Local government structure in England is a hot-potch mess - Yorkshire Post Letters

I have relatives in various parts of Australia and I was exploring, as one does, their local and regional government websites. I was struck by the clarity and simplicity of their arrangements.

For the city of Gold Coast, in southern Queensland, I found this admirable overview on the webpage - "Federal Government: major highways and defence; State Government: schools, police and hospitals; Local Government: roads, libraries, swimming pools etc".

Contrast England where we have not stopped faffing about with various levels of sub-national government since 1965 yet have only managed to make things steadily less clear or simple.

We pat ourselves on the back for having supposedly devolved power to elected mayors but in reality we've just created a hot-potch and a patchwork quilt, impenetrable to most of us unless we have serious time and energy on our hands to be able to find out what the latest arrangements are and how they are supposed to work.

Even if we manage to get to grips with our local authority, we then find that the NHS, the MPs, and the Police have their own entirely separate geographic structures, distinct from the local authority boundaries - and that's before we look at the archaic thing known as ‘the Church of England’ which thinks the country has two parts, the south with its capital in Canterbury and the north with its capital, rather agreeably for Yorkshire-folk, in York.

How many people in England could have a good go at answering the question: ‘Do we have regions in England?’ or ‘What's the difference between a county, a combined authority, and a borough?’

It's a gigantic mess. Decades ago, somebody should have blown a whistle and demanded that we come up with a clear schema either for the whole of Britain or at least for the whole of England.

Instead it has unplanned lurches from one half-baked set of changes to another, and another, forever. Scotland and Wales have managed rather better - but the state of things in England is truly shocking.

I'd love to see a series of articles in The Yorkshire Post setting out the history of each of these failed, futile reorganisations since 1965 and explaining the situation we have ended up with. We could take a look at Australia if we want inspiration.