Letter: Planned Council Reorganisation Means More Nails in the Local Democracy Coffin

Published on: 30 Mar, 2025
Updated on: 30 Mar, 2025

From Bernard Quoroll

Former local authority CEO and former Independent Person at GBC

In response to: The Future of Local Government: Your Views Are Important, Residents Told

Putting out a press release does not amount to meaningful consultation with the public. If our opinions were considered to be important or even relevant, they would have been properly canvassed before county and district political leaders cooked up their own sadly self-serving preferences behind closed doors.

Two unitary councils for Surrey could not in any way be regarded as local. As far as the three council option is concerned, Guildford and Waverley have more in common with Mole Valley than Woking, a town with which Guildford naturally competes for attention and resources and whose debts will be crippling. (There is even a case for considering four unitary councils in Surrey at population sizes which already successfully operate in London and elsewhere).

This whole exercise has been designed to fit a centrally preordained outcome. It is a Procrustean bed, constructed on the basis that only size matters and that the fewer annoying local councils central government has to deal with, in future, the better. Worst of all, it is woefully and inexcusably under-researched, something for which all council taxpayers will pay a price.

I worked in six local authorities, three of them as a chief executive and three of them, unitary. During that time I was involved in three wholesale reorganisations in different parts of the country. I learned that larger, more distant, less agile councils who overpay their officers, do not necessarily save money; that the uncounted cost of change is immense and that councils with real local connections work best for their communities and are in consequence more valued and better supported.

The people we elect are supposed to be our local champions. But their willingness in Surrey to fall in with centrally driven diktats smacks at best of naivety and at worst of a morbid desire to hammer yet more nails into the coffin of local democracy for some purpose which I am unable to fathom.

Do please wake up and smell the coffee.