Local Government needs a big shake-up

At UK Labour conference, Wales branch leader Ken Skates advocated for devolving power down from the Senedd to local authorities and ‘communities’ in Wales.

He gave absolutely no detail on what this would entail in practice, which is unsurprising given Labour have never previously called for this, at least not in Wales.

It doesn’t take a genius to see why they’re only talking about this now. They’ve lost the Senedd, so they want power distributed to the levels of government where they still cling onto it, though council elections are just 7 months away, so we’ll see what lines come out at the 2027 conference.

Ken Skates’ speech got me thinking about local government in Wales more widely, and it’s clear to me that things do need to be changed.

In general, I don’t support so-called rationalisation of public services. It often leaves rural and deprived areas worse off, makes services less efficient and strips them back to their bare minimum.

Local government is an exception to this.

Wales now has 22 local authorities, ranging from massive, rural areas like Gwynedd, Powys and Ceredigion, the cities of Cardiff, Swansea and Newport, and most bizarrely, small, mostly-urban county boroughs in the valleys like Blaenau Gwent, Torfaen and Merthyr Tydfil.

It’s hard to justify having so many councils, particularly in southeast Wales, with boundaries that seem arbitrary and enclosing regions that have no meaningful local identity.

I propose the merging of local authorities across the country. Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen are already combining many of their functions, why not go further? Their combined population would still be smaller than Newport’s.

I’m not convinced that bringing back Dyfed would be a great idea since most of its population is in the Carmarthen-Llanelli corridor and in South Pembrokeshire, and it would risk leaving the rural north of Dyfed (Ceredigion) behind.

Equality of population size shouldn’t be the aim of local government structure; it should be to ensure that geographically-adjacent areas of similar character, like the south Wales valleys, the Wrexham-Flintshire conurbation and Powys are governed in a way that meets the needs of as many residents as possible.

As for what powers councils should have, I see no case to expand them whatsoever at this time. If the council can’t even collect the bins on the right day, can they be trusted to run healthcare services, neighbourhood policing, or anything else for that matter?

And can the inevitable extra expenditure on bureaucrats and politicians be justified? No.

At the lowest level of Government, Wales has about 880 communities, at least 730 of which have their own councils. Given how small some of these areas are, and how few of the councillors on them were elected competitively, it is utterly bonkers that there’s such a drive to keep them as they are.

In 2022, just three of Ceredigion’s 51 communities had any contested seats, and just one, Cardigan, had a full slate of elected councillors.

Without a plan to drive up awareness and engagement with this level of government, it is totally unjustifiable to maintain it in its current form, if at all.

When the majority of people have no idea that they have a community council and that the community and county councils are different things, that’s a sign that the whole model has failed.

I stood for Aberystwyth Town Council in March. The number of people I spoke to who thought I was standing for county council, or were completely unaware of the election happening at all, was ridiculous.

Most of the people I spoke to who were aware were themselves involved in politics, or lived in the more affluent parts of the ward. In the end, the turnout was just 22%.

When the time is right, Welsh local governance needs a shakeup. There are way too many councils and councillors for the functions they have