Cllr Lucius Vellacott is a district councillor in East Cambridgeshire and the Skills Scrutiny Lead for Cambridgeshire and Peterborough
In amongst the genuine hurt over plans to abolish East Cambs District Council – by some margin the UK’s best-run Council – in favour of a massive unitary authority, I have picked up a trend which I am starting to feel truly angry about.
Labour are centralising all power away from my residents and calling it devolution.
I have found myself deeply troubled by plans to amalgamate Cambridgeshire Constabulary into a regional police force covering most of East Anglia.
Our police teams are already immensely stretched. Preventative neighbourhood policing in our area covers all of East Cambs with just a handful of officers. Do this and we risk police feeling like they’re too far away and residents feeling that they trust them less because they don’t know who – or where – they are.
I have also noted that Integrated Care Boards, which administer our NHS, are going to be amalgamated into regional boards. Now a single board is to deal with just *incomparably* different needs (from Fenland to Cambridge, for example).
Moving responsibility for policing to regional mayors instead of focused Police and Crime Commissioners is neither here nor there – what concerns me is that Mayors will have police powers, fire powers, planning powers, growth powers, skills powers… what won’t they do? What won’t they be expected to be specialists in? Where does it leave councils – themselves getting much bigger?
Andy Burnham’s faux devolution means Mayors will still be heavily restricted by government in how they use their enormous range of powers (for example, they can’t lower local taxes with them – indeed taxes will need to rise to deliver!) – I strongly argue that it’s shifting blame for failure to do things themselves in Government.
Money will be diverted to worse-run areas even more extensively than it is now, when we haven’t dealt with massive inequalities within our region yet.
And we have a series of villages, missing out on buses because nobody is close by with the authority to decide, missing schools because they’ve been made more ‘efficient’ by using taxis to get kids into towns, missing a village police officer, missing all kinds of basic public services not because there’s no money but because there is nobody there who cares.
Bigger is not better and it is not even more efficient. Like everything wrong with this Government, it does the first step of the thought process (that’ll cost less) and not the next twenty (other stuff will fall apart).
It might be okay if you were doing just one identical thing everywhere. But local councils need to cater for a huge range of things, people and places. Even within East Cambs, Littleport and Snailwell are places which are vastly different. This amalgamation argument is a belief pedalled by Whitehall and is not at all reflective of the truth that is well-run local government.
If they took one proper, detailed look at East Cambridgeshire District Council, perhaps they might figure it out. Our trading company builds the homes we need, not our neighbours. Our Council Tax is frozen for 13 years because we don’t do too much. We have no debt. We have tens of millions in infrastructure funding. Our model doesn’t work elsewhere because it is for our area.
And in a countywide survey, we dominated on every metric – value for money, service satisfaction, worry about being overlooked. And make no mistake – we will be. It will be in the little things, one decision at a time made by people with NO STAKE in our lives.
Whitehall and the Government have turned a blind eye to the demise of the local in local government. People’s lives will be worse for it. It really, genuinely breaks my heart.
Make the area too big, and you save a tiny amount of money for a massive, massive loss in applicability.
That, and people lose faith that the word ‘community’ even applies to them any more.
Who can they truly turn to if everyone is too far away to know who they are?
Make local government local again.