The situation
Surrey vests in April 2027. The rest follow in 2028. On that date the council that signed your contracts ceases to exist. Every agreement has to be novated, terminated or re-let before that date, and the decision sits with chief executives, section 151 officers and monitoring officers who are building a new organisation at the same time. Most authorities are doing this for the first and only time.
Underneath the mechanics sits a harder problem. Several sovereign authorities, each with its own leadership, political control and priorities, have to agree what the new organisation is for before anyone can sequence the work that builds it. Where that agreement is assumed rather than reached, it comes back later as reopened decisions, a structure nobody owns, and a plan that keeps changing shape.
The work is not hard because any single decision is hard. It is hard because there are hundreds of them, they interlock, and the date behind them cannot be renegotiated.
What we have done that is closest to this
We have not run a council merger. Several firms have, and they will tell you so.
What we have run is the problem underneath it. Nine sovereign government organisations brought to one target operating model, one governance regime and one approved business case: nine sets of baseline data, nine finance functions using different definitions of the same cost, and nine executive teams whose interests did not automatically align. A probation service restructured around nineteen thousand operational staff, with the change governance to hold it. Two London boroughs consolidated into shared services, with the operating model redesigned where the savings actually sat.
Vesting day is those three problems arriving at once, against a date. That is what we would bring to it.
What we deliver
| Deliverable | What it answers |
|---|---|
| Leadership alignment and objectives | What the new authority is for, what it will prioritise first, and where its leaders do not yet agree |
| Corporate strategy and priorities | What the new council will do in its first term, and what it will stop doing |
| Medium-term financial plan | One plan across the predecessor budgets, rebuilt on the new priorities and carrying the savings the merger is expected to deliver |
| Establishment structure | The post-by-post structure of the new organisation, what it costs, and the sequence for getting there from the predecessor structures |
| Contract disaggregation and novation plan | Which contracts transfer, which terminate, which must be re-let, and who owns each decision |
| Day-one readiness assessment | What must work on vesting day, what can follow, and what is currently unowned |
| Transition plan and risk register | A single sequenced plan across workstreams, with the decisions that gate each one |
| Options appraisal and business case | Green Book compliant, and defensible at scrutiny and to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government |
| Critical friend or independent assurance | A second opinion on a plan you have already written |
Every reorganisation produces a statement of what the new council will be. Officers write it, leaders agree it in principle, and it is rarely tested against the decisions it exists to govern.
The test is whether leaders, asked separately, give the same answer to a question like which predecessor service model the new authority adopts, or which first-year savings are load-bearing. Where the answers differ, restating the statement will not close the gap. It closes in a room, before the structure and the budget are built on top of it.
Tell us what’s on your desk.
If we are the right two people for it, we will say so. If we are not, we will say who is.
hello@votragroup.co.uk