Home secretary, Jacqui Smith, is a very busy woman, what with knife crime and this week's police Green Paper. But, despite her workload, the minister has still had time to express her views about the wisdom of district councils sharing their top management teams. The districts which have commanded her attention are Bromsgrove and Redditch. Ms Smith just happens to be MP for Redditch. The two councils have decided to have a joint chief executive, sharing Bromsgrove's Kevin Dicks. Ms Smith was unhappy at the idea, saying it would eventually lead to a merger and Redditch would suffer (see p5). In the absence of introducing a full unitary system in England, an increasing number of councils in two-tier areas are working together, sharing services and management. It is certainly a direction of travel favoured by the Government, not only on efficiency grounds but on meeting the joined-up agenda. The announcement of seven groups of councils and partners forming multi-area agreement areas this week took this process even further. It was heralded by the CLG as ‘recognition that they can achieve more than the sum of their parts'. So Ms Smith, in her insistence that merging the management of two district councils is a bad idea, is going against the grain of her own government. But she is not alone. Local government reorganisation is bedevilled by the fact that MPs' constituencies in two-tier areas are generally co-terminus with districts, not counties, and MPs are not, of course, going to be turkeys voting for Christmas. Their attachment to their district power-base and their considerable behind-the-scenes lobbying power explains one or two of the more interesting decisions taken in the recent round of new unitaries. But it is an issue across all parties. David Cameron told councillors to great applause at the recent LGA conference that small was good, and there would be no more reorganisation if he became PM. But then, many of his foot-soldiers come from districts, as do his MPs. It will be interesting to see what happens now in the three counties, Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk, where county-based unitarites are on the table. Michael Burton Editor, The MJ
