Letter: Do We Know Enough to Consider the Prospect of a Town Council?

Published on: 15 Jan, 2026
Updated on: 15 Jan, 2026

From Bernard Quoroll

former local authority CEO

In response to: Borough Council Launches Second Stage of Town Council Consultation

“A few things to bear in mind when deciding how to respond to the second stage consultation…

At the first stage, 33,000 households were consulted, so about 52,000 electors. Of those, 647 respondents indicated support, out of only 1,116 replies. This is a 1.2 per cent response rate and hardly a crushing endorsement. GBC seems not to have listened to its own electors in pushing on regardless.

The carefully worded response from Surrey County Council, as a key consultee, was clearly negative in tone, suggesting prematurity, extra cost to taxpayers and the potential for misalignment with the new unitary council’s own yet-to-be-formed proposals for engagement, as well as being a distraction from the overwhelming need to deliver major structural change in record time.

There is a disturbing hint in the outgoing county’s response, that the new successor council would intend to be firmly in the driving seat on community engagement. I am not sure how they can know that, but if so, it does not bode well for any engagement proposals coming forward. A new unitary council will need to behave very differently from its predecessor if it is to earn respect and support from all its citizens in future. It will need an entirely new engagement culture and not just be the reincarnation of what went before.

If Guildford Borough Council makes no order after the second stage consultation, that is not, necessarily, the end of the matter. The new West Surrey unitary council, not yet in existence can itself undertake a community governance review in respect of all parished and potentially parished areas and would be under some pressure to do so.

At that time, it could also look at the boundaries of existing parishes adjoining the town and others, bearing in mind substantial development proposals coming forward. Any authority-wide scheme for local consultation and partnership could more effectively be jointly hammered out in public rather than simply bestowed on communities by the new unitary council. There is strength in numbers.

Detailed proposals for land and asset tranfers and delegations of local powers consistently across the whole of its area could also be negotiated.

There is, incidentally, also a quite separate statutory right for a petition to be mounted by a percentage of electors so as to require community governance reviews.

Our outgoing county council has already made much about the potential to form area-based advisory committees and something similar was offered as an alternative in the first stage consultation but without meaningful detail. Such mechanisms are routinely promoted by larger councils as compensation for the loss of local decision making.

In my experience they rarely work well and are sometimes used more to “manage” local communities than respect their wishes. I would at least like to understand what is proposed in detail by the new council before voting to replace one tier of local government with another.

Parish and town councils undertake valuable but routine, very local services which are of little interest to unitary councils except as a means of transferring costs. Parish councils have their uses, the most important one for me being an obligation to be consulted on planning applications, but I would want to understand what local services would be delegated to a new parish council and its true cost implications before deciding whether to vote for one.

I would also like to understand whether local community assets which should be transferred to the new parish have been properly identified and agreed.

The fundamental point remains however that civil parishes on their own do not in any meaningful sense bridge the democratic deficit created by the formation of very large unitary councils. To assert otherwise is naive or disingenuous.

Large councils move government further away from local people and closer to central government. Parish councils increase the cost of services overall and distract attention from the fact that all the decisions which matter will in future be taken outside their local communities; always, no doubt, in the cause of “a greater good”, by councils who have not learned to listen.