Shock reverberated through England’s councils last week. “Beggars belief!” “Shambolic!” council leaders protested to the Local Government Information Unit (LGIU), which says: “We’ve never before heard such expletives. They’re apoplectic, incandescent.” And they have every right to be.

The government has slammed the brakes on its unexpected reorganisation of local councils. This almost certainly ends the one-size-fits-all, politically damaging remapping of England’s councils, which was never forewarned in Labour’s manifesto.

Councils hired extra staff to manage gigantic mergers and changes on the running of social care, waste collection, libraries, special educational needs, children in care, roads and parks – absolutely everything sliced and diced, with hundreds of thousands moving jobs under new brass plates.

Take Worcestershire county council. It just hired a local government reorganisation director on about £120,000 a year who started in August to abolish six district councils, dividing the county into two new unitary authorities. But like everywhere else that’s paused, subject to “rapid review”, much of it is dead in the water.

Why this emergency stop? Facing legal challenges from objectors over proposals to reorganise councils in Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, the local government secretary, Angela Rayner, received new legal advice that the reorganisation may not comply with law. From the start, I could see no political purpose in her launching this fiendishly complicated restructuring that has now crashed. On the contrary, it would have done Labour and the Liberal Democrats........

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