When the Structures Change, Who Do We Become? Part Three: The Margins Don't Move the Map

A new authority does not automatically inherit trust. Especially not from the people who never fully gave it to the old one.

The first two parts of this series explored what LGR does to place and to people. This final piece turns to the group who rarely appear in the reorganisation conversation at all: those already on the margins. People experiencing homelessness, living with learning difficulties, navigating poverty. The ones most dependent on the relationships and local knowledge that reorganisation puts most at risk.

In Part Three, Dr Amanda Milliner argues that trust cannot be transferred like a file or a caseload. That the knowledge which holds vulnerable communities together lives in people, not systems. And that when reorganisation happens quickly, it is always the 'hardest-to-reach' who pay the highest price, quietly, without anyone intending it.

Reorganisation is not a neutral act. New authorities have a chance to prove otherwise. But only if they choose to.