The bleak truth is that, without an end to austerity, public services as we know them are under threat. This is understandably a difficult thing for a Labour Government that cares about these services to face up to, but pretending that changing the number of councils will avoid that difficult truth is sticking our heads in the sand.

So far, the debate seems not to have progressed beyond the superficial '22 is too many' gut reaction that the Welsh Government seems to struggle to get away from. That is clearly not a sufficient evidential basis for a very costly course of action. Surely, the burden of proof is on the Welsh Government to find out what the cost of reorganisation would be and what benefits would arise from it. I certainly think the financial benefits are in danger of being overstated. Whether you have eight, 10, 12 or 22 councils, they still have to educate the same number of children in the same number of schools, collect the same number of bins and care for the same number of vulnerable people. These are the key drivers of cost.

This is especially true as, since the last investigation into wholesale reorganisation, massive savings in administration costs have been made by Welsh councils. In Torfaen council last year alone, they saved £1 million from their administrative and business services review, and there have been countless other efforts to reduce central costs. I know that Torfaen will continue to pursue collaborations and different ways of working, but recent experience suggests that, increasingly, these have service, quality and resilience benefits rather than cash savings. The danger is that, without looking objectively and in great detail at the evidence, the cost of reorganisation is understated and the benefits overstated. So, Welsh Government would spend a lot of money—over £200 million—and save very little, whilst disrupting service delivery for several years.

And what evidence is there to show that bigger is better? While some of the smaller authorities have in the past faced challenges, it has been some of those small authorities that have shown some of the best performance or had some of the best inspection reports. In the latest performance bulletin from Data Cymru, Torfaen was the ninth-best performing authority and ninth-most improved. What the data shows is that size is no determinant of performance, with smaller authorities generally better performing. While capacity is critical, this suggests that factors such as leadership and culture are critical to success rather than scale.

Lastly, what consideration has been given by Welsh Government to the sort of organisations they would be creating? What are the faults of local government as currently constituted? And I'm not pretending there aren't any, but, crucially, how would reorganisation make them better? Contrasting the current situation with some imagined perfection is not a sensible starting point. The danger with large units would be that they would be distant from people, parochially divided, and would resist the collaboration and creative thinking that would still be needed however large they were. It is leadership and culture that drives improvement, not scale.

When I spoke on this issue in the debate on the Williams commission report back in 2014, I made clear my view that reorganisation is not a panacea. In the four years that have passed, we have gone from proposed reorganisation to more regional collaboration and now back to consulting on reorganisation again. Four years on, I am more convinced than ever that reorganising local government in a time of austerity and with Brexit on the horizon would be a disaster.