“Great news” as Devon council shake up put on hold
Councillors across the political spectrum at Devon County Council have welcomed the government decision to review council restructuring plans
The Government’s announcement yesterday (Monday, September 7) to review local government reorganisation and scrap the existing council structure has received cross-party support from Devon County Council.
Devon County Council leader Julian Brazil welcomed the decision to pause the plans to create four unitary councils across Devon as “great news” while others said the decision provided “hope.”
The announcement yesterday followed months of scrambling by the county and district councils after the government mandated Devon and other counties must be divided into large unitary authorities.
It would have meant the scrapping of all district councils and county, with various options on the table, but ministers went for one that left Plymouth, Exeter and Torbay as unitaries and the rest of Devon lumped into a rural ‘coast and countryside’ council.
Housing, communities and local government minister Angela Rayner told Parliament yesterday that the decision followed legal advice.
As well as Devon, the process will be paused in 13 other council areas and decisions already made on Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk will be withdrawn. Those areas had already launched legal challenges against the plans.
The decision means local elections will go ahead as normal next May on existing council boundaries.
Devon county leader Councillor Brazil said it was “good news for the people of Devon.”
He added: “We now seem to have a prime minister who listens and this is a mature decision by the government. We can work with a government that listens.
“There’s no doubt LGR (local government restructure) has been costly, but it has been the catalyst to deliver reforms to streamline local government and we’re working well with district councils on that.
“We have said all along that you need to let us do it our way. We are best placed to deliver that.
“If the government wants a strong economy, you can’t mess up local government which is one of the building blocks to achieve that. We need a mayoral system to deliver a strong economy.”
Councillor Michael Fife Cook, leader of the opposition at Devon County Council, said: “The older you get, the more you end up cherishing messages of sanity and hope.
“The rethinking on LGR is not just for my generation to be thankful, future generations will come to realise, you don’t throw away a whole system for a few faults, we now have the opportunity to try harder for the future of Devon and not to waste £80million on rebranding and reinventing the wheel. This has been a good day for us all.”
In the announcement, Angela Rayner said the government is committed to reorganisation but working “with local people.”
She said: “The prime minister told the House last week, he was ‘prepared to look at local government reorganisation’ and he asked me as his communities secretary to 'do that'.
“In that context, in light of legal advice, I want to satisfy myself firstly that the right process is in place, that it is robust and of course complies with the law. And secondly, I want to fully test whether our proposals for local government reorganisation meet the priorities of a new administration and a new prime minister.”