Inevitably the Local Government Reorganisation Review currently being carried out by the Boundary Committee was one of the topics discussed at the Seminar for Babergh Members held on Thursday.
The date for the preliminary announcement with regard to unitary arrangements for Suffolk will be 7th July. The Committee will come up with just ‘one option with a possible variation’. This means that some of the Councils in Suffolk, who have already been asked to express their preference, are likely to be disappointed, since there is little or no consensus across the county with regard to the ‘right’ way ahead.
In contrast to Babergh, which true to form did what they were asked to do by the Committee and then got on with the day job, many other local authorities (notably the County) invested a good deal of time and taxpayers money on working up and publicising quite detailed schemes.
Their action has meant that the Committee has been obliged to go back to a number of Councils for clarification. Our Chief Executive, hearing about this, and having heard not a peep from the Committee herself, became rather concerned that our submission had not been of much interest to them. (You will remember that Babergh argued for an East/West split, but submitted a paper to the Committee which ranked the various possibilities in accordance with the criteria set by them. The paper is available on the Babergh website for those who are interested)
We were gratified to hear that Pat Rockall, Babergh’s Chief Executive, was told that far from being uninteresting, Babergh’s efforts have in fact been very useful to the Committee and our comparative thinking on the question has saved them some time and effort.
Let’s hope this means that they will settle on our suggestion for two unitary authorities for the county. The more I think about it, the more I feel that the One Suffolk Unitary idea would be a really bad for local democracy. Cheapest isn’t always best, and it is arguable that it wouldn’t even be the cheapest.
