So Harborough District Council is to disappear, subsumed into a single authority for the whole of the county outside the city of Leicestershire. And Leicester is to be expanded to make the hole in the doughnut bigger.
City boundaries have to be expanded from time to time, but I'm not sure the areas Leicester is taking will be delighted. For some years there has been criticism that its elected mayor Peter Soulsby, now in his fourth term, is keen on prestige projects in the city centre, but less interested in bread-and-butter issues like litter and the state of the pavements out in the suburbs.
Meanwhile, the abolition of all the district and borough councils in the county can only make government feel more distant, and this at a time when our democracy is being challenged from within and without.
I was in Loughborough today. It's a large town with a university, but it will soon lose Charnwood Borough, the council that looks after it and its hinterland. And Leicestershire, of course, is not the only county seeing huge changes.
This revolution in local government was not mentioned in Labour's last manifesto and there has been little debate about it since the election. It does appear to have been set in place because Labour has a vision for revitalising local democracy, but simply because someone has told ministers that there is an ideal size for a council and many are smaller than this.
I am reminded of a comment by Lord Bonkers:
I’m told that when a Labour junior minister discovered that councils are not All The Same Size, he started screaming and had to be sent home in a taxi.
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