We have the County Council Elections coming up soon.
Whichever party wins, we are going to have five new County Councillors for our area, because none of the sitting Tory County Councillors are standing again. In particular, the greatly-respected Roy Pearson sadly died a few months ago.
The biggest shock is that Stephen Castle isn’t standing again for Rayleigh North. This seems to be have surprised quite a few in his own party – it certainly surprised us! We are told that this is for personal and family reasons, and we wish him well for the future.
The up-coming elections have had me thinking about the system of local government. Here we have
Parish Council
Town Council
District Council
County Council
I assume that the rest of the country is organised in the same way.
Now, every single one of those takes some of our Council Tax for a whole variety of reasons. The question is, is now the time to really look at reorganising this. Does any district really need four tiers of local government. Why not abolish two of them, say Parish Council and either Town or District Council, and have just two. I would keep Town Council over District personally. Make those that are left as efficient as possible. No twinning trips, expenses capped at a maxmimum amount,no overseas fact finding trips. I’m not suggesting that Councillors don’t work hard, but I’m sure that Councils could work more efficiently if departments were amalgamated, if some layers of decision making were stripped out. No private firm would operate with so many tightly concentrated layers. It might even reduce our Council Tax as well.
Christine.It is only three tiers as Town Council and Parish Council are the same tier .Parish and town councils normally do the job voluntaraly whereas District and. County have increasingly high allowances and expenses . I agree that the system appears to be inefficient and there is a lack of interest in the local democratic process. I think there is a case for compulsory voting as in Australia .
Interesting question you ask, Christine. Thanks for raising it.
As A. Matthews says, it is three tiers here :
Parish Council or Town Council (eg Rayleigh Town Council, Rawreth Parish Council, Hullbridge Parish Council).
Rochford District Council
Essex County Council
I can see why people may think this is inefficient, but when all the different layers are working properly things should go smoothly, because the different layers generally have different functions. You wouldn’t say that having Boots, Martins and Iceland in the same High Street was inefficient, would you, that they should be merged?
Parish Councils do a lot of ‘bread and butter’ work, their meetings tend to be a little less formal and much friendlier. You can get 15 residents coming along to Rawreth Parish when a meeting of the District Council will have nobody in the public gallery. And I think the most important function of a parish council is that once in a while a big issue comes along when a village needs its own council to represent it – not one or two district councillors , or one county councillor (and the county councillor may cover other villages as well). So I would certainly keep parish councils.
What about District Councils? Rochford District Council covers things like refuse collection, grass cutting , sports centres and most imnportantly planning applications. I’m happier having planning applications for our area decided by councillors from Rayleigh and Rochford rather than from Clacton or Braintree.
County Councils deal with the big stuff like major highways and crucially these days, social services and care services. You need to be a pretty big council to deal with stuff like that efficiently. (Of course the potholes situation is pretty dire, but at least we have the District and Parish to exert a bit of leverage).
Next door in Southend that have a sort of 1 1/2 layer system. Southend Borough is a unitary authority that does all the County and District stuff. Plus in Leigh they have a Town Council as well
You COULD stick Rochford and Castle Point into Southend, to make a bigger unitary. In theory its a decent idea, but in our specific circumstances I think it would be bad for us. I understand Southend has lot of debt (we don’t), so amalgamating would bring our council taxpayers to help deal with the debt. Plus we have so much green belt that Southend would then have control over….
The system is only as good as the people that stand for office and are elected. At the Town Council level we tend to be people who can direct ward members to the right phone no. or person to contact etc. Most complaints are pretty mundane e.g when then street lights went out in Down Hall ward although very important to those living there. You need some one who lives in and represents a small area who walks around the ward identifies problems and can be identified by those he/she represents. In this case small councils are important.
Thank you for that both of you. No, I wouldn’t want to see Southend have control over our green belt, or indeed anything else here. They seem to have enough problems dealing with what they’ve got already.
It just appears, to a layman not involved at all, that so many people have their fingers in the pie, and when you read things like the expenses problems at County Council level it makes you wonder if there isn’t a better way. Perhaps being retired has left me with too much time on my hands to think about these things!
Never say you have too much time spare. Chris will have you delivering leaflets and I will rope you in for volunteering for the charity my wife and I work for at Christmas.
Only got spare time due to the weather. Once it gets warmer the garden will take up my time and energy. That’s assuming it ever does get warmer!
The cold weather is due solely to the Russians who use massive wind turbines to send us freezing weather. They can then sell as gas at absorbitant prices. The profits of course being used to buy premiership football clubs.
I blame the Government. The moment some idiot said there was a drought (about a year ago now) it started raining and hasn’t stopped since