Dear Editor

I understand that Government Ministers are planning to pass a new law to give themselves unprecedented new powers to scrap either district or county councils, once done the Government will be able to force changes on local communities, including creating new councils that completely disregard existing shire boundaries.

Yet research by Cambridge University has estimated that the reorganisation costs of converting two-tier councils to unitary councils could be in the region of £121 per head, and “there is every prospect that on-going costs would in fact be increased”. Such a bill would be equivalent to £345 per council tax-paying household, this whilst Police authorities across England are already facing extra costs for their now-cancelled plans to restructure.

Northern Ireland is being used as a testing ground for the drastic council restructuring. Plans there to reduce the number of councils from 26 to just 7, are to cost £143 million. Identifiable localities like North Down will become part of anonymous ‘East Local Government District’.

Another restructuring of local government will do nothing to improve local services and could make town halls more distant from local people. I am very concerned that working families and pensioners, already suffering from punishing council tax hikes, could see their bills rise by up to £345, with little likelihood of any long-term savings.

Just as with the cancelled police force reorganisation, Labour’s real agenda is regionalisation by stealth. If England’s boroughs and counties are wiped off the map and replaced with ‘sub-regional’ hybrids, it will weaken local identities and create a vacuum in which the unelected regional assemblies will suck up yet more power.

If the Government really wanted to save money, it should start by scrapping John Prescott’s tiers of regional bureaucrats.

Yours sincerely

Esther McVey
Parliamentary Spokesperson
Wirral West Conservatives