Catching up at the pub recently with an old friend – who happens to be a senior member of the Local Government Association – we got into debating the respective merits and drawbacks of unitary authorities. While both of us in our own ways have had a long involvement with local government, we could find little consensus between us on whether the unitary model should be pursued further across the sector.

This is an argument which has ebbed and flowed through the decades, beginning in earnest in the 1960s with the publication of the Redcliffe-Maud report, continuing through the various structural reforms of the 1970s and 1990s and rearing its head again in a number of the recommendations Lord Heseltine put forward in his 2012 review, No Stone Unturned.