Submitted by Bill Fernie
30th September 2026
Scotland is considering one of the biggest changes to local government for a generation. The Scottish Government has proposed replacing the existing 32 councils with between six and ten regional authorities, alongside somewhere between 120 and 160 community authorities.
The idea is to combine stronger regional decision-making with much more local decision-making in communities. The Government argues that some councils are too small to operate strategically while others are too large to remain genuinely local.
But there is another question which perhaps deserves more attention.
Does Scotland really need to reorganise the whole country at once?
The Fraser of Allander Institute has already warned that the scale of the proposed changes should not be underestimated. Reorganisation would involve much more than drawing new boundaries on a map. Staff, buildings, assets, debts, contracts, budgets, information systems and statutory responsibilities would all have to be transferred or reorganised. There would also be major questions about accountability and which services should sit at which level.
That is where an interesting lesson can be drawn from the computerisation of the Inland Revenue, now HM Revenue & Customs.
I saw that process during my time as an Inland Revenue tax inspector. Rather than attempting to transform the entire organisation overnight, computerisation was introduced progressively. One area would move onto the new system, giving staff time to learn how it worked and giving the organisation an opportunity to identify problems and correct them.
Training was an important part of the process. So was discovering what did not work as expected.
The whole process took around two years to complete across the UK, but by moving progressively rather than attempting one enormous overnight transformation, the organisation had the opportunity to learn as it went along. The result was widely regarded within the organisation as a successful major change programme.
There is an obvious difference between computerising a tax administration system and reorganising local government. Local government is vastly more complicated. It involves schools, social care, roads, housing, planning, waste collection, economic development and many other services which affect people's daily lives.
But the underlying lesson may still be relevant.
When a change is this complicated, why not learn from the first implementation before committing the whole country to the same model?
The Scottish Government is not starting entirely from scratch. Its own recent work has already recognised that different parts of Scotland may require different approaches. Work is taking place on alternative local governance arrangements in places including Argyll and Bute, the Western Isles and Orkney, with the Government saying that lessons from this work can help inform arrangements elsewhere.
That creates the possibility of something more cautious than a nationwide big-bang reorganisation.
One or two areas could be used to test the proposed regional and community structure in practice. They could be deliberately different. An urban area would reveal different problems from a rural area, while an island authority would raise yet another set of questions.
A rural area would be particularly important because Scotland's geography makes the idea of a single ideal size for local government difficult to establish.
A large population concentrated in a relatively small geographical area is one thing. A region covering thousands of square miles, with small towns and scattered communities separated by long distances, is another.
For somewhere such as Caithness and Sutherland, the practical questions would include how roads and transport are managed, how social care is delivered over large distances, how housing and economic development are planned, and how communities far from the main regional centre maintain a meaningful voice.
These are not simply arguments for or against reorganisation. They are questions about whether the proposed structure actually works on the ground.
The Fraser of Allander Institute has made a similar point from a different perspective. It argues that different services operate across different geographical areas. The scale which makes sense for transport or economic development may not necessarily be the scale which works for education or social care. It also warns that the Government should establish what new authorities are actually supposed to do, how they will be funded and how they will be held accountable before settling the final structure.
That seems particularly important.
A pilot should not simply be used to demonstrate that a predetermined structure can be introduced. It should be allowed to discover problems and change the model.
That means measuring the cost of transition as well as the promised savings. It means looking at staffing, IT systems, contracts, buildings, debt and assets. It means asking whether services actually improve. And it means finding out whether people feel that decisions have become more local and accountable, rather than simply being transferred from one large organisation to another.
There is also a historical lesson here.
Scotland has reorganised local government before. In 1975 the country moved to a system of large regional councils alongside district councils. In 1996 that system was replaced by the 32 unitary authorities which exist today.
So Scotland knows that changing the map of local government is relatively easy compared with making the new system work effectively.
The Government's present proposal is potentially a major opportunity to rethink how decisions are made and how much power should sit locally. But the process may be just as important as the final structure.
There is nothing inherently timid about introducing reform gradually. In some circumstances, it can be the more ambitious approach because it allows mistakes to be identified before they are multiplied across the entire country.
The Government could establish the broad principles nationally, but allow the first areas to implement them progressively, publish what worked and what did not, and then modify the model before extending it elsewhere.
That would turn the reorganisation into a learning process rather than simply a boundary-changing exercise.
The question for Scotland is therefore not simply whether 32 councils should become six, eight or ten regions.
It is whether we are sufficiently confident about the new system to introduce it everywhere at once.
Sometimes the best way to test a major new system is not to switch everyone over on the same day.
It is to let one part of the country go first, learn from the experience, fix the problems – and then move on.