Councils have until 21st March 2025 to make their initial proposals for unitary councils
You can read Cambridgeshire’s guidance here
I’m not going to lose too much sleep over it because the significant restrictions that ministers have imposed mean that beyond turning Cambridge and South Cambridgeshire into a single unitary council plus one of either Huntingdonshire or East Cambridgeshire districts, we won’t be able to deal with the huge structural problems. This is because in my view:
- There’s no realistic provision for creating a unitary council that broadly covers both the travel to work area and the rental commuter market area (see the maps in this post) so no Royston, no Newmarket, No Haverhill joining as proposed in 1969 by Redcliffe-Maud
- Minsters are still holding The Treasury’s line on overhauling local government finance structures and systems (see my blogpost here). This made the Commons Select Committee’s Housing, Communities and Local Government evidence session on local government financial stability all the more interesting (See my blogpost here) because the expert witnesses tore the existing obsolete structures to bits. If you want a comparison between the old rates, the poll tax/community charge, and the current council tax, see the LGIU from 1993 here.
For some radical ideas on how to fund local government, see the Reform Think Tank (not Team Nigel’s party) publication Back from the Brink published in December 2024.
Got any opinions? Want to talk to people about this?
Try your local councillors via https://www.writetothem.com/
Try Cambs Unitaries at https://www.cambsunitaries.org.uk/ who are campaigning for an overhaul of local government in Cambridgeshire.
A question from the mid-1990s
How many unitary councils would you create out of this lot?
Above – I’ve asked Cambridgeshire County Council to digitise and publish these past studies as part of their consultation
If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to:
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Below – should you wish to get involved in local discussions on possible unitaries, see the Cambs Unitaries Campaign at https://www.cambsunitaries.org.uk/
The Cambridge Town Owl 