The Financial Case for Local Government Reorganisation in Lancashire: A Transparent Component Model of Five Structural Proposals, with a Postscript on the 2026 Decisions

Working paper, data and code. Lancashire's fifteen councils submitted five competing proposals in November 2025 to replace the county's two-tier structure with two to five unitary authorities. The paper sets out a fully disclosed component model of the recurring structural effects of each configuration, built from the 2024-25 Revenue Outturn returns and published pay, payments, contracts, unit-cost and population data. In the central case the steady-state net annual position is £75.9M, £31.7M, −£2.6M and −£33.3M for two, three, four and five unitaries, and the ten-year value £491.6M, £135.4M, −£140.5M and −£389.1M; the results under the specifications not chosen are reported beside the central case (Tables 8a and 8d). The deposit contains the paper (Markdown), the February 2026 export and every derived input with the builder that wrote it, reproduce.py, which regenerates every table and prose figure under Python 3.12 with the standard library only, tools/check_paper.py, which checks the paper against that output, and the review records, including the rules for the later tests as they were committed before those tests were run. Run uv run python reproduce.py, then uv run python tools/check_paper.py. The README lists every file, its source and known errata. The author is an elected member of Lancashire County Council, the council that proposed two unitaries, and its Cabinet Member for Adult Social Care; see the paper's Declaration of Interests. The fact-check and the three reviews of this version were carried out by AI agents (Anthropic's Claude) working for the author; no human peer review has taken place.