MORE than £3.3 million was spent on scrapped local government reorganisation plans, Essex County Council has revealed.
A Freedom of Information request by this newspaper revealed the extra planning costs before the Government axed the project last month.
Net extra spending on the programme reached £3.341 million by August, with most of the money going on staff.
Peter Harris, Reform UK leader of Essex County Council, said the previous Conservative administration authorised the spending.
But Mr Harris said he refused to sign off any further contracts.
He told this newspaper: “I stood my ground.
“Although I was put under extreme pressure, I would not sign those contracts for IT and other consultants.
“I just refused to do it.”
The figure excludes the cost of existing council staff diverted to the project because the council does not record their time.
The authority also has no record of how many employees worked on the project. But it funded 34.8 full-time-equivalent posts to deliver LGR or cover other roles, including 27.8 in corporate services.
The breakdown shows staff costs totalled £2,393,000: £1,068,000 in previous years and £1,325,000 up to August 2026.
Consultancy, advice and support cost £788,000, while legal bills added £78,000.
It also spent £64,000 on service fees, £1,000 on IT and £17,000 on printing and stationery.
Essex County Council said the figures show the net extra cost of delivering LGR after contributions from other councils and the Government where costs were shared.
The authority said it has not assumed the Government will reimburse any costs because this has not been confirmed.
There is still no estimate of the total public money spent before the programme was scrapped.
However, work to figure out the overall cost is continuing alongside local authorities across Essex.
Colchester Council is demanding that the Government repay its costs.
Essex County Council started a legal challenge against the government in May, which Mr Harris said cost up to £30,000, before the government withdrew reorganisation plans.
“I was always confident of our legal position,” Mr Harris added.
Mr Harris said the bill could have reached £300,000 if the case had gone to the High Court.
He said: “It was a tough decision for me, but it's that versus more than £100 million that I could have had to spend.
“If you add up the costs for all the districts, then each one of them would have spent one or two million.
“I’d rather spend it on public safety, public health and council services, which is what we were elected to do.”
The council says it is now winding down the reorganisation programme “in a managed way”.
In its FOI response, the council said resources could be reused for other programmes or stored in case the Government reinstated LGR in Greater Essex.
In September, the Reform administration launched controversial security patrols in Chelmsford, Colchester and Braintree at a cost of £118,000 plus VAT.
The three-month pilot will put two Security Industry Authority-licensed operatives in each town or city centre seven days a week, from 10am to 6pm.
The proposals, which the government paused for review on September 7 after updated legal advice, would have replaced Essex's two-tier system with five new unitary authorities from April 2028.
Braintree District Council leader Tom Cunningham served as cabinet member for highways under Essex County Council's previous Conservative administration.
He says the decision to allocate £3.3 million in the budget was right, "given what we knew at the time".
"As the largest authority in Essex, we needed to do quite a bit of the heavy lifting," Mr Cunningham said.
"If LGR is paused indefinitely, for more than 5 or 10 years, then it's vital the government reimburses authorities.
"But if it is a brief pause, which we are waiting for the government to confirm next week, then the work is not a sunk cost.
"As a council, we had the desire to make the best of the situation regarding local government reorganisation."
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