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Originally Posted by Escapee
I do actually think it's a good thing, my local council resisted when they were told to combine with another local authority. I am aware that redundancies have been announced in my local council and although I feel that there needs to be a shake up, I wonder if some union action will be on the horizon.
I think the timing and focus on this has much to do with the huge losses that are expected for Labour in the 2025 elections.
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Big losses will be a smack in the face to Starmer, otherwise why would he bother engineering the timing of this.
These elections are a chance for voters, including Labour ones to show their approval or not.
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The shire county councils that will disappear are mostly Tory. Starmer is delaying council elections, giving Tories longer in their county hall, and replacing them with unitary authorities in areas where they will likely still be Tory.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Damien
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This is a radical shake-up if you still live in a part of the country that somehow still has the local government set up that was implemented in 1974 (or something akin to it), but all of Wales, all of Scotland and most of England’s major towns and cities moved to unitary local authorities years ago and I’d be interested to hear what % of the population any of this actually applies to now. I suspect the noise being generated around this is due to the media and senior business types living in the shires and commuting into the major cities to work still being more familiar with two-tier local government than most of us.
Unitary local authorities are themselves imperfect of course, but metro-mayors have been a useful innovation that corrects for that where strategic oversight is needed (transport infrastructure in places like Merseyside, Manchester and London for example).