Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council has vowed to fight government plans to scrap historic local authority areas.
Leader Simon Tagg told a full council meeting on 9th January that “Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough has a long history of independence dating back to 1173 that has been confirmed and expanded by royal charters over many hundreds of years”.
Major reform to local councils is on the way
In December the government announced some of the most dramatic reforms to the planning system and local government in decades. This will see councils handed a swathe of new powers over things like transport, health services and the local economy. There will also be more power to decide how to use money given to them by Whitehall.
Announcing the plans, Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said they marked a “turning point when we finally see communities, people and places across England begin to take back control over the things that matter to them”.
The sticking point for councils like Newcastle is that under the plans, all local authorities will become unitary, and services often delivered across a large geographical area will be delivered by a single council. The current patchwork of borough, town and county councils will be replaced with single ‘super councils’, preferably led by an elected mayor.
Super councils take away power from the people
Writing in The Conversation, Jack Newman, a research fellow at Bristol University, warns that the downside of super councils is that power will move further away from local people. He adds that work needs to be done to revitalise local democracy and ensure that individuals and communities can make their voice heard.
This is a point also made by Tagg, who said that unitary authorities are “more remote” from the communities they serve and that super councils would not have the same focus on addressing key issues in the borough, such as revitalising the town centre or dealing with the ongoing problems at Walley’s Quarry.
At the meeting, members of the cabinet agreed the council would stand up for the borough’s historic independence and call on Newcastle-under-Lyme MP Adam Jogee to support their campaign.
Staffordshire councils have history of strong collaboration
Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council is a member of Staffordshire Leader’s Board, comprising the eight district and borough councils in Staffordshire, along with Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Staffordshire County Council.
The Board has written to the government pointing out that councils in the area have worked together to deliver services successfully for several years and are keen to explore new ways of doing so but feels there is no need for an elected mayor in the area.
Local government reorganisation, particularly when county and borough lines are redrawn, is a tricky business and one that stirs up strong emotions linked to relationships with place and identity.
As Tagg put it, losing the independence they have protected for so long and so proudly has been a “recurring threat” to the borough, adding that residents have fought it off many times before “and will get behind doing so again”.
