Written evidence to be reported to the House
Local Government and Public Involvement in Health Bill
4:30 pm
Gordon Keymer: The whole exercise for inviting bids for unitary authorities has been most unfortunate. It has been costly. There have been no proven records of savings through unitary as opposed to two-tier authorities. It has caused serious division within the two tiers of authority, which will take a long time to recover from. It is a shame because we have just recovered from the experience of Banham and now we have this. However, it produced a couple of very important points about districts.
First, districts possess service provision and run an extremely tight operation on that. Secondly, districts must be given every encouragement to get their services from the most cost-effective source they can. Thatmay be from the upper tier—the county council—or it may be from their neighbours. In Tandridge, we are pioneering a lot of such work and acting jointly with our neighbours both within Surrey and across the county border. Although I think that the exercise itself has been unfortunate, there have been some good things and I should like to see every opportunity in the Bill to encourage the idea of flexible working.
To take your specific point, I am concerned about it. We were promised that 25 January would be a deadline for such matters, and that that would be the end of it. Mr. Woolas assured us of that, and I am sure that he did so with the best of intentions. However, we must be worried by the proposal. It suggests that what has not been achieved by stirring will be achieved by the Secretary of State, which is regrettable. If you would like me to propose a change to the Bill, I can say that the first thing I would hoick out of it is that proposal.