Scottish Government’s council reform proposition – what does it mean?

What is proposed?

The proposal is framed as a discussion document. This follows the Programme for Government 26-31, which announced a three-month conversation on local government structure and social care.

It also follows the Scottish Government’s Public Service Reform Strategy in June 2025, which outlined a vision for preventative and joined-up service delivery to address the projected £5bn gap in SG expenditure by 2030.

The proposals put forward:

• Six to ten regional authorities, focused on strategic decision-making such as economic development, housing, strategic planning, employability, transport and core services, including waste, environmental regulation and early learning.
• 120 to 160 community authorities, sitting within regional authority boundaries and based on recognisable communities (the paper gives Kilmarnock, Leith and Blairgowrie and Rattray as examples), focused on decisions such as householder planning applications, licensing, green spaces, town centre regeneration and local leisure and culture facilities.
• Island communities would be treated separately, with bespoke Island Single Authority Models.
• The government has committed to a parallel three-month engagement process with councils, trade unions and health and care providers, alongside separate proposals for NHS reform.

What don’t we know?

There is an urgent need for a realistic and grounded discussion on the purpose of structural reform. Our current questions below focus on this:

1. Why have we rushed to structural solutions without addressing the core drivers of local government financial sustainability? 
2. Why, after almost nine years of deliberation through the Local Governance Review, has the Scottish Government decided that the future structure of local government can be agreed during a three-month conversation?
3. How are the proposals going to cut costs if they need to support large new regional authorities and 120-160 community authorities?
4. If empowering local communities is central to the reform agenda, how does this square up with the intent to pool resources at a regional level?
5. Is there to be a ‘spend to save’ fund to pay for the transitional costs related to merging councils?

At LGIU, we have supported English local government through the currently paused Local Government Reorganisation programme. This has required a mammoth effort for councils to ensure services transition as “safe and legal”, and both the sunk costs and opportunity costs of structural reform cannot be underestimated. To put it simply, even where the underlying case for structural change is sound, the diversion of capacity from service delivery means the proposed efficiency gains do not materialise.

LGIU’s view

There was nothing in the SNP Manifesto for the 2026 Scottish Parliament elections that suggested they were planning anything as radical as this.

The Scottish Government’s proposal to replace 32 councils with 6-10 regional authorities and 120-160 community authorities is, frankly, shocking. Not just for its scale, but for how it has arrived: this looks like the plan the First Minister kept in his back pocket, unshared even at his own meeting with council leaders. Chiefs at SOLACE Scotland’s conference a fortnight ago had no inkling it was coming. That is no way to begin the promised conversation about the future of Scottish democracy.

The proposition raises far more questions than it answers. What exactly will the new regions be? How will the geographies of community authorities be decided and by whom? How will councillors operate in two levels at once? How are community authorities to be financed? What happens to social care, to education, to the coherence of places like Glasgow, which the plan would somehow carve into fragments? And how, exactly, are communities meant to influence decisions taken by remote new regional bodies? To expect councils to engage meaningfully and agree something on this basis within 10 weeks is simply unworkable.

Our deeper concern is more fundamental. Reorganisation is complex, difficult and expensive. It consumes attention and energy for years, to the detriment of everything else councils should be doing. And here it is being reached for as a substitute for the harder work of genuine reform. Scotland appears to be catching the English disease: rushing to structure in place of substance.

The truth is that none of the stated ambitions requires this upheaval. If you want stronger regional collaboration, you can build it through existing councils. If you want richer community working, you can do that within existing councils too. Structural change is not the answer to a lack of imagination, an unwillingness to do the hard yards of collaboration, or the pull of political legacy.

Local government in Scotland deserves a serious conversation about transformation. This is not it.