10 Comments

• John Ruddy 26th May '10 - 10:24pm

  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.

• David 26th May '10 - 10:30pm

  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.

• MatGB 26th May '10 - 10:42pm

  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.

• Dave 26th May '10 - 11:07pm

  @ 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.

• Ray Cobbett 27th May '10 - 8:57am

  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.

• Gordon 27th May '10 - 10:01am

  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.

• David 27th May '10 - 11:01am

  @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”

• Modicum 27th May '10 - 2:51pm

  Can someone explain this to an outsider? What is a unitary authority and what would this change have entailed for Exeter, Norwich and Suffolk?

• Iain Roberts 27th May '10 - 4:06pm

  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.

• Modicum 28th May '10 - 10:16am

  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?