i should state a possible vested interest in that i work for a council (it's a unitary, and not sure whether it will stay as is or get merged with another one) and live in a (different) small unitary council area.
overall, the whole thing gets a
from me. a lot will depend on the detail.
initial reaction is that this is a distraction from long term underfunding of councils, which is the real problem, not the structures or boundaries of councils as they are now.
and it's going to result in several years of uncertainty and sorting out and settling down, and a lot of money going in redundancy payments, office moves and so on. which will not help deal with the current problems.
i'm not convinced the 'confusion' between different tiers of council is that big a deal. i've lived and worked in areas with two tiers of council, and yes, some people might have to be told to ring the county / district if they phoned the wrong one, but don't think it's been a major issue. i agree that some county councils and (at least some) of their districts don't co-operate as well as they could, likewise some neighbouring councils don't co-operate as well as they could. having said that, councils having some shared services (e.g. particular specialists) is not uncommon, although arrangements like that can be fragile if one of the partner councils changes political colour and they want to do it differently.
what's local government for anyway? i broadly think things should be run and accountable at the most local level that's reasonable. the most local services being run by a parish council seems reasonable enough (arguably the london boroughs are too big for some services - the SDP or SLD or whatever the heck it was then did experiment with 'neighbourhood' level decisions involving the local ward councillors, but think the election of one NF or BNP councillor put the shits up them and they backed off from the idea in case one neighbourhood got another fascist councillor and therefore a majority) some things need to be run on a district level (at least), some things need a thought process beyond one district, some things (arguably too many) are managed at westminster government / whitehall level, a few things need international agreement and regulation.
too many things are in the hands of remote quangos - health in particular. policing is arguably more efficient with big multi-county police forces, but much less accountable, either with a police authority with members from multiple local councils, or with a pointless police commissioner.
do people want local councils? some people complain that councils are only managers of what whitehall says they can do, other people complain about 'postcode lottery' when they mean that different local councils have made different policy decisions.
arguably some boundaries (broadly unchanged since 1974, apart from the places that have so far got unitary councils, and the abolition of 'new' counties like Avon) don't always reflect current urban areas and communities. Reading is an example - what are now in effect the western / southern / eastern suburbs are in neighbouring council areas, Medway has a few suburbs that have been grafted on at the southern edge but are in administrative Kent, and so on.
Although some people haven't forgiven government for the 1974 changes (there's a few villages that got 'moved' from Yorkshire to Lancashire or vice versa for example) - and whatever you do, there are going to be boundaries somewhere and the potential for different councils / policies in the next street.
in berkshire, the county council just got abolished and all their functions deposited on the existing boroughs / districts which became unitaries, which arguably are too small to manage them well. and 15+ years on, some of them are just about getting the hang of them. some places now (and arguably under this proposal) will just have county (or artificial half county) councils which are arguably too remote to run the most local of services, and many councils with large areas (even the london boroughs, which themselves are the result of government mandated mergers in the 1960s) give the impression of favouring this town centre and neglecting that town centre.
merging several councils together will be politically bad for labour - towns and cities with labour councils will be submerged in to larger areas with more rural tory voters. As I said earlier, this looked like a deliberate but unspoken policy when the major government started introducing unitary councils after 1992 - the usual approach was 'take the labour voting big town out of the shire county so that the county council will be safely tory, and add a few suburbs and villages so that the 'urban' council will at least go marginal' - labour at the time didn't call them out on this.
and mixed feelings about the 'single funding pot' idea. on one hand, yes, whitehall is too prescriptive. and too much funding is based on councils having to compete with each other for it, which favours larger councils or councils with the resources (either in house or consultants) to prepare those bids. but i can see it leading to services used by smaller sections of communities and services that aren't seen as 'vote winners' being cut even more as a result.
and i'm also not that sure i'm fond of directly elected local mayors. we don't have a directly elected president / prime minister, i'm not sure i see any real benefits of a directly elected mayor over a 'leader of the council'
did i say
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