REPORT OF THE

CABINET/LEADER

REGIONALISM

1. The current policy of the County Council is to oppose regional government. Members will recall that the Council has previously voiced its concerns over such issues as the high cost of local government reorganisation across England (estimated at around £2bn), significant levels of opposition from the people of Hampshire to the principles of regionalism as evidenced by MORI polls, and in the case of Hampshire the sheer perversity of seeking to impose such a structure on a County Council which has obtained the "Excellent" category under the Government's own Comprehensive Performance Assessment.

2. On behalf of the County Council, the Cabinet has now responded specifically to two papers from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) which relate to the Regional Agenda, namely

· a paper entitled "Soundings exercise on the level of interest in each English region in holding a referendum about establishing an elected regional assembly"


· a consultation paper on the proposed statutory guidance to be issued in respect of local government reviews.


These responses are summarised in the following paragraphs.

3. On the "soundings" paper, the County Council's opposition to an elected regional assembly in the South East has been strengthened following the results of a recent MORI poll and by the views obtained from key partners. Whilst in the raw figures there is marginal support for a referendum in the South East showing the public's wish to have its say on the issue, this reduces substantially when the proposition, with all its ramifications, is explained in detail. Indeed, there is considerably less support for a referendum on regional government than other constitutional issues such as House of Lords reform, Britain becoming a republic, and the Euro. The concept is simply not an issue for the majority of people surveyed - 85% indicated that they knew "not very much" or "nothing at all" about the proposals while 63% could not indicate which region they were in. This underlines the point made in the County Council's earlier response to the White Paper that there was no identifiable sense of community in the South East, embracing as it does, 8 million people in 9 very different counties. The County Council has contended that a referendum could not possibly be considered against this background.

4. The same theme is continued in the response to the consultation paper on the proposed statutory guidance to be issued in respect of local government reviews. In general terms, the Cabinet, on behalf of the Council, has rejected the presumption in the guidance that the existing structures of local government in two tier areas should automatically be replaced by a unitary system if the review is to be undertaken. There is no reason to discount the two tier option of local government in areas where it is demonstrably shown to work effectively in terms of quality local services, public support and effective responses to the modernisation agenda. Nonetheless, the Cabinet has been obliged to make the assumption that the Government will not change its mind regarding a move to unitary councils. It has therefore suggested that the overriding key factors to be taken into consideration when considering a unitary configuration should be quality of service delivery and management, in which County Councils have a particularly strong record, and tradition and geography where existing county areas should be recognised and understood along with the fact that they are of sufficient size to have the capacity to provide community leadership and quality local services. The conclusion that the Cabinet draws from these observations is that, assuming that a change is to happen, unitary counties are unquestionably best placed to deliver the modernisation agenda, to provide strong community leadership and to deliver quality services. Indeed County Councils already provide the overwhelming majority of local services.

5. Copies of the detailed responses on both these documents are available from the Chief Executive.

6. The County Council will be kept fully apprised of developments on this crucially important issue.

5nR97303