Insights: Unitaries Are Not Necessarily a Silver Bullet

Published on: 16 Aug, 2024
Updated on: 24 Aug, 2024

By Bernard Quoroll

former local authorities chief executive officer and former Independent Person at Guildford Borough Council

In response to: Unitary Authorities Are the Way Forward

Beware what you wish for.

Central Governments of all political persuasions (and the Civil Service) prefer to deal with larger unitary councils for reasons which have nothing to do with local democracy and much more to do with their own political and managerial convenience. (So-called devolution agreements in recent years have continued to create larger bodies by the back door with little consultation and arguably much less democracy).

This has happened under both Conservative and Labour governments, which in my experience are both profoundly ignorant about what local democracy should mean and remorselessly supportive of reorganisations which favour a centralising narrative. So do not hold your breath while thinking that a new Labour government would be any different.

Larger councils are less accountable to individual communities and employ larger numbers of more highly paid senior officers. I proved that as a district chief executive in Buckinghamshire in the 1980s, as a result of which, the government of the day abandoned plans for a unitary Buckinghamshire.

But a few years later, a unitary Buckingham was created almost by stealth by taking advantage of a timely alignment of local politics and without any serious examination of the costs and benefits. Why was I not surprised?

Yes unitary councils should make it easier to understand which body is responsible for delivering particular services and in theory ought to be more efficient. Yet despite repeated waves of reorganisations in recent decades, no one has actually done the sums to prove that, or identify the real cost of change.

The most compelling arguments for unitary councils are that they require related services to plan together rather than separately and that they can reduce competition between councils whose politics may be different.

But councils should be much more than just vehicles for delivering services. Large councils are by their nature much more distant from individual communities and much less aware of and responsive to their needs. The UK already has larger local authorities than almost anywhere in Europe but the trend here has been relentlessly toward larger, more distant and less responsive bodies with fewer councillors representing individual communities.

This last point is often not well understood by advocates of larger councils but it is a simple political fact of life when controversial matters are being voted upon.

As the former chief executive of a district council, a unitary London Borough and a unitary County, I would argue that councils should be large enough to create economies of scale and promote cohesive planning of services but small enough to understand and respond to truly local need. In Surrey that would mean councils which are larger than the current districts but much smaller than a unitary county.

Nor would I be diverted by claims that things like area management committees can overcome the political deficit created by large unitary bodies. In practice such arrangements have limited efficacy when resources are being deployed across a large geographical area or when big decisions affecting individual communities are being taken.

Would-be unitary councils will also tell you that a unitary Surrey would be a “new council”. That might be so technically but in practice a unitary Surrey would simply absorb all the smaller districts whilst emphasising the importance of parish and town councils whose powers are modest.

As always with such complex decisions, the devil is in the detail. It is important to understand the detail before making too many large assumptions about the benefits of unitary councils in a county as large as Surrey. You can be sure meanwhile that Surrey County would endorse the unitary arguments but down play the implications for local democracy.

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