It’s time for a big change at local level
I much agree with the Wiveliscombe Town Council’s recent cir
culated proposal, well supported by many other Somerset councils – from parishes upwards – for the county council (leader David Fothergill ) to defer taking any decision on the question of more major reorganisation of Somerset’s local councils – all five top ones to merge into one – until we have beaten the economic chaos and public health struggle posed by the Covid-19 pandemic and made more progress on action plans to tackle the fast developing climate emergency.
Certainly, the Fothergill talk of big savings in administration by scaling up with just one management team instead of five, and devoting these savings to better frontline services, sounds as good as it did when we had the same Tory argument for the recent merger of Taunton’s treasured Deane Council and West Somerset’s.
As we now all know, this Tory merger under leader John Williams proved disastrous, not only failing to realise the forecasted savings, but incurring desperate millions of extra transformation costs from breakdown in organisation and service delivery via gross mismanagement of staff redundancies, removing loads of good staff who then had to be replaced.
In fact, this debacle also removed nearly the whole Tory group and recrowned Liberal Democrats back to power in May 2019. Good time, David, definitely to back deferment?
If this Fothergill fantasy does attempt adoption, please could lots oppose it via putting public ‘questions/comments’ to the coming county council online meetings: Scrutiny July 15 next week, Cabinet Monday 20, and full council Wednesday, July 29.
Apart from hopeless timing of all this, there is as much a loss of active democratic engagement argument against it as there is cost savings for it, particularly in these emergency times – probably worsening – when more positive neighbourhood sharing and close council connected back-up are essential.
Somerset’s vast area, stretching from Porlock to Frome, would be better served by abolishing the county council and devolving not only much more power downwards from Westminster, but also making district and parish/town councils centres of real local control and citizen engagement.
For wider area and bigger size scales, obviously district partnerships and management teams could be strategic operators, like the present very successful Somerset Waste Partnership.
Time for big change. It’s down to us street-level people, not up to remote unknown elites.
Alan Debenham Taunton