Sometimes the most innocuous sounding items on the parliamentary order paper turn out to be the most significant.

On Monday, the House of Commons was due to hear a “Ministerial Statement on Local Government Reorganisation”. Few, I suspect, expected it to amount to much.

Instead, the newly reappointed Secretary of State for Housing, Angela Rayner, stood up and announced that the Government’s plans to reorganise local government had hit the buffers.

For those of us who have been fighting these proposals, it was a welcome moment.

The Government’s plans to ‘simplify’ local government were first announced in 2024. The intention was to replace county, district and borough councils with larger, single-tier unitary authorities. Councils were subsequently invited to submit proposals for how this might work in their areas.

But I have never been entirely convinced that the Government properly answered the most basic question - why was this such a priority?

The usual answer was money. Larger councils, the argument went, would create economies of scale and reduce duplication.

But that argument was never as straightforward as it sounded. Bringing district services together may produce savings in some areas, but there are also potential diseconomies of scale when services currently delivered by county councils are divided up amongst smaller authorities.

And even if savings could eventually be achieved, they would come some way down the line. The costs, upheaval and disruption of reorganising local government, however, would be immediate.

Then came the Government’s decision to carve Hampshire into five new unitary authorities.

That proposal was met with widespread criticism from council leaders across the county, as well as me. What was particularly difficult to understand was how the Government could arrive at its preferred structure when it appeared to depart from the very criteria it had set for the reorganisation process.

For East Hampshire, the consequences would have been particularly damaging.

Our district would have been split between two authorities and East Hampshire as an entity would have ceased to exist.

That matters for more than administrative reasons. Communities are not just lines on a map. They have identities, histories, relationships and networks built up over generations. This is not something that can be easily replicated.

So I am pleased that, for now at least, the Government has pressed pause.

I wish I could say that this represents a change of heart. I am less certain.

From what Angela Rayner said in the Commons, it appears that legal advice played the biggest part in the Government’s decision.

The minister was understandably not giving much away. Governments do not, as a rule, publish their legal advice, so we may never know precisely what was said behind closed doors.

But one obvious possibility is that the Government has run into a problem of its own making. If you establish criteria for a major reorganisation and then make decisions which appear inconsistent with those criteria, you should expect questions to be asked.

Whatever the reason, we should nevertheless welcome the fact that the Government is now going back to the drawing board.

And there is an important point here. I am not opposed in principle to reform of local government. There are perfectly legitimate questions about whether our existing structures are the most efficient way of delivering services, and there is a case for looking at how councils work together.

But reform on this scale needs to make real financial sense, not simply promise savings on a spreadsheet. And, above all, it needs to reflect the communities that councils are supposed to serve.

But for now, at least, we can take a breath and be grateful for one simple thing. East Hampshire stays together.