in message <[email hidden]>, Sue White
(') said:Simon Brooke <[email hidden]> whizzed past me shouting
Quoted message said:
However, the real problem is that our local government areas are vastly
too large. I'm not certain that they're the largest (by population) in
the world, but they're certainly the largest (by population) in Europe.
In some areas they make sense though. Splitting Reading up into
separate sub-municipalities would make it extremely difficult to
manage, while at present nobody is more than three and a half miles
from the
Civic Offices. There are probably about 150,000 of us which is a lot,
but at least it's compact.
OK. Langholm, in Dumfries and Galloway, is closer to Preston, in
Lancashire, and to Perth, in Perthshire than it is to Drummore, in
Dumfries and Galloway. Drummore, in Dumfries and Galloway, is closer to
Drogheda, in the Republic of Ireland for heaven's sake, than it is to
Langholm in Dumfries and Galloway. By road it's worse. Autoroute reckons
it takes 2 hours 53 minutes to drive from Langholm to Drummore. In the
same period you could drive from Langholm to Cannock in Staffordshire,
which isn't exactly the north of England.
And yet we still expect the councillor from Langholm to make 'local'
planning decisions related to Drummore, a place to which he's probably
never been - and vice versa. One size does not fit all. Dumfries and
Galloway (you can tell it's not a natural region, it doesn't even have a
name) may only be 137,000 people, but it isn't even remotely compact.
You cannot - you simply cannot - organise 'local' government on this
scale.
--
[email hidden] (Simon Brooke) http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
;; ... exposing the violence incoherent in the system...
