Nick, my husband, came with me to the council meeting today. He has never been to Babergh before and I thought that he had better come while we still have something of interest to discuss. He was very impressed at the friendly welcome from councillors both known to him and unknown. He was also gratified that an officer turned up the lighting behind him so that he could continue to read the newspaper!
Once the meeting got under way however I am not sure that he saw the Council in its best light. There was some confusion not least with regard to why we were actually there. It seemed that councillors were not, as many had anticipated, being invited to give their final opinion on Local Government Reorganisation, since apparently more facts will be available before the deadline for submissions to the Boundary Committee on 26th September, but once again to give the Strategy Committee a ‘steer’ with regard to the Committee’s proposal.
I must admit that the whole process seems to have been going on for so long, with so many ‘steers’ and straw polls having been required at various meetings that I have pretty well steered myself into the ditch. I confess that at the start I set off in one direction but have more recently changed tack, at least on the subject of the principal proposal regarding the number of unitary councils that should be set up in the county.
I am not much of an admirer of the tactics of the County Council with regard to their championship of One Suffolk, which I think have been a little over enthusiastic to say the least, but I have come round to the view that this option is the least bad of the two possibilities on offer. This is a decision that I have come to purely on the basis of cost; if cost were not an issue the proposal for two unitaries would, I think, be vastly preferable. However I simply cannot believe that dismantling the County Council, which is about ten times larger than Babergh, will result in anything but additional costs that will undermine savings from the process as a whole. This was not the opinion of the Council as a whole today, so it looks very probable that Babergh will support the two unitary option at the final vote on 23th September.
I have for some time opposed the idea of redrawing the boundaries of the North Haven Unitary to include Hadleigh. As I said at the meeting today, to remove what is essentially a market town with its satellite parishes from the ‘Rural Suffolk unitary’, would be to drive a coach and horses through the entire concept of one ‘fast growth urban’ and one ‘historically based rural’ council that is the visionary basis of the Boundary Committee’s proposals. This is actually rather a political issue, with Hadleigh Councillors split between the Liberal Democrats, who want to go with North Haven (where there are fewer Conservatives, at least at present), and our one Hadleigh Conservative Councillor, Brian Riley, who does not believe that the people of Hadleigh wish to be part of an Ipswich oriented authority.
I was pleased to be able to second a highly dubious amendment by Councillor Riley proposing the exclusion of Hadleigh from the proposal to move the boundary. This set the cat among the pigeons for at least half an hour and enabled the Hadleigh issue to be well and truly aired.
Sadly those in favour of no change to the boundary lost the final vote, but the vote was closer than many might have predicted! And of course, because the vote was ‘only a steer’ the argument is not yet lost!
