To seize the opportunities local government reorganisation presents, councils need to be intentional about how they ‘end’.

Imagine being asked to dispose of yourself. That is exactly what councils facing local government reorganisation (LGR) have been asked to do. A process that will ultimately affect thousands of staff, councillors and residents started with institutions poring over plans for their own demise. The Government is entitled to change the structures of public institutions, but it is worth acknowledging how hard that must have been for those involved.

And it does not stop there: Structural change orders, joint committees, shadow authorities, TUPE, financial integration – the hard work continues on tight timescales. All while staff, councillors and residents continue daily lives and duties amid profound uncertainty and loss.

So how do councils seize that moment? And what role can institutions, asked to bring their own existence to a close, really play in shaping a future that will not be theirs?

There is a way of turning this moment around, captured neatly in the observation attributed to the poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: ‘Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.'

Endings are not simply conclusions. They are the immediate precondition for new beginnings. Get them right, and you can shape what follows.

For example, the decisions taken in winding down – about leadership, governance, ways of working and relationships – all have value beyond a council's endpoint. They can help to shape what a new council inherits in terms of assumptions, behaviours and priorities.

There is a danger then that urgency crowds out reflection. That in the push to be safe, legal and on time, we forget to realise the ambition of this moment.

Just as importantly, how people experience transition can affect how they feel about it: whether staff and councillors see themselves as agents of renewal or victims of process.

And councils are part of networks of organisations that include health, police, government agencies, voluntary organisations, businesses and communities. These wider place systems will not dissolve on vesting day. Instead, they'll play a vital role working alongside new unitaries to achieve the best outcomes for people and place.

But none of this can be left to chance. LGR is, by necessity, a phased, highly technical legal process. Large-scale institutional change must be broken into manageable components: legal transfer, governance design, workforce integration, financial alignment, systems migration and service continuity. Once this starts moving, it has its own compulsions, driven by statutory deadlines and risk management.

There is a danger then that urgency crowds out reflection. That in the push to be safe, legal and on time, we forget to realise the ambition of this moment.

And we really should be ambitious. These new councils will be born into a time of enormous stress for the local state, and – for all the cliché – challenges that are genuinely unprecedented: entrenched inequality, demographic change, climate risk, technological change, fragile local economies and widening pressures on public services.

But they'll also be the fulcrum in a new democratic system, connecting neighbourhoods to mayoralties, and expected to drive better outcomes for people and places – delivering not just more efficiently, but more effectively.

That's why ending well is a tangible opportunity – and why our three organisations are working together to support councils facing LGR. Outside the technical process, councils should carefully consider the impact they've had to date – and how it can be shared and built upon.

They can address how closure will affect their residents, their staff and the wider system they are a part of. And how, while services and democracy continue, the loss of their presence can be compensated.

But most importantly, they have the chance to think carefully about the future that awaits – and how their successor institutions can be best prepared for that moment.

Much of what councils do will continue. Services will remain. People will transfer. Places themselves won't change. Ending, therefore, is not so much a clean break as a moment at which the future council is already being formed – deliberately or by default.

That's why ending well can be the most consequential act of leadership this generation of local government will perform.

This is a version of an opinion piece written by CfGS's Mel Stevens, Ellen Care, head of practice at Collaborate CIC and Claire Ward, partner at Anthony Collins for the Municipal Journal: Read the original.

Anthony Collins, the Centre for Governance and Scrutiny and Collaborate CIC have announced an informal partnership to support councils facing LGR – read more here.