Local Government Reorganisation meeting timetable

Councillors will discuss Hastings Borough Council’s response to the government’s Devolution White Paper for a single tier of local government in the East Sussex and Brighton area. 

There will be a special Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting on Thursday 18 September from 6pm where committee members will be discussing a report detailing the three proposed models that Hastings will submit to the government. The public are welcome to attend. 

Following this, Full Council will meet on Wednesday 24 September to consider the options and proposals, before the final decision is made by the council’s Cabinet on the same evening. 

The three proposed options are: the ‘One East Sussex’ - single unitary model; the district and borough model; the coastal unitary model. 

Cllr Julia Hilton, deputy leader of the council and lead councillor for shaping places and local government reorganisation, said: "We have spent many months discussing these options internally and across all parties and we had more than 800 comments on our survey about them earlier in the summer. We also spoke to many more residents at face-to-face sessions.    

"We’ve been in regular conversations both with leaders and officers across both borough district and county councils and in regular councillor cross party working group conversations at Hastings as these options have been put together. This has been done on an incredibly tight timescale so there is still much to resolve."

If you have a question that you would like to be asked as part of the Overview and Scrutiny meeting, please email it to consultation@hastings.gov.uk by 10am on Wednesday 17 September. 

The other district and borough councils and the county council are also holding meetings in the coming days and weeks ahead of the final submission deadline on Friday 26 September.  

After we submit our final proposals, the government will be making the decision about how councils will be reorganised. We are also expecting there to be more consultation by government over the winter with a final decision in spring 2026.  

The full reports for Overview and Scrutiny are available on the council website, and the reports for Full Council will be available on Tuesday 16 September.