During the Banham Commission in the 1990s, I recall seasoned local government professionals and academics rolling their eyes in a ‘seen it all before’ way.

Now I know why. Every time local government reorganisation rears its head, I’m reminded of the two years of my life that I spent researching people’s effective and affective communities (as we neatly termed them at MORI), but also of an analysis of 60,000 responses we were able to do after the dust had settled.

At one level, it’s fascinating, getting to understand people’s patterns of identity and patterns of activity. However, the main conclusion we were able to draw from this large-scale analysis was how inappropriate the whole exercise was. And, by extension, every review before and since.

No-one’s to blame, though; it’s the paradigm that’s wrong. All reviews are ever able to do is tinker with the building blocks of local government that we have, which are largely from the mid 19th century. Many towns and cities have outgrown the boundaries of the authority supposed to represent them; Norwich extends beyond the City Council’s boundaries. And the historic desire to have a unit of governance which is also a unit of service delivery gives us councils which sometimes just don’t feel local enough.

The French system, where communes (communities) are the building block, makes so much sense. People are engaged and represented at a community level, but this is distinct from the unit of service delivery. You cannot deliver services at the scale of many individual communes, sometimes of only a few hundred people, so commissioning is done at an appropriate scale.

Design local government from scratch and it would look very different from today. But I would not argue for a major reorganisation. Instead, I’m encouraged to see initiatives now working around the structures we have been, ahem, blessed with.

As cities have outgrown authority boundaries, we now see MAAs. And authorities and their partners are now trying to find ways of engaging communities sub-locally.

As ever, local government’s capacity for innovation is impressive, though in an ideal world, we would not be having to innovate around a democratic deficit, and governance that does not fit the way communities are. As we all, know, however, this is not an ideal world.