6 Cornwall - the problem of remoteness [p.15]

One issue identified in the report was the negative impact of having one authority for a large rural area. Issues identified included a lack of community governance and the  problem of additional responsibilities performed by a singe group of councillors. The latter issue is one which impacts on the ability of councillors to deal adequately with both strategic and local matters. By overloading councillors the danger is of reducing their ability to do their best for their constituents.

"The Local Government Commission points out the problem that large authorities have in "reflecting community interests and identities over a large rural area”, thus becoming "too remove from the area it serves" [LGC, 1993, p.20].  This was the principle argument against a single unitary solution for Cornwall. Although the ‘Campaign for Cornwall’ submission argues it is possible for a Cornwall Council to be accessible and responsive by devolved manages structures there is still a strong perception that unitary authority means government from Truro.  And both experience of the practice of recent County Council decision-making and the MORI poll which showed that people in East Cornwall were particularly critical of Cornwall County Council suggest that these perceptions might be difficult to change.

 

More fundamentally, the centralist assumptions of the local Government Review make a really developed council difficult to achieve in practice.  Within the local government framework we have there would be no direct local democratic input into any decentralised community bodies se up by a Cornwall Council.  As a result, the criticism that a single unitary authority would require “a complex and expensive network of new area offices and committees, which blur accountability” [Cornwall Association of District Councils, 1994, p.8] seems a reasonable one. A single unitary authority deal with all aspects of Cornish government would in any case have a very large and unwieldy number of elected councillors in order to ‘fit’ the assumptions of the of the Review. All these points have even more force when applied to the kind of regional authority we are suggesting in this booklet, an authority that would inevitably have more, rather than less, functions. Taken together, the criticisms of a single government authority for Cornwall seriously undermine its potential.

 

But the most important argument against a single unitary option is that it cannot build on the other, community, level of identity in Cornwall.  The best government for Cornwall has both to recognise its case for strategic powers, while at the same time taking into account the strengths of local grass-roots identities."

 

 Cornish Social and Economic Research Group, (1994), ‘Empowering Cornwall – the best government for the region and its communities’.