Local government reorganisation. A good thing, or a bad thing?
There are two sides to this coin. On the one hand, democratic accountability becomes more distant. For example, I know that people are uncomfortable when a planning decision for, say, Stourport is made by a council sitting in Kidderminster, with planning committee members from across the district. So that unease will be greater if a decision for Bewdley is made in Redditch by councillors from across the whole county.
But the other argument is that a unitary authority gets rid of the nonsense that we have with the current system. Walk out of your front door past your bins (collected by the district council but rubbish disposed of by the county), past the dog mess on the pavement (district council) to your car on the road (county council), drive your child, who might have to go to a special school (county council) to your disabled parents (county council) for a day out. You can see the confusion. Add to that the duplication of back office functions across multiple councils (seven in Worcestershire) and you can quickly see that reorganisation makes financial sense.
So how is it possible this government has messed it up so badly?
In their own consultation, they talked about an optimum population being around 500,000 people. Worcestershire is 621,000 - around a quarter higher than optimum. So what does the government do? Thats right, create two mini unitary authorities, the northern one (that includes Wyre Forest, Redditch and Bromsgrove) being 292,000, fully 42% smaller than optimum.
So, they take all the services provided by Worcestershire County Council - adult social care, children's services, education, highways, refuse disposal, big planning, and all the rest of it (including back office and administrative functions), and split that in two.
The whole basis of why the reorganisation was done in the first place is lost.
I got a chance to question the Secretary of State on this. He gave an answer, but it wasn't the answer to the question.
But what was remarkable about this brief engagement was not that those of us on opposition benches were grumpy about all this. You'd expect that of the opposition. What was remarkable was the incredibly hostile reaction that his own backbenchers gave. Steve Reed MP had a pretty miserable time from his own team. Let's see how he gets on in Monday's reshuffle.....
