Letters: New Forest should become unitary authority on own

I have read with interest your coverage of the proposed local government reorganisation and what it might mean for us here in the New Forest.

Britain is one of the most heavily centralised countries in the world and the case for more devolution of funding and decision-making has been well made. For too long local councils have had to bid for scraps of central government money when the money should be given to elected councils by right for them to decide how to spend it.

Unitary authorities are surely a good thing, avoiding as they do the confusion that exists about who is responsible for what. I moved to the New Forest four years ago from Wokingham, an area which has been unitary since ‘administrative’ Berkshire was abolished in 1998.

Wokingham and its counterpart councils in Berkshire generally work well and the councils collaborate on a number of areas including recycling and trading standards. I was therefore very surprised to discover that the population served by New Forest District Council at 176,000 people is almost identical to that served by the unitary authority that is Wokingham Borough Council, a good indication on its own of the level of inconsistency that seems to define this country’s local government.

I also learn that, based on population, the New Forest is one of the largest district councils in the country and indeed in the 1990s was recommended by the Banham Commission to become a unitary authority in its own right, a proposal sadly rejected by central government.

The logical starting point is therefore that the New Forest should become a unitary authority in its own right, noting that this in no way precludes ‘shared services’ working with other councils in service areas where it makes sense to do so.

The problem is that Angela Rayner has declared that new unitary authorities in England should serve a population approximately three times larger (500,000 people) than the New Forest. Nobody can deny that by its very nature the New Forest has a distinct identity, with the added complication of the national park authority having planning responsibilities for the area it covers. The worst thing that could happen would be for the New Forest to find itself lazily ‘lumped in’ with and then dominated by the larger population of Southampton.

I find myself more in favour of regional elected mayors, mainly in the interests of democracy, visibility and accountability.

Somebody has to take decisions on major regional issues such as transport and strategic planning and it is far better that we can vote for that person ourselves rather than have a faceless ‘indirectly elected’ somebody do it in Winchester or, even worse, a politician or civil servant further away in Whitehall.

Jonathan Ruddle

Milford