Principle 4 – Provides strong democratic accountability, representation and community empowerment

In the previous principle, we demonstrated how our proposal for three unitary authorities for Surrey is underpinned by Surrey’s local circumstance and mirrors the county’s three functional economic areas. By using these as the foundation for a local government structure that intended to last for the next fifty years, we can ensure local leaders are empowered to support economic growth, housing and infrastructure delivery. However, this cannot be achieved without empowering our communities.

We are ambitious that the new unitaries for Surrey are exemplars of systematically shifting institutional power out and drawing community power in. The footprint of the three new unitary councils will enable us to adopt, embed and accelerate new and innovative participative methods that will improve local decision making and community engagement at a neighbourhood level

At the core of local government is a deep commitment to community and people. Everything we do is designed to empower our residents and businesses, helping to cultivate an environment where they can thrive and prosper. The extensive range of services we offer ensures that we are deeply woven into the fabric of our communities. This unique position enables us to effectively shape and enhance the places we serve, fostering community empowerment and promoting economic growth.

But it’s not just about what we can do on our own. One of local government’s greatest powers is providing clear place leadership, convening local partners and stakeholders from across the system to ensure that collaborate to achieve the best outcomes for local people and empowering our communities to thrive. The multiple crises of the first half of this decade - the pandemic, cost of living crisis, and climate and ecological emergencies - have underscored the urgent need to work actively with our partners and residents to solve the complex problems faced by our communities, and the importance of fostering community networks that are resilient.

This conclusion is supported by the views of Surrey residents over 3,000 of whom, through our recent resident engagement exercise on local government reorganisation, told us their top priorities for local government are overwhelmingly local. Over 60% cited ‘Understanding of local issues’ and ‘Local decision-making’ as their two highest priorities.

Support for this can also be evidence by our stakeholder engagement survey, where organisations told us they saw reorganisation as a key opportunity to reinforce existing professional networks and foster new collaborations between councils, businesses, and other stakeholders.

This points towards an untapped potential in Surrey to fundamentally rethink how we in the public sector design services with and for local people and places. Local government reorganisation provides a once-in-a-generation opportunity to accelerate community empowerment and strengthen democratic accountability across our county. It will remove the current duplicative local leadership structures, empowering the new councils to foster system-wide collaboration.

This can only succeed if the new structures of local government are built around Surrey’s district places, by forming new authorities that reflect Surrey’s three well-established and recognisable functional areas, as set out in detail above. Each has their own distinctive identity, strengths, assets and challenges, and best reflects boundaries that make sense to residents.

Empowering communities

Based on our evidence and key principles for reorganisation, we do not believe that a one- or two-unitary model for Surrey would provide strong democratic accountability and foster community empowerment. In both cases, the new councils would be too remote and too large to respond to, and engage with, local communities effectively. Spanning unconnected communities and economic clusters with disparate identities, needs, and challenges, they would be unable to deliver appropriately tailored-structures to decision-making and service delivery. They would be unable to develop a genuine connection with, and understanding of, matters that are important to local people.

Previous cases of local government reorganisation demonstrate that a larger, more remote, councils result in a democratic deficit. In previous instances, there has been an attempt to overcome this by developing local area boards or committees – such as Area Boards established in Wiltshire or Local Community Networks in Somerset. However, the evidence shows that these are a top-down and ineffective imposition that are too static and transactional. Rather than empowering communities, they essentially keep control with the council instead of sharing it with local communities.  Whilst effective in some areas, there is clear evidence that they can fundamentally fail to compensate for the democratic deficit created by unitary authorities which, due to their scale, are too large to reflect local identity and functional economic areas.

They can also be ineffective at amplifying otherwise unheard voices within communities and tackling social inclusion. For example, in Wiltshire, a 2022 LGA Peer Review found ‘there is a need to review their role and function [...] and the part they should play in a more strategic and collaborative approach to place shaping.’.[1]

Meanwhile, in Somerset, a 2024 LGA Peer Review found that their ‘Local Community Networks’, designed to empower local communities, instead created duplication to existing networks and structures, and that ‘residents and partners, […] remain to be convinced about the added value of the LCN’s’.[2] 

Our view is supported by research into area committees undertaken by New Local, who highlight that such forums serve to disempower communities.[3] Community engagement requires action on more fronts than any unduly large or geographically awkward unitary structure could hope to deliver. It is not realistic to expect residents and councillors to attend more meetings, and the evidence suggests that this would not be effective. These problems can be exacerbated when models are set over large and arbitrary geographies. 

Additionally, across Surrey in many places, parish and town councils already play an important role. Effective local representation, governance and decision making will be supported by their presence. However, this will need to be done in such a way that is reflective of local circumstances and cannot be done in a uniform and top-down way across the county. Not all parts of Surrey presently have parish or town councils, with their presence largely concentrated in the more rural areas. Their size and scale also vary significantly; whilst the average number of households in parishes across Surrey is around 1,700, there is significant variance, ranging from less than 100 households in Titsey (Tandridge) and Wisley (Guildford) to over 10,000 households in Farnham (Waverley) and Horley (Reigate and Banstead).[4] That said, there is also the opportunity to carry out community governance reviews to enhance local democracy and representation in areas that do not already have these arrangements in place.

Map denoting parished (red) and unparished (white) areas across Surrey

Developing and delivering innovative community engagement across Surrey

We are ambitious to use LGR as an opportunity to create new models of participative problem solving and decision making, working with local people and with established community groups.  We want to mobilise the already existing and significant capacity within our communities to give a greater sense of agency to them; co-producing solutions, taking joint action, and making our places more resilient, equitable and just.  

We have adopted a thoughtful, strategic and evidence-based approach – rooted in Surrey’s distinctive local identities and existing mechanisms of local democratic engagement and community involvement – to meaningfully share power with our communities and put them in control of the decisions and services that matter most to them.  Our goal is to use the LGR and devolution agenda to share power and better enable people to participate in the decisions that matter to them, by taking a values-based relational approach based on collective action and collective enterprise. 

Support for such an approach is evidenced by our stakeholder survey, where partners could see the potential for improved engagement with residents and local entities, ensuring that specific areas receive the investment they need. They told us that advocacy opportunities are vital for ensuring that the needs and voices of local communities are heard and addressed effectively, particularly in rural communities. This engagement is vital for ensuring that the needs and voices of local communities are heard and addressed effectively. Our proposal for a three-unitary configuration has been shaped by this feedback, providing the best means to improve engagement, encourage investment and foster economic growth. Developed to align with Surrey’s functional economic and social geography, provides the best framework by which the voices and needs of local communities can be heard and acted upon, unlike a two-unitary configuration which would be too large and remote from local people to respond to their needs, particularly within rural communities.  

There is a strong body of research that outline the scope of opportunity to blend the insights of communities into the strategy, service design and practice of local services. Recent studies in this from New Local, the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, and global best practice at the Bloomberg Centre for Cities at Harvard University indicates that the three-unitary model we propose could become the exemplar of systematically shifting institutional power out and drawing community power in.[1]

Across England, many local authorities are supplementing traditional democratic representation with ongoing deliberation and participation. Camden’s Health and Care Citizens’ Assembly established principles that guided the borough’s health and wellbeing strategy, while Wakefield trained their staff to hold inclusive community conversations in an open engagement process which informed priorities. In Test Valley, citizens’ assemblies and open engagement have underpinned the development of corporate priorities, plans for housing, and town centre regeneration.[2]

These examples are moving beyond traditional one-off consultation exercises and seek to engage and educate communities about constraints and opportunity to give them a greater sense of agency. They actively pursue and build an ongoing dialogue with residents as a core component of strategic decision-making. Such an approach to engagement and policymaking is not about diminishing, disempowering or diluting the important role of members. Rather, such approaches seek to enhance and support the statutory decision-making process and direct discretionary investment in preventative approaches, giving democratically elected leaders, at all levels, the tools, information and evidence to make the best decisions for their communities and places. 

[1] Jessica Studdert, Shaheen Warren and Anna Randle, ‘Radical Leadership: Power, Possibility and Public Service’, New Local, 13 February 2025; Hollie Russon Gilman, Jorrit de Jong, Archon Fung, Rebecca Rosen, Gaylen W. Moore, ‘City Leader Guide on Civic Engagement’, Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, 31 May 2023; ‘Think Neighbourhoods: A new approach to fixing the country’s biggest policy challenges’, Interim Report of the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods, 5 March 2025.

[2] Camden Council: Camden Health and Care Citizens' Assembly, February-December 2020

Wakefield Council: ‘How We Did It: Building intentionally inclusive community conversations’, New Local, 4 March 2024.

Test Valley Borough Council: Adam Lent and Summer Simpson, ‘“Everything we do is driven by our communities”: Inside Test Valley’s ground-breaking approach to community engagement’, New Local, 20 March 2024.