Election planning 'number one priority' for council lawyers following delay U-turn

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Ensuring elections are delivered in a legal, compliant and safe way will be council lawyers’ main priority over the next few weeks, a local government chief has told the Gazette following the government’s U-turn this week.

Housing, communities and local government secretary Steve Reed informed council leaders this week that he was withdrawing his decision to postpone 30 local elections ‘in light of recent advice’, following a legal challenge by the Reform UK party.

The 30 councils now have less than three months to become election-ready.

Paul Turner, president of Lawyers in Local Government, explained to the Gazette that the elections were postponed to release resources to deliver central government’s 'local government reorganisation' plan. ‘Given that the statutory instrument was made to postpone elections, many councils would not have started planning for elections and will now have to deliver elections in a shortened timeframe as well as having to deal with reorganisation,’ he said.

Lawyers play a key part in election planning and their priority will be to ensure the elections are delivered in a legal, compliant and safe way, Turner added.

‘The first thing that councils will be doing today is to ensure that there is a project plan in place and that any additional resources are secured quickly. After that the elections are likely to be discussed within the golden triangle (the CEO, the monitoring officer and the chief financial officer) to discuss the operational delivery and funding of the elections.'

As for all the other work in their in-tray, Turner said local government lawyers are experts at balancing many things.

‘Kickstarting the elections planning will be their number one priority, but there will be many other competing priorities - including the largest reorganisation of local government since the early 1970s. The only relief is that often councillors are more absent during the run up to the election as they are out campaigning - that can mean that there is less pressure to advance other work,’ he said.