Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, what recent assessment he has made of the benefits secured by local authority areas that have moved to unitary status.

The Government has made no recent assessment of the benefits secured by local authority areas that have moved to unitary status, but is aware of certain independent reports which have made such assessments. These include a report commissioned by the County Councils Network and authored by Phil Swann in 2016 called “Learning the Lessons from Local Government Reorganisation - An Independent Study“, which found that larger unitary councils are most likely to be able to generate economies of scale, be resilient, and be able to take strategic decisions in an integrated way with the broader public sector.