Title

As yet, whatever commentators say, the picture is by no means clear when it comes to confirming the depth of desire for unitary status. Privately, many county leaders and chief executives are far more effusive about the case for unitary government than they are in public. The difficulty of making the case among cabinet colleagues and party groups presents one set of obstacles. Yet another is the state of paranoia existing among many districts for which the very whiff of a unitary bid is enough for them to man the barricades, thus ending any further sensible dialogue. The road between now and next month, when the applications must be submitted, is a tortuous one. The latest salvo in the public relations war suggests a saving of some £500m a year, if unitary government was to be introduced across all two-tier areas, a conservative estimate and admittedly, based on a small number of actual examples (see p3). However, the estimates will cause a flurry among shire districts, which will invariably see the savings coming from their own extinction. They will almost certainly leave Whitehall cold. Mandarins at the DCLG already have an idea of what savings could be made if unitary government was introduced efficiently across two-tier England but know the prospect of it happening is remote. They are much more interested in the content of the ‘virtual unitaries,' the pathfinders outlining ways of merging back offices, which were flagged up in the White Paper. These are attractive because they do not touch on the sensitive nerve of abolition, enabling the front-end, the districts and counties, to exist along with their democratic structures, while the support service costs diminish through merger. There are some commentators who believe a sensible option for the White Paper would have been to avoid inviting unitary bids altogether, but instead demanded from all two-tier councils a clear programme for back-office merging. This remains a possibility, once the pathfinders have been assessed, but the DCLG needs to offer greater inducement for this to happen. Yet there is hardly anyone senior in local government who does not appreciate the next few years will be considerably tougher on budgets than the last few. And they all understand that the only way of meeting rising demand for services on static revenue is by cutting the costs of bureaucracy.

Title

WHITEHALL

Virtual savings

SUBSCRIBE TO CONTINUE READING