September 1st 2020
District councils hit back in reorganisation row
District councils have warned that bigger local authorities are not necessarily ‘better or cheaper’ as the debate over reorganisation intensifies.
The District Councils Network (DCN) has today (1 September) published a new report, which argues that lower tier authorities should play a key role in the government’s forthcoming Devolution and Local Recovery White Paper.
It argues that district councils ‘represent the best of local government’ and that government should deliver ‘genuine devolution’ which drives local growth.
It comes just days after the County Councils Network published a report of its own, which claimed that merging districts and counties could save £3bn over five years.
The DCN report calls for an upper population limit for any new unitary authority of 500,000 people to prevent an ‘unacceptable divergence from the principles of electoral equality’.
‘The primary case for county unitary councils focuses on achieving scale and savings,’ the report states.
‘However, as a House of Commons briefing for MPs summarised in 2019, all the evidence is clear that increasing scale is no guarantee for increasing efficiency or improving public services.
‘Meanwhile county councils have promoted questionable projected savings from county unitary proposals, which focus on removing delivery capacity and do not come close to resolving the funding challenges facing local government; evidenced by the significant financial challenges facing recently created unitary councils. In fact, rooting services in locality could be most effective in achieving long term financial sustainability,’ the report adds.
It also says district councils are the ‘building blocks for growth’ with the ‘levers to make it happen’.
‘Districts are lead authorities for the Towns Fund and Future High Streets Fund, already providing the leadership, partnership and local know-how and experience to remodel our town centres into thriving centres of community, leisure, and retail,’ the report states.
‘We need to go further and faster in investing in our town centres as centres of community and have further powers to shape places including lowering of PWLB loan rates.’
The report also calls for district councils to be given new powers to ensure utility companies move at pace, set planning fees locally and invest in new social housing.
Photo Credit – Monika1607 (Pixabay)