On 16 July the government decided Lancashire’s 15 councils will be abolished and replaced by four new unitary authorities from 1 April 2028. Padiham & Burnley West lands in the new East Lancashire, the largest of the four, merging Blackburn with Darwen, Hyndburn, Rossendale, Pendle and Burnley.
Announcements tell you the map. They don’t tell you what the new councils actually inherit. So I built a model that does, with every figure traceable to a published source, and the whole dataset downloadable.
Explore the interactive model →
What it shows
East Lancashire is the biggest and the poorest. 498,255 residents, the closest of the four to the government’s 500,000 guideline, which all four miss. Its employment rate (44.6%) is the lowest of any new unitary and its social-care demand the highest. On a needs-weighted split of county spending rather than a population split, East Lancashire’s share would be roughly £41m a year higher, a number that should be central to how the new council is funded.
The balance sheets are wildly unequal. Blackpool brings £607m of debt against £35m of reserves into the smallest unitary. Ribble Valley, Fylde, Wyre and South Ribble arrive debt-free. The county’s own £345m of reserves and £953m of borrowing have no agreed split, the same issue that took Northamptonshire’s councils four years of dispute to settle.
142 contracts worth £1bn outlive the councils that signed them. From a £204m public-health nursing contract running to 2032 down through energy, waste and staffing frameworks, the new councils start inside a decade of their predecessors’ procurement decisions.
A Band D household’s council bill differs by up to £205 between neighbours being merged. Harmonising council tax across each new unitary creates winners and losers in every one, quantified per council on the page.
The pension fund is the good news. All 15 councils sit in one £12bn fund that is 134% funded, and precedent from Cumbria and Northamptonshire says it won’t be split. Its next valuation lands on 31 March 2028, the day before vesting.
The £28m-to-£585m question
The six councils who proposed the four-unitary map claim £81.9m a year in savings by 2032/33. The six completed English reorganisations since 2019 tell a more mixed story: Buckinghamshire beat its business case fourfold; Somerset declared a financial emergency eight months after vesting; Cumbria’s savings were swallowed by the cost of splitting the county.
Modelled against that record, the same decision nets Lancashire anywhere from +£585m to just +£28m over a decade, with payback ranging from 2030/31 to 2036/37. A twenty-fold spread, decided not by the map, but by execution: harmonise pay before vesting day, as North Yorkshire did, or let it drift, as Somerset has; manage the county split better than Cumbria and Northamptonshire managed theirs.
Every assumption, every source and every confidence rating is published as open data at /data/lgr-model.json. If you think a number is wrong, you can check it, that’s the point.