The Welsh local government reorganisation of 1974 created eight county councils and 37 district councils, ending county boroughs, which were unitary authorities. The reason? We needed larger authorities and uniformity, and many of the urban district councils and rural district councils were too small. Then, in 1992, 22 principal councils were formed, and it's these unitary authorities that have governed Wales since 1996.

Both the Williams commission established by Carwyn Jones, and subsequent proposals put forward by Leighton Andrews as public services Minister, have recommended reducing the number of Welsh local authorities further still. Local government mergers are again being considered, and there's a political consensus that we need larger authorities, although calling a reconstituted Dyfed a local council does—at least to me—seem a little strange. Perhaps it's based upon the great success of Hywel Dda as a health board. This is built upon the belief that larger councils perform better and are more efficient. Well, England and Scotland have several unitary authorities larger than Cardiff, but Scotland has five smaller than Merthyr—Inverclyde, Clackmannanshire, Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland—and England has one, Rutland.

If larger authorities were more efficient and effective, two things would happen: council tax would be lower and performance would be better. The larger authorities and Powys, for which merging has not been deemed necessary, should charge the lowest amounts. I'm always amazed by why Powys is treated differently to anywhere else in Wales, but—. Whilst the two smallest authorities have the highest council tax, medium-sized authorities appear to perform better than either large or small authorities when it comes to the cost of council tax to residents.

Does council performance show that the larger authorities by population perform better? According to the Western Mail, 

'the quality of services delivered by local authorities in Wales is not determined by the size of the council'.

The Western Mail figures are based on 28 indicators across a range of local government areas, including education, social care, housing, environment and transport, planning and regulatory services, leisure, culture and corporate health, with four points on offer for councils that performed in the top quartile of each indicator, and one point for those at the bottom. From this data, it is not possible to conclude that larger councils and Powys perform better, because medium-sized authorities take three of the top four places. 

In Scotland, the variation in council tax is much less than in Wales, but the lowest council tax is in the Western Islands and Shetland, two of the smallest authorities, and the largest council tax is in Glasgow, which is the largest.

Over the last 25 years, there have been service reorganisations that have created larger organisations throughout the whole of the Welsh Government-controlled public sector—health being a classic example. There is generally a political consensus at the National Assembly that these larger organisations are better than small ones and mergers are generally a good thing.

Mergers are expensive, not just with redundancy costs and the cost of rebadging the organisation, ICT—and, for those people who have been following it, after the creation of Natural Resources Wales, the number of times they came back to ask for more money to borrow in order to meet their ICT problems was continual. And it's inevitable; ICT is the bit that hangs over any reorganisation of any organisation. Yes.