How North Yorkshire Council’s unitarisation is already paying dividend - Carl Les

Indeed the situation is so dire that we are considering legal action, especially as the rhetoric that accompanied the decision suggested that “there is no evidence that rural services cost more to deliver”, “rural areas are more affluent” and “councils use this to bolster their reserves”.

Not in this council. This indicates to me that the logic is flawed and although I accept that it is the right of any government to make decisions that may be difficult i.e. unpopular, they must be based on evidence to be sound. Hence why we are taking advice on a Judicial Review, and we have in the last few days sent a “letter before action”.

This is the formal start of a process, in our vernacular a letter to say ‘Hey Up! This hasn`t been done right’. We wait to see what reaction we get from the government. I think other rural councils will be interested in our progress, but no others have been hit so hard as North Yorkshire Council. One positive reaction is to commit to a Fairer Funding Review. Why do residents in North Yorkshire have to pay more Council Tax than for an equivalent property in other places, including London, where property values and earnings are much higher?

However, back to Mr Rickaby. In a report approved two weeks ago by the Executive Committee I lead, and which will be presented to Council later in February, so fully in the public eye on both occasions, we showed that out of savings of £88.898m, 68 per cent ie £60.192m were attributed to LGR. I don`t have the necessary space allocated here, so I won’t list all the lines on the spreadsheets that back up the figures, but I will list the main subject areas and give some examples of where the new Council has been able to bring things together and use its size to gain improvements.

Commissioning services £3.579m - eg specialist housing for adults with needs.

Democracy £256k - less councillors and allowances, less election expenses.

Increased Income £10m - eg reviewing commercial waste collection esp regarding holiday lets, additional dividends from council-owned companies doing more work, sponsorship and advertising opportunities, expanding pet cremation services.

Procurement £12.55m - eg energy contracts across the whole estate, IT systems licencing.

Property £2.696m - rationalisation of necessary property eg vacating Jesmond House, and one floor of Belle Vue Mills.

Service synergy £20m - joining up services like Environmental Health and Trading Standards, bereavement services, reducing agency staff in planning offices, rationalising vehicle workshops.

Support services £8.635m – joining up teams and reducing numbers in legal, HR, IT, finance, committee services.

Technology £2.439m – moving eight systems into one, in more than one service application, reducing purchasing needs, maintenance, software updates.

I hope this gives Mr Rickaby, and anybody else who is interested, the evidence that he is looking for that not only was unitarisation the right thing to do to make local government more efficient, avoiding duplication and confusion about who does what, but as we predicted in our successful submission to government, a Conservative one at the time, it can and does save money.

No wonder the present government, Labour this time, is keen to continue with local government reorganisation as part of the devolution agenda. There may be different opinions about LGR, especially from those who consider their councils’ existence threatened, although it’s important to remember that under LGR all existing councils go to be replaced by one single new.

However, I think one thing that all councillors are united on is that we have too centralised a central government, and the devolution of decision-making from Whitehall to the Town Hall is a good thing.

A new element of our budget this year is the actual raising of extra funds from second homes. We have introduced this to tackle our housing crisis, and we will be the first council in England which will allocate all this extra revenue to do just that, tempting though it might be to use it to tackle other difficult problems like Home to School Transport.

Another part of housing is the Local Plan and to be very open we have published the 1,500 sites that landowners and developers have put forward for consideration. It is important to note that these are not approved or even preferred sites. The filtering for suitability begins now, but any site still has to go through the public planning application process to gain permission.

Carl Les is the Leader of North Yorkshire Council.