In Suffolk, previous attempts have run aground on the inability of the parties to agree. The County Council always wants a Unitary County, whilst the Districts don’t, and Ipswich wants the biggest unit that Labour can reliably control, some sort of “Greater Ipswich”.
In 2009, when Hazel Blears was promoting her own reorganisation agenda, we ran through pretty much that pattern, made more opaque by her apparent willingness to contort the stated criteria in order to achieve her desired goals. Not exactly gerrymandering, but not exactly just either. In the end, the promise by both opposition parties to scrap the whole thing, combined with the passing of time, did for the proposals.
This time, Jim McMahon laid down some criteria which seemed to rule out many potential options - a target population of 500,000 and a county with a population of 780,000 rather pointed to a County Unitary solution. But, unlike in 2009, when the Conservatives dominated the Districts here, now, Babergh, East Suffolk and West Suffolk are run by rainbow coalitions, whilst Mid Suffolk is dominated by the Greens. And none of them are keen on a County Unitary.
There has been some rowing back by the Minister too. Rumours that he’d be happy with a 4 or 5 Unitary solution for Norfolk and Suffolk combined (an average of 320,000 residents for each) create a whole new set of possibilities - Greater Norwich and Greater Ipswich (both good for Labour), a possible reincarnation of “Yartoft”, a bringing together of two struggling port towns plus a rural hinterland straddling the county boundary - but makes reaching an agreed decision that bit less likely.
We were to receive a presentation on behalf of the County Council and, in fairness, Andrew St Ledger, standing in for the County Chief Executive (I might have dressed more formally had I thought she was coming), made a decent stab at explaining things.
There were questions. Smaller Councils, such as my own, are concerned about potential asset transfers as the new cash-poor Council(s) withdraws from non-statutory activities. How does Drinkstone, or Creeting St Peter, cope with the financing of newly-acquired assets? Or, in the case of Stradbroke, a relatively small village with a leisure centre which serves a large geographical hinterland, how can the tax base cope if responsibility falls back onto it?
We talked of clusters, and how they might be organised, of the seemingly deliberate failure of the Conservative Group on Suffolk County Council to share their plans with Opposition councillors in real time. But it was an hour or so extremely well-spent, I thought.
I also got in a gentle dig at Suffolk County Council for its past failure to respond to Parliamentarian requests for briefings on reorganisation plans. Once again, Peers have been forgotten which, given that the required secondary legislation will receive most scrutiny in the Upper House, strikes me as churlish and potentially problematic. That might have struck home, given that Andrew St Ledger appears to be far more capable, and considerably more engaged than Stephen Meah-Sims did last year (albeit that this isn’t a high bar).
I do think that there is a genuine desire to include our sector in the planning of the new local government arrangements for Suffolk, which suggests that some lessons have been learnt. But there are still six months to go before final proposals are required, so I suspect much energy will be expended, and much debate had, before then.
1 comment:
I have sometimes wondered why it is that these unitary councils have to fit within county boundaries. For example, my sister-in-law lives in Haverhill almost right on the border of Essex and not far from the eastern boundary of Cambridgeshire, yet it seems that it will be linked with distant parts of Suffolk, rather than nearer conurbations.
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