Councils are experiencing “whiplash” and face an “unnecessary race against time” to organise ballots after the government abandoned plans to delay 30 council elections in England, local authority leaders have said.
Ministers had wanted to delay elections at councils undergoing major reorganisation, with many set to be merged or subsumed into others, but faced a legal challenge from Reform UK, which argued the delay was undemocratic.
The government confirmed on Monday that it was dropping its delay plan, giving councils and local parties just over 11 weeks to organise elections before polling day on 7 May.
Matthew Hicks, the Conservative leader of Suffolk county council, said ministers had “consistently expressed confidence” in their decision to postpone, so the announcement had come as a surprise.
“Local councils across the country are experiencing whiplash as major government decisions shift repeatedly and without warning,” he said.
“This uncertainty makes it almost impossible to plan effectively, deliver stability for residents or provide clarity for our staff and partners.”
He said the move left a “significant question mark” over the wider plans for local government reorganisation. There is continuing debate in the area over whether Suffolk should be governed by one unitary authority, or three, after the shake-up.
Florence Eshalomi, the Labour MP for Vauxhall and Camberwell Green and chair of the housing, communities and local government committee, said “councils should not have been put in the position of choosing between frontline services or elections”.
“Democracy is not an inefficiency that should be cut out during a local government reorganisation process,” she said, adding that she wanted to see councils given additional resources in order to put elections on at short notice.
The heads of major local government organisations also voiced anger at the move, saying it undermined faith in local democracy.
Jonathan Carr-West, the chief executive of the Local Government Information Unit, said the government had “lost a fight it should never have picked” and it was “playing fast and loose with the foundations of democracy”.
“There was no good reason to postpone these elections,” he said. “Having attempted to pass the political risk of postponing elections on to councils by insisting that it should be a local choice, and now backing down under the threat of legal actions, the government has shown a capricious disregard for local democracy.”
He also raised concern about the constrained timetable for mounting the elections, saying it will “needlessly” add strain to staff workloads, and said “many parties will now be scrabbling around to find candidates they didn’t think they needed”.
Richard Wright, the chair of the District Councils’ Network, a cross-party group, said councils and voters were “bewildered by the unrelenting changes to the electoral timetable”.
“It’s the government, not councils that have acted in good faith, which should bear responsibility for this mess which impacts on people’s faith in our cherished local democracy,” he said.
“The councils affected face an unnecessary race against time to ensure elections proceed smoothly and fairly, with polling stations booked and electoral staff available.”
He added that with local authorities working on the “biggest shake-up of councils in 50 years”, the government has done “little to assure us that it has a strong grasp of the huge legal complexity involved”.
A number of council leaders said that, as the legal process over the planned delay was still active, they had continued to plan as if elections would take place anyway.
Kay Mason Billig, the Conservative leader of Norfolk county council, said the government had “wasted everyone’s time”.
“I note the government’s change of mind on yet another decision it couldn’t stick to,” she said. “We had already budgeted for and were planning for elections, so we can now proceed.”
Shabina Qayyum, the Labour leader of Peterborough city council, said: “We put forward our view at the request of the secretary of state, with the knowledge that their decision may not go ahead, and therefore preparations for the elections have continued.”
