I’m not sorry at all to see Keir Starmer leave office this week, but I don’t have great expectations that his replacement will be much better.  I do think Andy Burnham will have a very different style which may be novel at first, but once the novelty wears off and people start to notice the actual substance, I fear that substance will be depressingly familiar to what we’ve seen over the last two years.

There is no getting away from the fact that it’s Labour MPs who won’t support making the difficult choices to get our country back on track.  Andy Burnham knows this and I suspect he could seek to distract the public with some eye-catching policies, looking to gain short-term popularity, but the same fundamentals and difficult challenges will still exist.

All eyes will be on who his senior cabinet appointments will be, but as a councillor, my interest will particularly be on who his minister for local government will be.  I very much hope that the incumbent, Steve Read MP, is removed from his post.  He deserves to be removed entirely from the government as the way he has handled local government reorganisation has been a disaster for local government, especially here in West Sussex.

In December 2024 the government announced all areas like ours with two-tier local government, had to merge into unitary authorities, as well as having directly elected regional mayors.  Ever since then, the government’s handling of this has been shambolic.  Goalposts kept moving, their own criteria for proposals kept changing, elections were off and then on at the last minute, and now two separate delays to get a decision as to what our new unitary authority will be.  In March the government announced a delay until July, and then last week, a further delay until October was announced.

Elections to our yet unknown new unitary authority covering Crawley are due next May.  The ever-shortening timetable remaining to merge councils and to break up West Sussex County Council, is risking huge disruption to services and ever more costs to local taxpayers.  It’s a shambles.

Councillor Duncan Crow, Leader of Crawley Borough Council Conservative Group

23nd July 2026