulnerable children and adults, by minimising risk to the services the County Council delivers and the potential threats from a lack of effective business continuity and appropriate future government structures in the long-term.  

We will seek to ensure organisations of the future have the best chance of being financially sustainable and resilient. Organisations will need to be sufficiently large to withstand financial shocks and smoothing of significant cost drivers such as demography and deprivation.  

We will leverage anchor institutions as the basis of the most appropriate structures to underpin sustainable delivery that offers value-for-money for the taxpayer and minimises the cost of transition.  

We recognise that any future Unitary Solution will require effective mechanisms to enable local identity, engagement and local growth ambitions (including Local Place/Regeneration Boards, Area Committees and potential future Development Corporations.  

We want to ensure equity of representation in a future Mayoral Combined Authority. All mainland Unitary Authorities to have equitable representation and voting rights.