Speaking on Politics South West two weekends ago (Sunday 3 November) Martyn Oates informed his viewers ‘It seems pretty clear that the Government wants to get rid of the remaining two-tier council areas’.

Should that happen South Hams District Council will soon be no more. Devon is an area in which the County Council comprises one council tier and District Councils, such as South Hams, the other.

To quote paragraph 2.98 of the documentation accompanying the recent Budget: ‘The upcoming English Devolution White Paper will set out more detail on the government’s devolution plans, including on working with councils to move to simpler structures that make sense for their local areas, with efficiency savings from council reorganisation helping to meet the needs of local people’.

Responding to Martyn Oates, South Devon MP Caroline Voaden had no problem should our District Councils disappear. She said: “I personally think there’s probably money to be saved if there was one council rather than ten or twelve districts plus a county. There would be fewer elections to fight and fewer leaflets to deliver, which would be very welcome.”

Noticeably she expressed no concern for those who might lose their jobs in order to help create any savings. Nor for the fact that decisions directly affecting her constituents, currently being taken by locally elected representatives, accountable to their communities, would instead end up becoming the responsibility of others many miles away.

Her reaction also appeared to directly conflict with the commitment made by the Lib Dems in their manifesto earlier this year to ‘decentralise decision-making from Whitehall and Westminster by inviting local areas to take control of the services that matter to them most.’

Earlier this year, as readers of this paper will remember, the Society along with many others argued that any decision by Devon County Councillors on whether or not to proceed with the creation of the Devon and Torbay CCA should be delayed until after the general election, when the intentions of the incoming government would then be known.

Yet of the seven county councillors representing the South Hams only one, Green Party councillor Jaqui Hodgson, chose to vote against the creation of the Authority.

Our four Conservatives, including Bickleigh & Wembury representative Cllr John Hart, who as the then Leader of the County Council, had been primarily responsible for championing the authority’s creation, could not wait to vote in favour.

And despite South Hams District Councillors themselves at a meeting of the full council on March 21 having ‘called for the process to be postponed pending the outcome of the forthcoming General Election and 2025 County Council elections’, Leader Cllr Julian Brazil and his Deputy Leader Cllr Dan Thomas, both Liberal Democrats and both Devon County Councillors, simply abstained.

They did so despite their colleague, Cllr John Birch having previously warned them the CCA was ‘just a preamble to the abolition of true local government in Devon’.

Richard Howell

Chair – for and on behalf of the South Hams Society