Before the boundaries are set: a shared service map is the transition work councils can do now

The Government's stated expectation is broadly one unitary authority per region, with larger regions possibly having more than one. City and district councils had until 9 August 2026 to propose their own arrangements under the Head Start pathway. Councils not included in an accepted proposal enter a Backstop process, in which the Government proposes the arrangement. Whangarei District Council's published timeline, one indication of timing rather than a national schedule, shows a Cabinet decision in September 2026, consultation from October 2026 to March 2027, a final proposal in March 2027, legislation in early 2028 and amalgamation after the October 2028 local elections.

Most of a transition plan depends on the outcome: who transfers to what, on which date, under whose authority. Auckland's 2010 amalgamation was run by a statutory transition agency. Future legislation may establish something similar, or something different, and its form, powers and employment responsibilities are not yet known. Councils should not make decisions on behalf of a future entity. What they can do, under their current authority, is build a comparable account of current services and dependencies. That supports their own continuity planning now, and it could give any later transition authority a better starting point than several inventories that have to be reconciled first.

Why the map, and why shared

Whatever the structure, the services have to keep running through the changeover: statutory timeframes, rating, payroll, consents, civil defence readiness, customer contact and the rest. Many of the risks to that continuity come from what services depend on rather than from the services themselves. A service that two councils both provide may run on different systems, under different delegations, through suppliers with different contract end dates, and depend on one specialist in each place. A service list omits those dependencies. Recording them the same way in each council and comparing the results makes them visible.

The map should be prepared jointly, and inclusion should follow dependency and materiality rather than organisational boundaries. Regional councils could not submit Head Start proposals, but regional functions are central to any unitary model, so the regional council belongs in it. Council controlled organisations, water organisations and shared service entities come in where they own a system, contract, asset, data source or statutory function that a service in scope depends on. If each council builds its own inventory in its own format, the first job of a transition body is to reconcile them, and differences in how services were defined create rework. A common format agreed first means the maps can be compared when they are finished.

Governing the information

Councils need agreed rules for sharing service information before a legal transition exists. The agreement should name an accountable sponsor and a data host, state the legal basis for sharing, set access approvals and a security classification, say how employment and personal information and commercially sensitive contract details are handled, cover records ownership and the treatment of official information requests, and include rules for a council withdrawing and for resolving disputes over definitions. Chief executives can assess whether the work fits within their current mandates, budgets and delegations. Where it has material cost or could be read as pre-empting the reform decision, elected members should be briefed on its scope and limits.

Keeping it proportionate

A full inventory of council activities is not proportionate before boundaries are known, and detail beyond what any structure would need is wasted effort. Three controls keep the exercise useful under any outcome.

What the map lets a council do before the decision

The map supports specific decisions before the structure is settled, and it is worth being precise about which.

Analysis that can be done now: which contracts and systems have end dates inside the likely transition window; which services depend on a single person or supplier; where two councils' delegations for the same service differ; where records are held in forms that would be hard to migrate.

Preparation that can be done now: options for consolidating systems, with criteria, without selecting one; a review of contracts expiring in plausible transition periods, recording renewal options, break clauses and procurement lead times, without distorting lawful procurement or accepting poor value on the strength of a structure that does not yet exist; documenting the knowledge held by people whose departure would put a listed service at risk.

Commitments that should wait: irreversible, reform dependent system commitments that a later authority would own; commitments to future accountabilities; anything said to an individual about a future role. Replacements that are necessary for security, support, compliance or service continuity still proceed under current authority, and the map helps show which those are.

The people in the map

The roles a service cannot operate without are the part of the map most exposed to the transition, and the map records them as data: the role, the service it holds up, the cover that exists, and whether the knowledge involved is documented. How to assess those roles, build cover and transfer knowledge is covered in the published article on succession planning, and the method applies here without change. What the map adds is the ability to see those exposures side by side across councils.

The map also takes time from the managers who know the services best, who are usually the managers responsible for running them. Ways to free that time include pausing lower priority work, a small shared team drawn from the participating councils, fixed term secondments, or limited specialist support. Adding the work to existing jobs is the option most likely to produce a thin result.

What to do first

Take it in stages rather than as a region wide programme from day one. First, the chief executives of the councils most likely to be affected test whether there is willingness and authority to share, including the regional council. Second, a small group pilots the taxonomy, the first pass fields and the information rules on two or three continuity critical services that more than one council delivers. Third, the group decides, on what the pilot found, whether wider coverage is justified and at what pace.

This work can identify immediate continuity risks and reduce the amount of information a future transition body has to reconstruct. It can proceed before the structure is settled, and it does not pre-empt the structure.