Costing Local Government Reform

First paragraph: Recent government proposals to reform local government into single-tier systems throughout the United Kingdom have assumed that unitary authorities will lead to greater efficiency. However, existing evidence on whether the introduction of unitary authorities will reduce costs for a given level of services often contradicts this. This paper identifies a number of the problems of prior costing of local government reform and analyses a recent report for the Scottish Office estimating the costs and savings of moving to single-tier authorities