I spent a lot of time on the doorsteps of Telscombe during the county council election campaign earlier this year. I spoke to residents about their bins, their roads, their local schools, the state of social care, and the cost of living. These are communities with a strong sense of who they are and where they belong. What I did not hear, on a single doorstep, was anyone asking to become part of Brighton.
That matters. Because right now, without any meaningful mandate from the people who actually live here, a proposal is working its way through Whitehall that could do exactly that. And when you look carefully at why this proposal exists at all, the answer has very little to do with what is best for Telscombe.
Brighton’s numbers problem
To understand what is really happening here, it helps to look at the arithmetic. Brighton and Hove currently has a population of around 298,000. The government’s own guidance for the reorganisation programme requires new unitary authorities to serve between 300,000 and 500,000 residents. Brighton and Hove sits right at the very bottom of that range, and is projected to lose population through net internal migration in the coming years, not gain it.
Brighton and Hove’s own documentation acknowledges this openly. Its preferred model for Sussex is a five-unitary structure, with each authority serving between 300,000 and 400,000 residents, and it explicitly states that Brighton and Hove may need to merge with neighbouring areas to the east to make that work. The communities to its east include Peacehaven, Telscombe and East Saltdean. In other words, these communities are not being considered for absorption because it would benefit them. They are being considered because Brighton needs them to make its own numbers add up.
Brighton’s housing crisis is not Telscombe’s to solve
The population arithmetic is only part of the picture. Brighton and Hove is facing an acute housing crisis. Independent analysis suggests the city needs to deliver more than 37,400 new homes by 2040, equivalent to around 2,500 homes per year. Its own Labour leadership has described this as an unprecedented crisis, committing £112 million to new homes and buy-backs in its most recent budget. Brighton and Hove’s City Plan, which governs how much housing must be built and where, is already under severe pressure to deliver.
Here is the problem. Brighton is a densely built city, hemmed in by the South Downs National Park to the north and the sea to the south. Land for housing within its current boundaries is scarce. The communities of Peacehaven and Telscombe, by contrast, sit on the coastal fringe to the east with open land around them. They also carry lower planning constraints. For a city Labour administration desperate to hit housing targets set by a Labour government in Westminster, absorbing these communities is not just arithmetically convenient. It is politically essential.
Residents in Telscombe did not vote to be Brighton’s solution to Brighton’s housing problem. They should not have that role imposed on them without being properly asked.
What the consultations have shown
The case for this merger has now been put to local people on multiple occasions, and the answer has been consistent. In summer 2025, Lewes District Council and East Sussex County Council ran a specific consultation on Brighton and Hove’s proposed expansion into Lewes district. The result showed overwhelming opposition. More than 6,500 people signed a petition objecting to the proposal. The government then ran its own statutory consultation between November 2025 and January 2026, which received 3,828 responses. Those results have never been published.
The government conducted a formal public consultation, gathered nearly 4,000 responses, and has chosen not to share what those responses said. On 25 March 2026, the Secretary of State announced he had not yet reached a decision, citing concerns about both proposals, and launched yet another consultation, this time focused specifically on whether parts of Lewes district should be transferred to Brighton and Hove. That is the consultation that closes on 15 June 2026.
The people of Telscombe are now being consulted on this question for at least the fifth time. Each previous exercise has returned a clear answer. The government keeps asking. One has to wonder what answer it is looking for, and why the answers it has already received are apparently insufficient to settle the matter.
A Labour solution to a Labour problem
It would be naive to discuss this proposal without acknowledging the political context in which it has been developed. This reorganisation programme was initiated by a Labour minister in Westminster. The Secretary of State overseeing it, Steve Reed MP, is Labour. Brighton and Hove City Council is run by Labour, and Bella Sankey, its leader, has been enthusiastic about expansion from the outset. The 33 Labour councillors who run Brighton and Hove have every political incentive to support a boundary change that gives their authority more residents, more land, and a better chance of meeting its housing targets under a Labour national government that is watching closely.
None of that makes the proposal automatically wrong. But it does mean that the claimed benefits to communities like Telscombe need to be scrutinised independently, not taken on trust from the politicians and administrators who stand to gain from the outcome. And those communities deserve to have their own elected representatives at the table when the decisions are made, not relegated to the public gallery as observers.
My position
My position is not that change is inherently wrong. Local government should serve residents as efficiently and effectively as possible, and where reorganisation genuinely achieves that, it is worth pursuing. But the threshold for imposing permanent structural change on a community that has consistently said no is high, and it has not been met here.
The financial case for merger with Brighton has not been made. The service delivery benefits to Telscombe residents have not been demonstrated. The housing pressure argument, which is the most honest account of why this proposal exists, is not a reason to reorganise Telscombe. It is Brighton’s problem to solve within Brighton.
Residents in Telscombe have made their views clear, more than once. A government that genuinely believes in listening to communities would have heard them by now. There is still time, just, to respond to the current consultation before 15 June and add your voice to the thousands who have already done so. Every response to this process tells the Secretary of State that these communities are watching, that they remember what they have already said, and that they expect to be heard.
How to have your say before 15 June 2026
Time is short, but there is still an opportunity to make your voice count. The government is running an official consultation and every response matters. Here is how to respond:
Online: Respond directly to the government consultation at: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/modified-proposals-for-local-government-reorganisation-in-east-sussex-and-brighton-and-hove. The consultation closes at 11.59pm on 15 June 2026.
Paper copy: Printed versions of the survey are available to pick up at any East Sussex County Council library.
Whatever your view of the proposal, please use it. Silence is not a neutral act when a decision of this magnitude is being made on your behalf.
Stephen Chapman
Reform UK, East Sussex County Councillor for Telscombe
May 2026
