That’s a nice County Council you’ve got there... pity if something happened to it...

It’s been a decade since the demise of the last attempt to restructure local government in Suffolk, when some of the dying breath of the Labour Government was wasted on a futile attempt to persuade the local political leadership to agree on a new structure. It was, in truth, doomed to failure, with the Labour leadership in Ipswich never likely to quietly accept any settlement that minimised their prospects of power, plus a whole bunch of Conservative District Councillors unwilling to abolish themselves. One of the first decisions of the Coalition was to kick the idea as far into the long grass as possible.

Ironically, as Ros noted at the time, with District Councils increasingly coming under financial pressure, the resulting mergers and pooling of back office functions acted as a gradual but inevitable driver towards larger councils - St Edmundsbury and Forest Heath combined to form West Suffolk, whilst Suffolk Coastal and Waveney came together to form East Suffolk. And yes, you still had three tiers, but the outline of possible new unitary authorities was, and is, emerging.

But financial pressures continue to mount, and the pandemic has driven all local authorities closer to crisis. The lurking attraction of creating unitaries becomes ever more alluring - a former Finance portfolio holder at County level, Richard Smith, estimated the financial benefit at £80 million - and harder to resist.

I do get the arguments against it - the loss of local representation, the difficulty in campaigning for insurgent candidates, the challenge to councillors in getting around their larger patches and to grasp the issues across multiple parishes, to name but some. But, ultimately, you have to ask the question, “do you want any locally supplied services beyond the statutory ones?”. And, regardless of what some might wish, the public do want buses, libraries and much else besides.

The challenge for towns and parishes is how to stay relevant when more remote from the principal authority. What opportunities will there be to take on service provision and can they be accessed in an á la carte fashion, depending on the size and ambition of the Town/Parish? Lowestoft, or Stowmarket, will be much more activist than, say, Creeting St Peter or Darmsden.

My sense is that, given the Government’s suggestion that authorities covering a population of 300-400 thousand people work best, Suffolk’s future is, ironically, its past - the recreation of East Suffolk and West Suffolk, based in Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds respectively. Dividing the county into Greater Ipswich and “Rural Suffolk” risks creating one authority lacking in cohesion and another made up of an inner urban area in conflict with a more rural doughnut surrounding it.

So, we’ll see how this goes. I suspect that the political leadership in the county haven’t really progressed in their thinking on the subject, but that they’ll end up being driven, either by a centralising Government that firmly believes in centralising things, or by financial necessity, into restructuring. It might not be pretty for any of us...