For the 26,000 people living in Peacehaven, Telscombe and East Saltdean, the question of which council will run their services has now landed in the courts. East Sussex County Council has formally launched a legal challenge to the government’s plans to reorganise local government in East Sussex and Brighton & Hove, extending a period of uncertainty residents have already endured for months.
Council leader Andy Woolley, of Reform UK, confirmed that “a legal letter was issued” on Friday. He told BBC Politics South East that the plans “would remove 26,000 people from our footprint of East Sussex, historically”. Those three communities, currently part of East Sussex, would under the approved plans become part of a new, larger Brighton & Hove unitary authority.
Woolley has framed the dispute in terms of what residents themselves have been saying. Speaking previously to BBC Radio Sussex, he said residents had “consistently raised serious concerns. It’s a pattern of sustained and meaningful objection.” When the reorganisation process was paused in September by Communities Secretary Angela Rayner, following legal advice, he called it a “common sense decision that should have been taken months ago”.
The pause did not settle the matter. The legal challenge now formalises opposition that had been building for some time. As far back as July, Woolley and Zoe Nicholson, the Green leader of Lewes District Council, both said they would consider a legal challenge against the plans. Nicholson went further earlier this month, initiating what she described as “protective legal action” against the reorganisation. She also welcomed the September pause, but stressed that residents’ interests must be protected “until the plan to annex parts of our district are abandoned”.
Not everyone on the local political scene sees the plans that way. Jacob Taylor, the Labour deputy leader of Brighton & Hove City Council, argued that the three areas are “very closely aligned with the Brighton economy” and are “intrinsically connected” to the city in terms of transport, work and education. “Personally, I think it would be great if those areas became part of Brighton & Hove. It would be much better than being part of a large East Sussex unitary,” he said. For the residents caught between the two positions, the arguments turn on questions of daily life: where people work, how they travel, and where their children go to school.
Meanwhile, behind the political and legal contest, another group is living with the consequences of the ongoing uncertainty: council staff themselves. Dan Sartin, the branch secretary for the union Unison in West Sussex, said local government workers were “under huge amounts of pressure” and “having to do more with less”. He noted that morale in local government had been low “for a long time”, and that reorganisation was adding to that uncertainty. For those employees, the question of which authority will ultimately employ them, and what their roles will look like, remains unresolved while the legal process unfolds.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government has so far offered little detail on what happens next. A spokesperson said: “We recognise the need to provide certainty so areas have clarity over their future and will set out next steps in due course.” That promise of clarity is precisely what residents, councillors and staff across the affected areas say they have been waiting for.
For now, the future shape of local government in East Sussex and Brighton & Hove rests with a legal process that has only just begun. The communities at the centre of it, from the coastal towns earmarked for transfer to the wider county whose boundaries would change, continue to wait for an answer about who will govern them, and on what terms.