Bigger Isn't Better

What English Councils Can Learn From Queensland's Amalgamation Scars

In 2008 I was getting calls from a number of Queensland councils to help them navigate the council amalgamation process. I remember sitting down with the mayor, councillors and executive teams of three councils that were amalgamating into one council. There was a lot of fear around the room. There was anger at the state government and uncertainty on how it would actually turn out.

At the recent LGA conference in the UK, one of the breakout sessions was on devolution. Devolution is essentially England’s attempt at amalgamating councils. But devolution has two distinct meanings. One is genuinely new power moving down to mayors and strategic authorities, often with real money attached. The other is something else entirely: councils being merged into bigger ones, whether they asked for it or not.

That second piece – local government reorganisation – is where I want to focus. Because England isn't the first place to try it, and one area that did, offers a warning worth reading before the ink dries on any more transition plans.

What's actually happening

Under the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026, two-tier council areas across England are being pushed toward unification. Instead of a county council and several district councils sharing responsibility for one area, that area gets a single, larger council doing everything. It's being run alongside the mayoral devolution agenda but it's a separate mechanism, and it's worth keeping the two apart in your own thinking. One is about giving local leaders more say. The other is about redrawing the map.

The case for it sounds reasonable on paper: less duplication, lower overheads, simpler lines of accountability, structures that don't work against the new mayoral authorities sitting above them. During debate on the bill, some in Parliament pushed back hard, calling the pace “rushed, top-down and imposed” and warning that consolidation was being treated as a precondition for devolution rather than something communities had actually asked for.

I've heard that exact language before. Just not in Westminster.

Queensland Australia already ran this experiment

In 2007, under the Beattie government, Queensland decided its 156 councils needed to become 72. The reasoning was familiar: financially weak councils, fragmented services, an assumption that scale would fix both. The Local Government (Reform Implementation) Act 2007 passed in August that year, and by March 2008 the old councils were gone and the new ones were standing.

It was not a quiet transition. Regional communities in particular felt like decisions about their identity had been made somewhere else and handed down. The backlash was loud enough that four areas – Noosa, Livingstone, Mareeba and Douglas – eventually won the right to de-amalgamate after 2013 referendums, and had to pay their own way back to independence once they got there.

Here's something to consider for anyone currently being told bigger will be better: Studies into the merged councils found a higher proportion showing diseconomies of scale after amalgamation, not fewer. Brisbane City Council, Australia's largest local government area by population, underperformed compared to unmerged councils on several financial measures in the years that followed. The efficiency case that justified the whole programme wasn't just unproven going in. It didn't hold up once someone actually measured it.

None of that means reorganisation is automatically a mistake. It means the promise of efficiency was asserted with more confidence than the evidence has ever supported, in Queensland and in most places that have tried it since.

What UK councils can take from that

A few things travel well across the distance between Brisbane and Birmingham.

The financial case is usually oversold at the start. Treat efficiency projections as a hypothesis to test, not a guarantee to bank on.

Transition costs are real and they land early. Queensland councils paid to merge, and the ones that later de-amalgamated paid again to unmerge. Budget for the disruption honestly rather than assuming savings will show up fast enough to cover it.

Identity is not a soft issue. It's the issue. The councils that fought hardest to de-amalgamate weren't chasing better balance sheets. They were fighting to get their name and their voice back. Communities remember who decided this for them long after they've forgotten the org chart.

Five things council leadership can do to actually thrive in this transition

1.     Name the identity question early and honestly, instead of treating it as a communications problem to manage after the fact. Councils that get ahead of “what happens to us” earn more trust than those that wait to be asked.

2.     Push for transparent, published performance baselines before and after the merger. Don't let “this will be more efficient” go unmeasured. Queensland's evidence only surfaced years later, once councils had already lived through the disruption.

3.     Build a transition budget that accounts for costs before savings arrive. Set aside contingency rather than betting the whole plan on efficiencies arriving on schedule

4.     Start building relationships with neighbouring authorities now, ahead of any formal requirement to collaborate. The Act leans on strategic authorities working together anyway – councils that build those relationships early will be in a stronger position once new boundaries are drawn.

5.     Lead the people through it, not just the paperwork. Staff, councillors and residents are all navigating the same uncertainty at once. How leadership shows up during a forced transition shapes trust in the new authority for years, long after the new letterhead has been printed.

Reorganisation is being imposed. What happens inside it isn't. Queensland's experience isn't a reason to panic, it's a head start – a chance to walk in with eyes open instead of finding out the hard way what a lot of Australian councils already know.

Peace, Steve

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Steve Huff is an author, keynote speaker and leadership consultant who has worked with local government leaders around the world. He will be available for keynotes and consulting across the UK, Ireland and Canada from March 2027. His book, Life is Chaos and All is Well, is available at winningchaos.com.

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The Real Agenda – Leading in Local Government. This is Edition 1 of a fortnightly series covering leadership, change and the real challenges facing local government leaders across Australia, the UK, Ireland and Canada. The next edition publishes in a fortnight. Follow Steve Huff on LinkedIn to receive each edition, or visit winningchaos.com.