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The Bradworthy Wind Turbines
Councillor
Christie's Weblog
From your Torridge District Councillor Peter Christie
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10th Aug '08
I don’t know how many people have been following the debate about the proposed changes to local government in Devon as I have to admit the subject is dry and fairly arcane but its results will probably dictate how Bideford develops for the foreseeable future. Needless to say local councillors at all 3 levels (town, district and county) are all very interested and recently town councillors got their chance to discuss certain aspects of the plan with county councillor Humphrey Temperley. Roger Vanstone put his finger on one major talking point in the current arguments for a single Unitary county-wide council. In order to ‘widen’ democracy 28 ‘Community Boards’ will come into being made up of elected councillors and community representatives but as councillor Vanstone pointed out whereas councillors are answerable to the public these representatives will be answerable to no-one but themselves. Councillor Temperley didn’t follow up this point but did ‘hope that the Board could reach a consensus decision about contentious ideas’ – but if it came to the crunch the Unitary councillor, who will be automatically chairing the Board, will have the final say – which led councillor Vanstone to wonder whether these Boards will merely be talking shops with no real power at all? Sadly I think this could be the reality of the new situation. Councillors Caroline Church and Andy Powell were both bothered by the perceived ‘democratic deficit’ where Torridge and North Devon area representatives would be permanently in a minority on a new Unitary they pointing out how difficult it would be for local views and voices to be heard down in Exeter – which councillor Temperley agreed with.
Following this meeting we held a special meeting to finalise our views on the Unitary proposals. At the start I moved that we stuck with the present system as it has worked fairly well since 1974 – a position eventually supported by 10 councillors with just the 2 Lib Dems voting against (with 2 abstentions). The debate was intense and a lot of excellent points were made though Steve Clarke pointed out the difficulty of reaching a decision with so little evidence to go on whilst Caroline Church had been so intrigued as to who the people making the final decision were she googled them – and found out that the first name was once the Leader of a council that found itself in dire trouble whilst others had no obvious qualifications for deciding the future of Devon. I raised two points, firstly Torridge had almost the lowest wages in Britain and could see its council tax levels rise when Devon wide levels were ‘evened out’. Secondly by yoking us to South Devon average wage levels will appear quite high – and thus we will never be able to draw down EU/central government funds to help overhaul our infrastructure and services. As I say many other points came up and Andy Powell adeptly boiled them down to 6 that we felt important and these were the ones we voted on. Tony Inch then suggested we send a copy of our decision and the reasons we reached it to all the other town councils in North Devon – which was accepted. Having sent this off our next step is to acquire a list of all TDC and Devon county ‘assets’ within the Bideford boundaries to see which we think should revert to the town council.
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