Kemi Badenoch has launched a formal bid to keep local elections scheduled for this May, as her shadow business secretary warned cancelling them was “entirely wrong”.
Kevin Hollinrake, who backed the Conservative leader’s motion, said there had been “no attempt to gather consensus” in areas where elections were cancelled.
Local government minister Jim McMahon laid an order earlier this week to postpone elections in nine council areas – across East Sussex, West Sussex, Essex and Thurrock, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, Norfolk, Suffolk and Surrey.
Polls due on May 1 in these areas would instead take place next year, after a local government reorganisation.
Mrs Badenoch this week laid an early day motion calling for the order to be “annulled”, initially backed by five other Conservative MPs including Mr Hollinrake.
The Government could now find time for the “prayer” motion to be debated by a committee or in the House of Commons chamber, where MPs could vote to keep elections in the diary.
Mr Hollinrake told the PA news agency: “The Labour Government have massively rushed this imposition. There has been no attempt to gather consensus within two-tier areas. Local residents have not been consulted at any stage.
“Council leaders have a ‘gun to their head’ from the Labour Government.
“These elections are not being ‘postponed’ – they are being cancelled.
“This mass change is unprecedented and entirely wrong.
“We are particularly concerned about the significant delay of up to three years before the new councils are in place, and existing councillors serving a seven-year term.”
The Government has plans to scrap two-tier systems, where voters are represented by both county and district authorities.
Instead, smaller unitary councils with around 500,000 people in each would be created in their place.
The move would affect Mrs Badenoch’s North West Essex constituency, where Essex County Council and the Chelmsford and Uttlesford district councils are expected to be scrapped and replaced.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner announced the delay to elections across the nine areas earlier this month, when she told the Commons: “We’re not in the business of holding elections to bodies that won’t exist and where we don’t know what will replace them.
“This would be an expensive and irresponsible waste of taxpayers’ money, and any party calling for these elections to go ahead must explain how this waste would be justifiable.”
Ms Rayner said she had only signed off on cancellations in half of the areas requesting a reorganisation.
“The Government’s starting point is for all elections to go ahead unless there’s a strong justification for postponement, and the bar is high, and rightly so,” she said.
