When I am speaking to residents, they often raise with me concerns or difficulties regarding Wokingham Borough Council. Planning, potholes and over-hanging trees come up regularly. Never has a resident come to me asking for a new layer of Local Government bureaucracy.
Yet, imposing a new level of Local Government has become a priority for the Labour Government nationally – and now Liberal Democrats locally too.
Instead of focussing on delivering efficient and effective services for local people, Wokingham Borough’s Liberal Democrat leadership is spending its time on adding another expensive layer of local government. This would include an elected mayor and a ‘Strategic Authority’. These kinds of authorities have been established in other parts of the country, but crucially, this has always been through local choice. Now the Government has decided to impose this type of local authority on every part of England. They call it devolution but in reality, it is quite the opposite. Planning and transport decisions will be taken away from our local area and made at a remote regional level.
An elected mayor would be paid a large salary and would employ staff. The Mayor for West Yorkshire receives £109,000. Not only is that more than an MP, but that’s about four times the total allowance Wokingham’s Council Leader can claim. The strategic authority, designed to make some decisions and hold the mayor to account, would also employ staff.
As well as additional costs, the Government intends for Mayoral Strategic Authorities to have new tax raising powers. So, your Council Tax Bill will go up.
The Liberal Democrat Leader of Wokingham Borough Council has said he is “uneasy” about the power a mayor would have. But he added, “the prize in terms of funding for our region is potentially so great that it would be foolish not to engage with the government’s agenda”. A mayoral authority will lose the voices of our community, have another layer of government take over responsibility for strategic planning and transport, while charging people more – all for some funding that is unlikely to trickle down to Wokingham Borough. I don’t think this is a price worth paying.
The local benefits are also unclear. When asked if this much-vaunted funding would deliver a third Thames Bridge and other essential local infrastructure, the Leader admitted that hadn’t been discussed, let alone agreed.
We’ve seen this all before. Berkshire County Council was remote and fixated on larger towns, rather than smaller towns and villages in our area. The County Council was scrapped in 1998, following a grassroots campaign, with more powers devolved to smaller councils like Wokingham Borough.
It is difficult to see how the smaller towns and villages making up Wokingham Borough would be heard alongside large towns like Reading, Oxford, Slough or even Swindon.
We shouldn’t forget the Government still intends to force small unitary councils like Wokingham to merge. Labour’s policies will see Wokingham Borough forced to join with many other areas, swallowed up by a monster council that is remote from local residents.
We previously successfully fought to abolish Berkshire County Council because it was expensive, remote and an unnecessary extra layer of government.
Your local Conservatives believe Wokingham shouldn’t be bullied into this expensive, top-down rearranging of local government deckchairs.
By Cllr Pauline Jorgensen
