Introduction

Local government in England is an outlier when it comes to size (Baldersheim and Rose 2010; Swianiewicz, 2010; Denters et al, 2014). Yet, amalgamations are far from finished in England and this chapter will explore how a policy narrative has been developed articulating the need for the ever-increasing size of English local government – a narrative which is shared between central and local government. While it is the centre that takes the formal decision about council mergers, the process is easier if some local government political elites share a policy narrative with the centre that extols the virtues of larger local government and fewer councils.

The council size debate reflects a series of assumptions about the purpose of local government (Bulpitt, 1983; Stewart, 1983 and 2003; Chandler, 2007; Copus et al, 2017) and the last wholesale reorganization in 1972 created councils which reflected those assumptions but not necessarily recognizable communities of place (John and Copus, 2011). Since the 1972 reorganization, subsequent governments have been shy of further massive territorial upheaval, preferring to cajole and convince local government into mergers through the creation of a policy narrative based on a folklore like belief in the efficacy of larger local government (Copus et al, 2017).

Drew et al (2019) point out the dearth of scholarly activity exploring the nature of the arguments that are employed by proponents and opponents of municipal mergers to convince the public of the rightness of their cause. They employ a rhetorical analysis to examine the efficacy of those arguments which display the ‘dreadful consequences’ that could occur from failure to amalgamate or from amalgamation. In this chapter, we take a different approach to analyzing the arguments, preferring to employ the notion of policy narratives (explained in section two) particularly as politicians in England need care little about convincing the public, who will only nominally be consulted in the process and have no real say, such as via a referendum, on amalgamations. The audience that needs convincing, in the English case, are councillors, council leaders and chief executives who can be convinced to assess the world in the same way as the centre through a stabilizing general policy narrative (Jones et al, 2014).