Anyone wanting a snapshot of the immense pressures facing local government could no worse than visit the annual County Councils Network conference which took place this week. In the space of some 36 hours county leaders and chief executives are bombarded with a litany of challenges including adult care, integration, bed blocking, children in care, housing, funding…and of course that hardy perennial, reorganisation.

How new secretaries of state must love opening their shiny red boxes to find yet another unitary proposal for a two tier area.And yet how they keep demanding more to show their commitment to devolution or as cynics might argue, to keep local government fighting among itself. For as the Local Government Association's chairman (and district leader) Lord Porter told county leaders this week, ‘reorganisation is mutually assured destruction' since as the present structure is so imperfect all existing councils would have to be swept away. He added: ‘I went into politics to make people's lives better not to argue about a line on a map.'