On 6 July 2026 the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government published a short piece of guidance for councils that are about to be abolished. It runs to a few hundred words and it says one thing plainly.
Forthcoming local government reorganisation is not a reason to delay plan-making.— MHCLG · Ground Level, 6 July 2026
That instruction lands on a lot of councils. Local government reorganisation in England is the largest restructuring since the 1990s and covers roughly 41% of the population. It is not a tidying of boundaries. Whole tiers are going: all 15 councils in Lancashire, all 15 at district and county level in Essex, every district and borough in Staffordshire along with the county council and Stoke-on-Trent City Council, the six borough, district and county councils in Warwickshire. Most of the new unitary authorities take over on 1 April 2028.
A local plan takes years. So a district told to carry on making one, in the knowledge that it will not survive to see it through, has to decide what carrying on actually means.
Two of them have decided, and they have decided opposite things.
What the MHCLG guidance on plan-making and reorganisation says.
Read the guidance again and the second sentence matters as much as the first. Councils "must start" their plan by the timings set out in regulations, and the requirement applies even where adoption cannot happen before the new unitary exists. Councils that took Local Plan Implementation Funding are held to the milestone dates they committed to.
Then, further down, the department concedes something.
It is still developing the transitional regulations. It has not yet resolved "how an emerging plan can be progressed by a new unitary authority post unitarisation". The timetable for the first plan covering a whole new unitary area will be communicated separately, once the arrangements are settled.
The instruction is clear and the machinery to carry it out has not been built. Councils are being told to keep going under rules that do not yet exist.— The Editor · Ground Level, August 2026
Councils are being asked to make decisions now that only those unwritten rules can make safe. In the meantime they are offered the ability to work jointly with the neighbours they will eventually be merged with, which is a sensible suggestion and not an answer to the question.
That is the gap in which the two decisions below were made.
How Cotswold District Council is carrying on regardless.
Cotswold District Council put its new Local Plan to Full Council on 12 August 2026 and it was approved for publication. The formal consultation, the last one before the plan goes to a government inspector, runs from 24 August to 5 October 2026. The plan and every response go to the Secretary of State in December 2026. An inspector examines it during 2027. The council expects to adopt it around March 2028.
On 16 July 2026 the Secretary of State confirmed that Gloucestershire will be served by a single unitary council. It vests on 1 April 2028. Elections to the shadow authority that will run the transition are on 6 May 2027.
Set those two timetables beside each other and the gap is about three weeks.
The plan itself is substantial. It plans for 18,911 homes against a local housing need of 1,054 a year, which is a requirement of 17,918 over the 17 year period and 5.5% more than the minimum. Ten strategic sites carry 11,302 of those homes. Affordable housing is set at 40%. The evidence base runs to more than 40 studies, three of them commissioned within four months of publication: an Infrastructure Delivery Plan by Prior and Partners in July 2026, a housing delivery study by Iceni in the same month, and a viability assessment by Quintic in May.
None of that is the work of a council that has given up. It is the opposite. It is a council doing exactly what the guidance told it to do, thoroughly, at real expense, in its final 20 months.
Why the plan starts below a five year housing land supply.
The most striking thing in the Cotswold evidence base is not hidden. It is in a table.
The council's Housing Land Supply and Stepped Requirement Topic Paper models the supply of deliverable housing land across the whole plan period. At 1 April 2028, the date the plan is intended to be adopted, it projects 4.7 years. National policy requires five. Paragraph 9.11 says so directly: the five year supply "cannot currently be demonstrated at 1 April 2028". The trajectory then recovers, reaching 5.2 years by 2029/30 and holding around five until it slips to 4.8 in the last year it can be measured.
Two further details in the same document are worth more than the headline.
The first is the buffer. When a council fails the Housing Delivery Test it has to add a buffer to the supply it must demonstrate. Below 85% delivery the buffer is 20%. Cotswold's current measured position is 95%, which requires a buffer of only 5%. The council has applied 20% anyway, for the first three years, on the basis that it expects to fall below the 75% threshold given how far delivery has fallen short over the past two monitoring years. A council volunteering a harsher test than the one it is subject to is an unusual thing to read in a council's own evidence.
The second is the shape of the requirement. The plan does not ask for 1,054 homes a year evenly. It steps: 420 a year, then 1,030, then 1,525. Nearly 60% of the total falls after 2036. The heaviest years belong entirely to an authority that has not been elected yet, on a trajectory set by an authority that will not exist to be held to it.
Two settlements illustrate what the plan does at ground level. Kemble, a village of 388 dwellings with a neighbourhood plan approved at referendum, takes a strategic extension of 1,020 homes. At the previous consultation the figure was 587. Ampney Crucis carried 660 homes at that consultation and Broadwell carried 17. Neither village is named anywhere in the published plan.
Why East Hampshire District Council stopped its local plan.
In May 2026, East Hampshire District Council decided it would not submit a local plan by the government's deadline of 31 December 2026. It is refocusing its planning work on the area that will become the Mid-Hampshire unitary authority. Winchester City Council is taking a related route, working with its future neighbours on a plan for the new authority rather than finishing one for the old one.
The leader of East Hampshire, Councillor Richard Millard, said that continuing with a local plan would be "pointless and unjustifiable". The reasons given were the new planning rules, the reorganisation decision, and the absence of government clarity on how to prepare a plan for boundaries that will cease to exist.
East Hampshire is not a soft comparison. It is constrained in the same way Cotswold is: 57% of the district sits inside the South Downs National Park, where national policy limits what can be built, and the National Park Authority is not expected to meet its own housing need. Its standard method figure went from 575 homes a year to 1,142 at the December 2024 change, then to 1,124 when the affordability ratios were updated in March 2025. The council has obtained legal advice suggesting it can depart from the standard method altogether, which would take the figure to 828. That is a separate argument and a significant one, but it is not the reason it stopped. The council cites reorganisation.
What pausing a local plan costs, and the tilted balance.
Here is the part a reader will already be thinking, and it deserves to be put plainly rather than left implied.
If a plan is going to be adopted three weeks before the council adopting it disappears, and if the years it really bites fall to a body nobody has voted for, why not just stop? East Hampshire's position looks like the honest one.
The answer is in what happens to a district with no up-to-date plan.
Where a council cannot demonstrate five years of deliverable housing land, paragraph 11(d) of the National Planning Policy Framework engages. Planners call it the tilted balance. Permission for housing must be granted unless the harm significantly and demonstrably outweighs the benefits, and the policies that would ordinarily protect a site carry reduced weight. It is not a technicality. In June 2026 an inspector allowed an appeal for up to 54 homes on a field at Lechlade after accepting that the scheme would harm the rural character of the site and the setting of a listed farmhouse, and that it conflicted with both the local plan and the neighbourhood plan. She granted it anyway, because the council could demonstrate only 1.8 years of supply.
A district that pauses its plan does not pause that. It extends it. Every year without an adopted plan is another year in which the arguments a council can make against speculative development are worth less than the arithmetic against it. Cotswold's own committee papers have warned that reorganisation could force a plan restart and leave the district without an up to date plan for five to seven years.
So the choice is not between doing the work and not doing it. It is between finishing a plan that will be inherited by strangers and handing those strangers a district where every field is arguable.
Neither council is being unreasonable. Cotswold is buying its residents an adopted plan at the cost of committing an unelected successor to a housing trajectory it had no part in setting. East Hampshire is refusing to commit that successor, at the cost of leaving its residents under the tilted balance for as long as it takes the new authority to produce something. Those are real costs on both sides, and a department that has not written the transitional regulations is in a weak position to say which council chose correctly.
What to watch as the transitional regulations arrive.
Three things will tell you how this resolves, and none of them requires waiting for a press release.
The first is whether the transitional regulations appear before December 2026. That is when the first wave of plans, Cotswold's among them, goes to the Secretary of State. If the rules for carrying an emerging plan across reorganisation are still being drafted when plans start arriving, the problem stops being theoretical.
The second is how many councils have quietly taken East Hampshire's route. There is no published tally of which authorities facing abolition are still mid-plan and which have paused, which is itself worth noticing. The government has issued an instruction and does not appear to be publishing the compliance rate.
The third is what happens at examination. An inspector testing the Cotswold plan in 2027 will be asked whether a housing trajectory that starts below five years and loads 60% of its delivery into the back half is effective and deliverable, in the ordinary way. What is not ordinary is that the body giving those assurances will be dissolved before most of them fall due. There is no established way to test a promise made by an authority that will not be there to keep it.
If you live in a district that is being abolished, the consultation now open on your local plan is the last one that council will run. What it settles will be inherited.