Many Devon MPs have launched petitions and have pledged to raise the government’s decision on Local Government Reorganisation when parliament resumes in September. CPRE is urging those who oppose the government plan to write to Angela Rayner as well. – Owl

Devon “betrayed” by Local Government Reorganisation decision Devon CPRE, August e-bulletin

‘Gerrymandering’, ‘a stitch-up’, ‘betrayed’ and ‘shafted’ were just a few of the headline reactions to the government’s announcement of their preferred plan to reorganise our two-tier local government system into a single ‘unitary’ model.

The decision sent down from the Secretary of State on 16 July divides Devon into four Unitary Authorities: an expanded Plymouth, an expanded Exeter, an expanded Torbay and… the leftovers, quaintly titled ‘Devon Coast and Countryside’. This will be the largest single authority by area in England, and its biggest town will be Barnstaple.

The upshot is that 777,000 Devonians will live – and pay their Council Tax – in the three new metropolitan areas, while the remaining 455,00 will bear the financial responsibility for 2,500 square miles of rural and coastal Devon, a single authority that stretches from Lynton to Salcombe, and from Hartland to Axminster.

Plymouth will subsume 13 parishes currently in the South Hams, while Exeter will take 15 from Teignbridge, 28 from East Devon and six from Mid Devon. Torbay will expand its boundary to take on 22 parishes in total from Teignbridge District Council and South Hams.

As Devon County Council leader Cllr Julian Brazil put it:

“The sentiments sound fine. Devolution, democracy, efficiency. But the reality is everything we’re being forced to do will achieve exactly the opposite. Decisions will be taken further from the people, decided by distant, faceless officials, censored by an ever more controlling centre.” He described the plan as a ‘Labour stitch-up’ and estimated that it would add £250 a year to household bills – mainly Council Tax – in the vast new Coast & Countryside Authority.

In our own statement, we pointed out that there are areas of rural Devon which have some of the lowest incomes in the entire country. Livestock-grazing farmers, of which Devon has a preponderance because of our world-beating pastureland, have seen their average incomes drop to less than £23,000 in recent years.

We said: “This plan clearly demonstrates, yet again, that Westminster has no understanding whatever of what happens outside the cities, of the precarious economics of rural England in general and Devon in particular, and cares even less. Already they have summarily and suddenly turned off the agricultural subsidies that many Devonian farmers depend on, and hit them with Inheritance Tax on theoretically-valuable land that yields their families barely subsistence-level incomes.

“Devon depends heavily on landscape-based and coastal tourism – yet at the same time we’re a top target for the government’s new uses for our agricultural landscapes, like massive solar farms and now, it appears, gigantic data centres and containerised battery ‘parks’ on our fields. Just the sort of things that we’re already hearing are causing people to think twice about moving here, let alone coming here for their holidays. And the beneficiaries are huge corporate businesses and offshore investors, not the people whose land is being taken.”

We understand that Devon County Council is one of three that have decided to take the matter to a Judicial Review. In the meantime, we urge anyone who thinks that taking all of the conurbations, the vast majority of the industry and three fifths of the population out of Devon, leaving the remaining 40% of taxpayers to try and fund the largest authority in the country, is a terrible idea to write to:

The Rt Hon Angela Rayner, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, 2 Marsham Street, London SW1P 4DF.

Numbers matter – fill her mail box