'You won't notice a change in bin collections' new boss of North Yorkshire super-council reassures as he prepares for massive merger

Richard Flinton will oversee a budget of some of £1.4 billion as the new North Yorkshire Council will merge the seven existing district councils - Selby, Harrogate, Hambleton, Richmond, Craven, Scarborough and Ryedale, into one authority.

Scarborough-born Mr Flinton has worked in local government since joining North Yorkshire County Council in 1987 as a trading standards officer.

Following confirmation of his appointment, he said: “There’s real efficiencies we could make in how local government operates in North Yorkshire.

“And it's very much been an ambition of mine, to try and help to bring that to fruition.

“And therefore the opportunity to be chief exec of the new council is very rewarding for me.

“You are caught by the size of the role and the magnitude of the issues and responsibilities that are involved.

“So it's also very humbling, from that point of view. But I take a lot of confidence from the fact that there are some excellent people working in all eight councils who will be working on those issues.”

Mr Flinton is keen to ensure that the public don’t see any great difference in services the district councils provide - such as marriage and death registrations and bin collections - when the merger takes place next year.

“We hope on that first day that they'll see no difference because the idea is that all of the places that they would access council services from will continue.The public shouldn’t see any immediate impact,” he said. “They know where to go to access services. Leisure centres will be open, bins will get collected, all of those normal things will still happen.”

But it’s inevitable, given the cost of living crisis, that some cuts may be on the horizon, Mr Flinton said.

He said: “We’ve got to go through a number of years of some really in depth transformation as to how council services can operate, where we will need to make savings because we know that austerity is going to once again hit local government very hard.

“We need to make savings and we need to take the opportunity to transform services to be absolutely at the cutting edge of what local government can achieve.

“There are just so many issues pressing on everybody's daily lives, whether that's threats from emergencies relating to climate change or cost of living impacts. Councillors have more and more got to be seen to be standing alongside people and working on these massive issues.”

There are no plans to close any of the local council offices in the region, Mr Flinton confirmed, with the home-working introduced during the pandemic showing that it isn’t vital for staff to be exclusively based at County Hall in Northallerton.

The recruitment process for the new chief executive was open and promoted nationally before Mr Flinton was named as the preferred candidate in July