The LGR playbook: Stabilising services, modelling council tax and allocating Crisis and Resilience Funding
21 July 2026
Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) forces merging authorities to face a high-stakes double challenge: harmonising conflicting Council Tax Reduction (CTR) schemes without worsening record council tax debt, while also transitioning new funding streams. Without unified data, merging schemes blindly risks income shocks for residents and threatens collection rates at a time when council budgets are already under severe strain.
In this webinar, Phil Butler from The Anglia Revenues Partnership shared the practical challenges facing councils as they prepare for reorganisation, highlighting the importance of early engagement and robust CTR modelling. Nikitta Vanterpool from Cambridgeshire County Council explored how LIFT can safely model scheme changes and combine legacy datasets.
We also looked at how councils can use the new Crisis and Resilience Fund (CRF) to move from reactive applications to proactive support that protects vulnerable households from day one.
Listen back to hear
- Preparing for change – An ARP perspective
- Designing CRF through collaboration
- Using LIFT to support through LGR and beyond
- Discussion
Guest speakers
“Looking at council tax reduction scheme alignment, it became clear that there were differences in schemes and that some of them were quite significant. The good advice is to review these early, identify those differences and understand the potential impact and where decisions might need to be made. Once you consider the options of how you might want to operate CTR from vesting day, you will need to know the impact, therefore modelling will be required.”
“The LIFT programme became much more than a data tool and acted as a catalyst for the wider development of the Crisis and Resilience Fund, helping partners to come together around a shared vision of prevention. Having dedicated funding at the early stages was crucial because it gave us the capacity to invest in partnership working, test new approaches and build a stronger, more strategic model.”
