A new government, new energy, new enthusiasm, new people, but for local government are there new ideas? On the surface, it seems not.

The centre's programme for local government is currently based on expanding the inherited policy of combined authorities either with elected mayors, or with the curious hybrid of a directly elected leader. The existence of a tiered structure for devolution deals, central control of the nature and shape of specific deals to meet government policy preferences and interminable wrangling around elected mayors, all seems set to continue. The enthusiasm for covering all of England with devolution deals is also unabated without any serious questioning of the social, political and economic geography of un-devolved areas, which are generally much more rural in character. The formal exclusion of districts from the process makes the latter question all the more difficult to sensibly address.

Next, is the question it is devolution or decentralisation on offer to England? The former requiring a transfer of political power, autonomy, governance capacity and independent decision-making; the latter, the transfer of tasks, functions, responsibilities and services: England continues to be offered decentralisation, dressed up as devolution.

Lurking behind the recent excitement about the launch of new devolution deals for Greater Lincolnshire and Hull & East Yorkshire (with elected mayors) and non-mayoral combined county authorities covering Devon CC and Torbay Council, and Lancashire CC and its neighbouring unitaries Blackburn with Darwen and Blackpool BCs, is the ever present threat of local government reorganisation. But, it is not just those councils that could experience pressure for expensive, unnecessary and fruitless reorganisation.

There is a growing fatalism in local government that reorganisation is ‘inevitable' (as reported in The MJ recently). It is not inevitable; it is just something ingrained in the centre's thinking. It needs repeating that England already has some of the largest councils across Europe and that it is not increases in size that improve local government, but, among other things, powers, autonomy, political and managerial skill, an equal working partnership between the centre and local government and, of course, fiscal and resource freedoms. None of this has truly been on offer from devolution deals. Indeed, if councils are abolished and new, bigger unitaries created, the problems reorganisation was meant to solve do not evaporate into the ether, as the negotiations between Northamptonshire unitaries over sharing the £40m from the balance sheet of the abolished County Council shows.

As we analyse and describe in detail in our book – The Strange Demise of the Local in Local Government - you don't gain by getting bigger, you just get bigger. But, the centre remains a one-trick pony when it comes to local government structure with a single direction of travel to larger and fewer councils. Who benefits from larger and fewer councils? Not the public, who, when given the chance have rejected in local referendum the abolition of their districts and the creation of unitary councils. The public's local loyalties and preferences clearly do not matter to the centre when it comes to the boundaries of the councils people live in. But, fewer councils and councillors makes control by the centre easier.

Now, the above may make it seem like reorganisation is inevitable, but it is not and local government must not accept that inevitability. Local government needs to gather evidence from overseas where smaller local authorities do a marvellous job of balancing service quality with local democracy and community identity and to confront the centre with that evidence; it needs to look at the evidence that bigger councils are not automatically and always better (the District Councils' Network's imaginative and effective 2020 publication - Bigger is not Better - a comprehensive, evidence-based publication, got its title from the results of the available research); local government needs to make constant demands for greater freedom and resources and use the Council of Europe's 2022 report on the UK's compliance with the Charter of Local Self-Government as ammunition; it needs councillors to use their political muscles within their parties to change the centre's thinking about local government;  and, it needs to constantly challenge the persistence and growth of centralisation.

If it does none of these things we are left with the questions: 'How big do you want to go and what is the optimum number of local authorities in England? That question is never answered by the centre, but the answer is 58. Anyone with a copy of the 1969 Maud report to hand will know why.

But, a time will come when someone asks the question: why, when we have all of these marvellous devolved combined authorities do we need the authorities that are combined within them – why not just scrap the lot? Game, set and match for any concept of the local in local government. If we sound sceptical or even cynical here it is a scepticism and cynicism born not of personality, but experience. Here's hoping the government prove us wrong.

Colin Copus is emeritus professor De Montfort University (visiting professor at Ghent University), and Steve Leach is emeritus professor  at De Montfort University