Political View: Getting reorganisation halted is another success

The result was Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (HCLG), Angela Rayner, being forced into an embarrassing, humiliating public climbdown on LGR following privileged government legal advice – withdrawing the planned restructuring decisions for Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk and pausing LGR for 14 other areas, including West Sussex and Cambridgeshire & Peterborough.

What this means for Cambridgeshire is that the geographical salami-slicing of the county into three unitary authorities: Greater Peterborough, Mid Cambridgeshire and Greater Cambridgeshire will not now progress, until and unless government’s legal advice changes, and the previously planned local elections (elections by one-third) will proceed next May, instead of the all-out elections mandated by LGR.

Reform UK have been opposed to LGR since its inception. As a party, we feel that the government’s plans to replace historic two-tier local government (district and county councils) with unitary councils (such as with Peterborough) is an expensive, ill-thought through, ideologically-driven waste of public money – wasteful to the tune of several billion pounds. It has also been suggested that rural and coastal areas will be disadvantaged by LGR, in favour of big city priorities. Locally, Cambridge’s and Peterborough’s priorities might come before those of the proposed Mid Cambridgeshire unitary authority (comprising: Fenland, East Cambridgeshire and East Huntingdonshire).

Another potential disadvantage of LGR, arising from merged district budgets and altered boundaries, could be that vital local services are put at risk and decision-making stalled. Consider a slimmed-down cohort of Council officers but with the same workload as that previously shared across two councils, and it is easy to see how the administrative day-to-day work of the council for residents could give rise to the impression of services grinding to a halt.

Over the last couple of weeks at Peterborough Council, there have been grumblings amongst Councillors over the proposed Option D version of LGR. This proposal has been modified by the Labour Leader to now only include from Huntingdonshire: Yaxley & Stilton and Folksworth & Washingley Wards – a reduction in the number of Huntingdonshire wards within the ”Greater Peterborough” proposed new unitary authority. As readers will be aware, Huntingdonshire is traditionally a right-of-centre area in terms of political representation.

Whilst all-out local elections next year would likely see the Reform UK Group at Peterborough gain many more councillors (based on winning the popular vote, securing 27.1% of the vote share on 7 May of this year) we believe that locally it is in Peterborough’s and Cambridgeshire’s best interest not to restructure local government and remove district and county councils, both in existence for over 130 years, for a local-form of ”big government”.