Local Government

I beg to move,"That the draft Shropshire (Structural Change) Order 2008, which was laid before this House on 8th January, be approved." Tonight, or rather this morning, we are to consider the draft order for the establishment of the new unitary Shropshire council. It is not prime time, but the business is important and it is right for it to be debated on the Floor of the House. The order implements a proposal submitted to the Government by Shropshire county council, with the support of Oswestry borough council. It is a proposal presented to us by a democratically elected, locally accountable council, and drawn up for us by that council. It is a proposal that the council has presented after seeking local views, and it is the proposal that the council believes will produce the best governance in Shropshire in the coming years. Having studied the proposal carefully and assessed it in the light of criteria that we published at the outset of this process in October 2006, we believe that its implementation would indeed establish a form of governance that would serve the people, businesses and communities of Shropshire well in the future. In reaching that view, we rigorously applied the five criteria that we had set out in our invitation to bid back in 2006. We had already set out the general case for unitaries in the White Paper that preceded it. Our invitation and the White Paper reflected our belief that introducing unitary local government is a way of removing many of the weaknesses to be found in areas with a combination of county councils, district councils and parish councils. As we said in the White Paper, such structures often add to public confusion, and create a fragmented and sometimes complicated local leadership. They may also lead to duplication, inefficiency, difficulties with co-ordination and failures in service delivery.