Plans for councils’ merger under fire - "Less accountability", claim opposition Labour

Published: 11 February 2011
by JOSH LOEB

WESTMINSTER City Council’s radical plans to save tens of millions of pounds by merging services with other west London boroughs will lead to less accountability, Labour councillors have warned.

City Hall wants to combine some areas with neighbouring Kensington and Chelsea (K&C) and Hammersmith and Fulham (H&F) to save £35million a year.

This week City Hall bosses released a 100-page “tri-borough report” detailing proposals including:

• Slashing the 350 middle and senior managers by 50 per cent by 2015

• Merging children’s services with a single director

• Westminster transferring its human resources team to either K&C or H&F next year

• Westminster retaining its chief executive but the two other boroughs sharing one from October. Other recommendations include combining areas such as social care, waste collection, libraries management and parking enforcement.

Services “key to local areas”, such as housing management, licensing and planning will be not be merged.

The report will be discussed by the councils’ respective cabinets over the next 10 days and City Hall bosses have stressed they will not undermine Westminster’s sovereignty. But Labour group leader Paul Dimoldenberg said the plans had been “hatched behind closed doors” and risked making all three councils “more remote, less accessible and less accountable”.

He added: “Reducing back-office costs to save front-line services is something which we have always supported and it is very surprising that these three flagship Conservative councils can only find £1m of savings each next year given that 100 staff have been working flat-out on these merger plans for the past six months. Even if more savings can be found in future years, the record of all three Conservative councils in axing front-line services to children, young people, the elderly and the vulnerable raises real concerns about how any savings from the proposed merger will be used. Westminster is already cutting services to 3,000 vulnerable adults with moderate needs.”

When news of the merger plans broke last year, Liberal Democrat leaders from across the three boroughs wrote to the West End Extra saying they were “dismayed by the lack of consultation”.

Addressing the Bayswater Residents’ Association in November, Westminster Council leader Colin Barrow said: “There is no intention to create a supercouncil. In most of the areas, the areas that are important to you – of services on the ground – the service will continue to be delivered to a Westminster specification.”

He said the plans would help drive down costs for taxpayers and ensure the protection of frontline services.