Westminster Report

BY the Rt Hon Mark Francois MP, Member of Parliament for Rayleigh and Wickford.
LGR: Labour’s “Trojan Horse” to Cover us in Concrete.
We now have a new Prime Minister, in Andy Burnham. It’s early days in his premiership, but the so-called ‘King of the North’, constantly seeks to emphasise his northern heritage and has even created an outstation of Downing Street known as “Number 10 North”. However, my constituents don’t live in the North but in the South and I am concerned by his apparent lack of attention, to what goes on south of the Midlands.
Nevertheless, Labour do appear to be pressing on with their plans for so-called “Local Government Reform” (usually abbreviated to “LGR”). The essence of Labour’s argument is that local government functions will be performed more efficiently, including in counties like Essex, if we change from a two-tier system of local government into a single tier, with Essex being broken up into five unitary authorities. There are, however, a whole range of practical problems associated with this idea that “big is beautiful”.
Firstly, it’s not true. We currently have a “two-tier system” of Essex County Council and below that a number of districts/boroughs/city councils (such as Rochford and Basildon for instance). Labour’s plans would create a new “Mayor of Essex” – although somehow we seem to have gotten by without one for nearly 1000 years – as the upper tier and then the unitary authorities would be the lower tier (the third tier, town and parish councils, are relatively unaffected either way). So, from the outset, you can see this is not as much of a streamlining as Labour would have us believe, not least as the Mayor of Essex would have similar powers to those held by the current Mayor of London – and the last thing we need in Essex is another Lord Sadiq Khan!
Secondly, this would involve several years’ worth of painful reorganisation, making lots of loyal local government officers redundant and it would probably take a full five years or so for the whole system to really settle down. For councils that currently spend several billion pounds a year in providing public services, the total saving in revenue costs at the end of the entire process, according to the latest estimates, would be barely more than £50 million a year, across Essex; a fraction of the current spend. In other words, the game isn’t worth the candle (or as the Americans say, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze).
Thirdly, there’s really no demand for it. In 25 years of canvassing across my constituency, I have never, once, EVER been asked by a constituent on the doorstep to create a Mayor of Essex. Moreover, in a recent opinion poll, conducted by YouGov across the county of Essex, when Labour’s proposals for five unitaries were put to voters, they were clearly rejected by a margin of 56% to 24%, or more than two to one.
I know from my own experience as the local MP, people that live in the Rochford District do not want to be forced into a shotgun marriage with Castle Point and Southend. If this proposed “South East Essex Unitary” were created you only have to glance at a map to guess where that new council, headquartered in Southend, would try and build all the new houses that the Government demands (which is exactly why Labour wants it!)
Similarly, if Basildon was shotgunned together with Thurrock (to form the “South West Essex Unitary Authority”) that would involve my constituents in Wickford having to pay out considerable amounts of money in interest payments, to subsidise Thurrock’s very large debts.
In truth, the whole point of this exercise is to break up well-established local government units and to try and establish larger, less accountable councils, as part of Labour’s overall drive to build 1.5 million houses, over the course of this Parliament. At present, they have built barely 300,000 in two years and are absolutely nowhere near hitting that target, on which almost all of their major economic projections rely.
This whole scheme is a “Trojan Horse” to achieve that. For anyone concerned about defending our Green Belt – which we have a lot of in the Rochford District – these plans are very dangerous indeed, not least as they completely lack the new infrastructure required.
A chief advocate of LGR was Steve “Build Baby Build” Reed, the former Housing Secretary, since sacked by Andy Burnham. However, this responsibility now falls to Angela Rayner, who hails from Manchester and knows very little about Essex.
As I write this article, in August, it’s still unclear as to whether or not these plans will actually go ahead. The Government still need to move an Order in Parliament this autumn, to create the five new unitary councils. However, a judicial review, brought by both Conservative and Reform-led councils in Essex, has challenged the highly-political basis on which these five new authorities were cooked up – but that case might not be heard until the New Year.
So, in summary, the whole thing is now a complete mess. Those who serve in local government, still don’t know, one way or another, what is actually going to happen and neither do Essex residents.
My genuine advice to Labour Ministers is to drop the entire thing and let our existing councils concentrate instead on solving more immediate problems, such as filling in potholes and trying to come up with a workable Rochford Local Plan, in order to better resist speculative development across our District.
The people of Essex don’t want LGR; as that poll very clearly shows – and Labour refuse to hold an Essex-wide referendum on it. As your MP, I’ve been opposed to the whole process from the outset. I very much hope that common sense may yet prevail, the whole barmy scheme will be abandoned, we can protect our precious environment in the Rochford District instead.
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