Allies of Local Government Secretary Steve Reed – who is ultimately responsible for this reversal – argue that their approach shifted because the legal advice changed. But they won’t explain how.<\/p>\n
“We’re trying to make policy while live legal advice is fed in,” says one official. “It’s never going to be perfect.”<\/p>\n
It seems highly likely that ministers were warned that they might lose Reform’s court challenge.<\/p>\n
Even though the case is now not going ahead, the government still faces a significant lawyers’ bill, as well as having to pick up Reform’s legal costs which are reported to be more than \u00a3100,000.<\/p>\n
Ministers have also committed to helping those councils that will now need to run complex multi-ward elections with just two and half months’ notice.<\/p>\n
The District Councils Network, which represents many of the smaller councils affected, says voters will be “bewildered”.<\/p>\n
The fallout from this embarrassment is far from over. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are calling for the government’s legal advice to be published – something that is likely to be fiercely resisted in Whitehall.<\/p>\n
The Lib Dems are also considering using their upcoming ‘opposition day’ in Parliament next week to try and force the government to reveal what happened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Allies of Local Government Secretary Steve Reed – who is ultimately responsible for this reversal – argue that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":430961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-430960","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-kingdom","8":"tag-gb","9":"tag-great-britain","10":"tag-greatbritain","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=430960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/430960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=430960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=430960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=430960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}