Labour’s plan to replace the existing councils in Exeter, Norwich and Suffolk with new unitary authorities has been cancelled by the coalition government.
Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles today announced that the existing local government structures would remain.
The argument for the decision seems to be that the move to unitaries didn’t have the support of the local populations, two didn’t have the support of the independent boundaries commission and they were going to cause a lot of hassle for very little savings.
The real meat on this story looks to be down in note 4 to editors from the press release:
4. Implementing these unitary proposals was estimated to involve £40m restructuring costs to be incurred up to 2014-15. In that period, it was forecast that savings of £39.4m could also be achieved. From 2015-16 annual savings of £6.5m were forecast. Councils should be able to make savings of this scale and more including through sensible co-operation between each other and with partners, without the need for any reorganisation.
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10 Comments
I can say that, as an old exonian that unitary status for Exeter DID have the support of the population – and the business community, and the local tories, and the local Lib Dems, in fact a very united. The people who were opposed to this were the tories and lib Dems on the County Council who were going to lose Exeter.
This is the first time Exeter has bid for unitary status, and it won’t be the last. As for the arguments about Exeter being too small, I am (just) old enough to remember 1974, when Exeter lost it status as a County Borough, and became the lower tier in a two tier council.
So much for giving power back to the people and devolving decisions down.
I live in Bedford, we just went to a unitary authority last year and the prommised savings have never materialised! I think the whole thing is a total waste of time and money, as this article says so well, the kinds of savings could equally be made simply by the different authorities working closer together.
Going Unitary also causes so much nervouseness and unsettled feelings on the staff involved it lowers moralle and productivity & an increase in sick leave and people takign early retirement on health (stress) grounds, a cost that is never taken into account in the calculations.
John, having lived in Exeter, Torbay (where I grew up), a few places in London and now Calderdale (one of the smallest unitary MBCs), I’ve come to the conclusion that for a unitary with the responsibilities of a modern council, you want to be roughly the size of at least three constituencies, definitely more than two.
Torbay is certainly too small, and should’ve been included within the review, and Exeter would, with modern responsibilities, be too small as well. I did thing the ‘Greater Exeter’ plan including Exmouth and others had some merits, but Exeter on its own probably not.
I don’t know, really, why small unitaries struggle as much as they do, but Calderdale isn’t that effective, and Torbay certainly isn’t, last I looked Torbay is larger than Exeter population wise. Expand it to include the travel too area nearby, then it might be viable, but that travel too area is mostly small towns with a different outlook. Regardless, I do think, on balance, that this is the right decision, not least because it really did look, to me, that Bradshaw had personally intervened to override the boundary commission, never keen on that sort of thing, even if it’s what the local voters in one constituency want.
Devon without Exeter would be problematic, just as it is without Plymouth and Torbay.
@ MatGB, 26th May 2010 at 10:42 pm
“I’ve come to the conclusion that for a unitary with the responsibilities of a modern council, you want to be roughly the size of at least three constituencies, definitely more than two.”
Strongly agree: back in 1969 the Redcliffe-Maud report urged 300,000-1,000,000 for a county-level authority, and I don’t see evidence since for anything smaller: London’s been a mess ever since it was broken up among boroughs averaging little over 200,000, and the moth-eaten mess of authorities we have now looks ever more like a re-run of the one the Maud commission was meant to get rid of.
It’s time we stopped piecemeal scrapping or upgrading of individual areas and looked again at the whole map with a view to unitaries embracing coherent areas regardless of historical boundaries. I’m sorry we didn’t go for the threefold (Most of) Cornwall – Greater Plymouth – East & North Devon division we’d have had decades ago if local vested interests hadn’t blocked that very forward-looking set of recommendations.
No doubt there are local factors in this decision from Pickles. But I hope the coalition will look critically at the function and working of local government. Firstly PR is needed to break up the one-party towns such as the one I live in. Next, fewer councils and councillors would be welcome to reduce the costs of elections , allowances and attract brighter ( younger) candidates. Many council groups resemble day care centres for the elderly ( I’m 70 and a former councillor) and are completely unrepresentative of even the minority who elect them. Dave’s Big Society
is largely a fiction and is no substitute for real democracy.
It’s not the first time Exeter has bid to be a unitary – they did in the Tories’ round in the 90s, they did in the last Govt’s round of unitaries, and then they had another bash in John Denham’s pre-election giveaway. Like Oxford, they need to accept they are too small to be an effective unitary.
@John Ruddy. Problem is it left the rest of Devon unviable. You only have to look at Torbay to see small unitary councils aren’t the answer. Yes Exeter was a county borough before 1974, so was Bradninch until 1870! “Brandninch was a borough-town t’when Exeter was a grassy down”
Can someone explain this to an outsider? What is a unitary authority and what would this change have entailed for Exeter, Norwich and Suffolk?
Modicum – A unitary authority is one that’s solely responsible for all the local government functions in its area. The main alternative in England is a two-tier system where a county council (careful, almost missed the first o) covers some things, like schools, and a district or borough council does others. Most cities have unitary councils and there was a move under Labour to abolish the old district/borough/county councils outside the cities and replace them with unitaries. As you can see from the discussion, the issue’s far from clear-cut.
Thanks Iain,
Two levels of local government sounds inefficient and a bit less accountable to me. But I’ll defer to others’ expertise.
Couldn’t they just have a referendum and let locals decide?