England is undergoing another major round of local-government reorganisation. Councils are being abolished, new unitary authorities are being created and administrative boundaries are being redrawn.
None of this changes the geographic counties. Local government and county geography are separate things.
But it does expose a long-standing problem with another layer of British geography: the lieutenancies.
At present, many lieutenancy areas are tied closely to local-government geography. That means that when councils are reorganised, Government can also find itself having to revisit the arrangements for Lord-Lieutenants.
And that is exactly what is happening now.
In implementation letters issued on 20 July 2026 for the latest local-government reorganisations, the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government explicitly said that it expects further legislation to be required after the principal Structural Changes Orders, including for:
ceremonial matters that need specific provision, such as Lord Lieutenants
The Government says it envisages a supplementary order potentially covering a number of reorganisations, coming into force in time for 1 April 2028. The same wording appears in both the Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland and Oxfordshire/West Berkshire implementation letters.
This creates an important opportunity.
Rather than patching the lieutenancy system again so that it accommodates another generation of council areas, Government should use this moment to solve the underlying problem permanently.
The lieutenancies should be realigned with Britain’s historic, geographic counties.
Why does local-government reform affect the lieutenancies at all?
The office of Lord-Lieutenant is much older than modern local government.
Lieutenants emerged in the sixteenth century, centuries after many of Britain’s counties had already existed. For more than three centuries, lieutenancy generally made use of the existing county geography. The county came first; the later office used its territory.
That is the logical relationship.
Local government is different. Council areas exist for the administration and delivery of public services. They can be reorganised whenever Parliament concludes that different arrangements would work better.
There is no inherent reason why a civic and ceremonial institution such as the lieutenancy should have to change every time the machinery of local government does.
Yet the present statutory framework has entangled the two.
Schedule 1 of the Lieutenancies Act 1997 defines the areas used for lieutenancy purposes. In England, many are expressly constructed from local-government areas or combinations of them. The current legislation, for example, describes the Bedfordshire lieutenancy in terms of Bedford, Central Bedfordshire and Luton, while the Cheshire lieutenancy is constructed from Cheshire East, Cheshire West and Chester, Halton and Warrington.
This is not the geographic county system. It is a separate lieutenancy geography built substantially around administrative arrangements.
And when those administrative arrangements change, the weakness in that system becomes obvious.
The Government is already having to deal with the consequences
The present LGR programme illustrates the problem particularly well.
In Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland, the Government intends to replace the existing local-government structure with two unitary councils from April 2028, subject to Parliamentary approval. The implementation letter confirms that the principal Structural Changes Order will establish the new councils and abolish the existing ones.
In Oxfordshire and West Berkshire, another Structural Changes Order is intended to establish three new unitary authorities, including a Ridgeway Council combining West Berkshire with areas presently administered within an Oxfordshire-named local authority. Again, this is subject to Parliamentary approval.
The geographic counties beneath those arrangements do not need changing.
Rutland remains Rutland.
Berkshire remains Berkshire.
Oxfordshire remains Oxfordshire.
But because lieutenancy arrangements have been made dependent upon a changing administrative geography, Government has already identified Lord-Lieutenant matters as something potentially requiring consequential legislation in the next stage of the process.
That should prompt a simple question:
Why keep rebuilding one changing geographical system on top of another changing geographical system?
We have seen where this leads before
The problem is not new.
In 1974, six metropolitan local-government systems were created in England: Greater Manchester, Merseyside, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire.
Their metropolitan county councils lasted only twelve years. The Local Government Act 1985 abolished them on 1 April 1986.
Yet the same-named lieutenancy areas survived.
So today we have lieutenancy areas whose geography preserves the shape and terminology of local-government arrangements whose principal councils disappeared forty years ago.
Greater Manchester is a good example. Its metropolitan council was abolished in 1986, but a Greater Manchester lieutenancy area remains. The same principle applies to Merseyside, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, the West Midlands and West Yorkshire. None of those lieutenancy arrangements alters the underlying geographic counties.
This demonstrates the danger of tying civic geography too closely to administrative fashion.
A local-government structure can be created because it suits the administrative requirements of one generation, abolished by the next, and yet leave behind a lieutenancy geography which continues indefinitely.
The result is unnecessary complexity and, more seriously, widespread confusion about what the counties actually are.
Lieutenancy areas are not counties
Part of the difficulty is linguistic.
Lieutenancy areas are frequently described informally as “ceremonial counties”. HCI does not use that expression because it blurs two distinct concepts.
A geographic county is the enduring territorial division.
A lieutenancy area is the territory assigned to a Lord-Lieutenant.
A council area is territory administered by a local authority.
These are three different geographical layers.
The Lieutenancies Act itself illustrates the source of the confusion. For its own statutory purposes it uses “county” for various English and Welsh lieutenancy areas, while Schedule 1 explains how those areas are constructed. But an administrative body’s use of a county name, or legislation’s use of county terminology for a particular statutory purpose, does not make the resulting area the geographic county.
That distinction matters greatly for county identity.
Southport remains geographically in Lancashire despite being within the Merseyside lieutenancy area.
Wigan remains in Lancashire despite the Greater Manchester lieutenancy.
Coventry remains in Warwickshire despite the West Midlands lieutenancy.
These later arrangements do not transfer places between geographic counties.
There is already a stable geography available
The obvious alternative is not to invent yet another system.
It already exists.
In its 2024 User Guide to the Index of Place Names, the Office for National Statistics records the historic county in which places throughout Great Britain are situated.
Most significantly, ONS recommends the historic counties as:
a stable, unchanging geography which covers the whole of Great Britain.
The same guide distinguishes the historic counties from the separate administrative counties and county councils created for local government.
That makes the present situation especially striking.
One arm of Government already recognises a complete geographical framework across Great Britain specifically for its stability.
Meanwhile, another statutory geographical framework — the lieutenancies — remains substantially entangled with local-government boundaries which Government is once again in the process of changing.
The solution almost writes itself.
Make the lieutenancies permanent
The Historic Counties Institute believes the lieutenancies should once again be aligned with the historic, geographic counties.
That does not mean local-government boundaries also need to be aligned with them.
Quite the opposite.
The whole point is to separate the two systems properly.
Councils should be free to cover whatever areas Government and local communities consider most effective for public administration. A unitary council may sit wholly within one county or extend across two or more counties. That is a matter of local-government design.
The lieutenancies, however, perform a very different role.
They are civic and ceremonial institutions. Connecting them to the enduring county geography would give them a stable territorial foundation entirely independent of future administrative reform.
The principle would be simple:
local government can change; the geographic counties and the lieutenancies based upon them do not need to.
It would future-proof the system
The administrative benefit is considerable.
If lieutenancy areas were permanently defined by geographic counties, a future Government could reorganise councils without automatically generating another round of questions about the geography of the lieutenancies.
Councils could merge.
Unitary authorities could divide.
Combined authorities could change.
Administrative boundaries could cross county boundaries where there was a sound practical reason to do so.
None of that would require the lieutenancy map to be reconstructed afterwards.
The very problem MHCLG is now having to consider in its forthcoming supplementary legislation would largely cease to exist.
That is more than a heritage argument. It is simply cleaner government.
A stable system should be based upon stable geography.
And it would strengthen county identity across Great Britain
The cultural benefit would be greater still.
Lord-Lieutenants represent the Crown locally. The institution carries a strong civic and geographical symbolism.
Aligning lieutenancies with the geographic counties would therefore give clear national recognition to those enduring identities.
People in Southport could once again be represented ceremonially through Lancashire.
Those in Coventry through Warwickshire.
Those in Staines through Middlesex.
Those in the parts of Yorkshire currently divided between later lieutenancy arrangements could have those relationships properly reconsidered in accordance with the historic county and Riding geography.
Rutland’s lieutenancy would rest upon Rutland because Rutland is the county — not because there happens, for the moment, to be a Rutland local authority.
And Berkshire’s identity would no longer be obscured simply because much of the county has been administered through local-government areas carrying other names since 1974.
This would not recreate any previous system of local government. HCI is not seeking to do that.
It would instead restore a clear relationship between a civic institution and Britain’s permanent county geography while leaving councils entirely free to evolve separately.
A Great Britain settlement
A comprehensive reform would require care.
The historic development of the lieutenancy was not identical in England, Wales and Scotland, and a lasting settlement would need to account properly for Scotland’s later lieutenancy history as well as particular cases including the Yorkshire Ridings, the City of London and the Isle of Wight.
But those are questions of detailed implementation, not objections to the principle.
The objective should be a coherent Great Britain-wide settlement in which lieutenancy geography is no longer dependent upon whatever pattern of council areas happens to exist at a particular moment.
The Lieutenancies Act 1997 already provides the statutory framework for the lieutenancies across Great Britain. The present LGR programme creates an obvious occasion to reconsider how that framework defines their territories.
Whether comprehensive realignment is achieved through the forthcoming supplementary legislation itself or requires additional legislative provision, the opportunity should not be missed.
Stop patching the system
The Government has not announced that it intends to realign the lieutenancies with the historic counties.
That is HCI’s proposal.
What Government has now said is that the current local-government reorganisations are expected to require further legislation dealing with ceremonial matters including Lord-Lieutenants, and that a supplementary order may deal with several reorganisations together.
That makes this the right moment to ask a much bigger question than where the next few lieutenancy boundaries should go.
Instead of asking:
How should the lieutenancies be altered to accommodate this round of local-government reform?
Government should ask:
Why should lieutenancy geography depend upon local-government boundaries at all?
Britain already possesses an enduring county geography.
Government already recognises it.
ONS already recommends it precisely because it is stable and covers the whole of Great Britain.
Now is the opportunity to use it.
Realign the lieutenancies with the historic counties, separate them permanently from local government, and ensure that however many council reorganisations take place in the decades ahead, we never have to solve the same problem again.
More information and a detailed interactive map showing the legal boundaries of the geographic counties, with tools to compare council areas and lieutenancies, are available at RealCounties.com.