LGR: while everyone’s watching the map…

Local government reorganisation (LGR) is the biggest shake up to local government in fifty years, and most of the conversation about it within local authorities is rightly looking a long way ahead, towards what the new authorities will look like and how services will be structured. L&D and organisational development will have their work cut out once the new organisations actually exist and councils will need proper support to get that right, and there'll be plenty to say about it nearer the time.

But it's mostly a conversation for 2027 and 2028. There's another conversation that matters just as much, and it's happening right now, while the white paper is still being worked through and nobody yet knows what the final map looks like.

It comes down to an old problem in public sector change that rarely resolves cleanly: how do you invest in people development at a time when some of those people are going to lose their jobs? For some people it feels almost unethical, spending time and money on development while colleagues are potentially heading for redundancy in the same breath. Does it even make sense to commit to this before you know who stays and who goes? And what do you actually say to staff when you, the employer, leader or line manager, don't have the full picture yourself, when the dust hasn't settled on what the new structure will look like, who reports to whom, or which roles survive at all?

It's a fair question. Nobody wants to run sessions that feel hollow, or that feel tone deaf next to the fact that people's jobs are on the line.

But here's the other side of it. If the change is going to work, if you want to end up with the simpler, less duplicated, less wasteful structure that LGR is meant to deliver, you can't get there by leaving people to sit in uncertainty for two to four years and hoping they hold on. Good people don't wait around indefinitely - the staff with the most options, the ones any merged authority will most want to keep, are also the ones who can leave fastest if the wait drags on with nothing said. When that happens, organisations end up losing exactly the people they wanted to keep, or losing more people than they ever planned to, and then having to rehire to fill the gaps. That's expensive, and it costs a lot more than supporting people properly would have in the first place. We're seeing it right now in central government, where a fair few departments have recently come through their own restructures and are busy advertising for roles they only just let go of. Support through this isn't a nice extra bolted on to the reorganisation, it should be an integral part of the reorganisation itself.

So what does that support look like in the next twelve to eighteen months, well before anyone knows the final shape of things? There are five areas worth focusing on, based on what we're seeing right now.

1. Managing through uncertainty

From the December 2024 white paper to a reorganised structure in place by 2028, that's close to four years of people being expected to do their jobs well without knowing what their job will look like, or whether it will exist. That's a long stretch to ask anyone to operate in limbo. Teams and individuals need practical ways of working without certainty: how to keep delivering when priorities shift under them, how to make sound decisions when the ground keeps moving, and how leaders talk to their teams honestly without promising things they can't deliver. It's exactly what our Leading Through Uncertainty capability masterclass is built around.

2. Team and individual resilience through change

It’s challenging to manage the pressure of working through a merger while colleagues might end up competing for the same future roles, while workload doesn't drop just because everything else is in flux, and while morale has to be held together without pretending the situation is simpler than it is. Teams that come through this well usually have leaders who've been given the tools to hold that tension, not just told to "stay positive". Our Resilient Teams Through Change programme works with whole teams on exactly that.

3. Upskilling for success

Reinterviewing for your own role, applying for a different one, or simply ending up in a merged organisation with a different culture and different ways of working, all ask more of people than carrying on in a familiar job ever did. Giving people the chance to build genuine leadership and management skills now gives them a real advantage, not just in getting through the process, but in actually thriving once they're on the other side of it, whoever they end up working for. It's part of what our Lead module covers.

4. Confidence and how you come across

Reinterviewing, meeting a new manager for the first time, or walking into a team with an unfamiliar culture can knock people's confidence even when nothing about their actual ability has changed. How someone comes across in those moments, in an interview, in a first conversation with a new boss, in the early weeks of finding their feet somewhere unfamiliar, makes a real difference to how quickly things click into place. Helping people sharpen how they communicate and present themselves helps them show up as the capable person they already are, and it’s what our Personal Impact masterclass is built around.

5. Having good career conversations

Managers are being asked to have conversations they've often never been trained to have. What do you say to someone who asks "will I still have a job" when you genuinely don't know yet. How do you have an honest one-to-one about an uncertain future without sounding evasive, or without overpromising just to make the conversation easier. Getting this right is a key part of any prolonged restructuring process, because it's where staff actually experience whether their organisation is being straight with them or not.

None of this is a 2028 problem - these things are relevant right now, while people are still living with the uncertainty, not once it's already resolved.

The equation is as follows: equip your leaders to handle uncertainty, help your teams build real resilience, and make sure people feel invested in and properly equipped for whatever comes next, and you'll keep hold of more of the right people, spend less having to rehire and retrain further down the line, and have considerably less to untangle once the dust settles. That gives you a far better shot at actually achieving the simpler, less duplicated, less wasteful structure LGR set out to deliver in the first place, and for that reason it’s good value for money to treat such professional development work as an integral part of the people costs of the reorganisation itself.