Back to Oxfordshire - Words (almost) fail me!

I cannot think of any local government reorganisation proposal that is as badly thought out as this (and the competition over the last 50 years is pretty fierce), in particular, the one that affects me directly, the proposed new Ridgeway Council.

Where do I start? You only need look at the map to see the following-

1 – The transport network, road and rail, covering the area makes it impossible to chose a sensible seat of government for the area. There is nowhere that has good connections with all of Newbury, Hungerford, Lambourn and the Kennet valley; Didcot, Abingdon, Wantage and Wallingford and each of Henley, Faringdon, Watlington and Thame. If service departments from the county, West Berkshire Unitary and current districts are to be combined, they are going to have to keep or open a network of maintenance depots and outstation offices to serve the area adequately. And before any idiot starts parroting the usual gibberish about “well everything is on-line these days”, you cannot maintain and inspect roads, schools, leisure centres, day-care facilities, parks and nature reserves, waste and recycling depots, deliver adult social services or carry out site meetings and inspections from your laptop. It all points to an inefficient and costly geographical structure.

2- There’s going to be a huge amount of time and money spent in administrative re-organisation. Unless West Berks (as an established unitary authority) is simply going to step in and assume the role for all functions currently reserved to the county in Oxfordshire, there will be across the board redundancy consultations across at least three authorities. South Oxon and Vale of White Horse currently sharing many (most?) district-level functions, but there will be duplication with West Berks on these and with the to-be abolished Oxfordshire on the remainder.

3 – The boundaries of the authority make no sense. There’s a substantial part of the built-up area of Reading in West Berks – most of Tilehurst, all of Calcot, Purley and Theale. All have good bus links to Reading town centre, two have stations on lines into Reading. Yet South Oxfordshire and the Vale are losing land to the new Central Oxfordshire authority. There will now be a single council whose elected members will be making decisions on places they probably couldn’t find on a map. Lumping the towns I refer to above is simply ridiculous.

4 – This is also going to perpetuate the battles between the Oxfordshire authorities on the sharing out of housing allocations. Central Oxfordshire will refuse to increase housing numbers, Ridgeway will try to put them all in Thame and Didcot but face pressure from Reading to bear their share of their numbers, North Oxfordshire and Ridgeway will push back against Central Oxfordshire, pointing out (correctly) that there’s plenty of “grey belt” around the city, so none of them will produce compliant local plans.

5 – A lot of time, effort and resources has been spent in recent years on county-wide matters in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. I have participated in the formulation of a Local Nature Recovery Strategy alongside dozens of local naturalists that was co-ordinated and funded by Central Government, and a similar strategy has been developed in Oxfordshire, both processes resulting in formal adoption of the strategies by the relevant authorities last autumn. There are Fire and Rescue services, Local Enterprise Partnerships, and many voluntary organisations and groups are organised on a cross-county basis. What happens to all these? I expect OxRAIL 2040 will remain in the drawer….

I await (with some trepidation) the next move in the proposals in bringing forward a combined mayorality for Berkshire, Oxfordshire (and possibly Swindon). There’s an uncomfortable feeling that by the time this comes to fruition the new unitary authorities will have all invested in staff, premises and resources for the functions that will then by appropriated to this authority, so more waste and confusion will arise.

As a Berkshire person, there’s just one possible positive outcome. Much of Ridgeway was in Berkshire before the 1974 local government changes. I think it’s about time we reclaimed that land! Ridgeway for Berkshire – NOW!

 

If it happens West Berkshire will be happy that they don't have to have any connection with Reading. They probably moan that they didn't get there to include Swindon.

Can't many advantages to West Berks, it has been a unitary authority for over 30 years. Like the rest of Berkshire unitaries they were full of grand ideas until it cam to coughing up the money.

 
Likewise Devonshire although we have raised Oxfordshire's plan by one council; Devon County Council and eight district councils together with the two existing unitary authorities - Plymouth & Torbay - are to be replaced by four new unitary authorities - 'Greater Exeter', 'Greater Plymouth', 'Greater Torbay' (I've no idea what they are actually going to be called) and Devon Coast & Countryside.

Personal Opinion Alert: I have always thought, and said so in the online consultation (using more polite language), that this was, is, and will remain a completely crap proposal. Largely driven by the self-serving administrations in Plymouth, Torbay & Exeter who were seemingly more interested in retaining their own influences rather than acting in the interests of all Devonians. I think this will lead to the three urban-centric authorities sucking up all the commercial & financial resources of Devonshire with the new Devon Coast & Countryside unit left to deal with the scraps of a largely rural community stretching from Ilfracombe (N) to Start Point (S) and Holsworthy (W) to Axminster (E), around 110 miles in each direction.

FWIW my view was that three unitary authorities centered around Exeter, Plymouth & Barnstaple would have been a better model, which would have allowed the total population of c. 1,260,000 to be split into three bits of roughly equivalent size. Does Torbay warrant being a unitary authority in it's own right? Nah!

 
... may have implications for transport, including rail, across the county. Article from the Oxford Clarion, which among other things wonders what now happens to the work done on the County Council's OxRAIL 2040 project.

Mark

https://oxfordclarion.uk/the-final-cut-its-three-councils/