On holiday last week I was amused to see this recycling bin, which has been hastily re-labelled to indicate that Alnwick District Council is no more.
Indeed signs of the demised body are still visible in many public places. The ghost of the late District Council lives on.
The new unitary Northumberland County Council was formed in the spring of 2009, and so has only been running for a little over a year. It has to be said however it has done little to rebrand itself! Even its name implies that this is simply an expanded version of the previous county council. In a recent article in the local authority press the Chief Executive continues to grumble about ‘District Council resistance’ to abolition, which doesn’t seem a very positive approach to me.
The new council is run by a Liberal Democrat minority cabinet and has only 67 members to cover the whole, huge, county. There are around 300,000 people in Northumberland.
A quick look at the website shows that arrangements to put community engagement structures in place have barely got off the ground, which must disappoint residents who have lost one whole layer of representation.
According to the Chief Executive’s article, the Northumberland unitary arrangements were supposed to achieve annual savings amounting to around £17 million. If that really is all that will be achieved, given the size of the council’s budget, the exercise hardly seems worth the biscuit.
At Babergh from time to time we claim to be sorry that unitary arrangements in Suffolk did not go ahead. However the Northumberland experience gives me pause for thought. It may well be that the half-way house offered by the merger with another District Council, turns out to be the better way forward.
