Unitary Suffolk incoming?…

I was, I admit, somewhat surprised when Creeting St Peter’s county councillor, Keith Welham, noted last Monday at our Parish Council meeting (which reminds me…) that the prospect of a unitary authority or authorities for Suffolk had reared its head again.

It shouldn’t come as a complete surprise, I guess, because the argument that multiple tiers of government are less financially efficient than one has been around for a long time. But it’s a brave government that commits itself to a major reorganisation of local government, especially this early in its mandate.

And, having read the article in The Times yesterday (and no, I’m not linking to it), it strongly suggests that there will be a single Suffolk unitary authority, based on the suggestion that Jim McMahon, the Minister for Local Government, has concluded that an authority serving no less than 500,000 or so is the minimum likely to succeed.

This is not my first rodeo, nor is it Suffolk’s though. Plans to replace six District, one Borough and one County Council at the tail-end of the Brown administration fell in part due to the fact that there was no agreement on what represented a viable size for an authority, that the Minister, Hazel Blears, seemed to have no consistent policy on that point and that both opposition parties were clear that they’d reject any such proposal. It did not end well, with much effort and some resource wasted in the process.

What I didn’t really appreciate then, but do now, is the impact on the relationship between a Parish Council such as mine, and the principal authorities that we have to interact with. We become increasingly remote from the levers of power, and a lot of effort will be required to establish an effective working arrangement with a larger, further away, County Unitary. And, if they withdraw from discretionary service provision, whilst a town or large village might be willing to step in, how does my community, with an annual budget of less than £6,500, do the same?

But, if the Government are serious about (effectively) imposing such a solution on Suffolk, they will inevitably find a way of doing so. My fear is that, instead of one financially struggling County and five junior Districts/Borough doing alright, we’ll end up with a Unitary authority that, as has been the case in places like Somerset, increasingly withdraws from all but mandatory services for lack of funds. And that is not an outcome I look forward to with anything but dread…