My Lords, I am in the happy position of agreeing totally with my noble friend Lord Newby—that is a good start, is it not—particularly with reference to the absolute importance of having a two-tier approach to local governance in all rural areas, but particularly in North Yorkshire. That obviously means that I agree with many of the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, who put her cards on the table and said that she prefers a two-tier system.
I bring to the Committee’s attention my relevant interests as a member of Kirklees council and a vice-president of the Local Government Association.
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The difficulty we have is that the statutory instrument is very much a done deal. The legislation has come too late for effective challenge. You cannot elicit changes when people are already on the streets, knocking on doors, with the new ward boundaries in their minds. I heard from the noble Lord, Lord Jopling, that many elements of the reorganisation are already in train and we know the elections are taking place in a couple of months, so it is a done deal. But it is still worth making some comments, perhaps so that we do not go down some of this route again.
The government policy is that unitarisation—what a horrible word that is for creating unitary councils—must be locally led and not imposed on areas. One of the criteria is that a unitary authority should have a minimum population of 300,000 and a maximum of 600,000. That is interesting: the population of North Yorkshire, as we have heard from my noble friend, is already more than 600,000, so is beyond the limits that have been set.
We heard in the earlier debate what a difficult and large terrain Cumbria is. Here are the figures: Cumbria is 2,580 square miles, and North Yorkshire is 3,400. The population of Cumbria is 500,000; North Yorkshire is 600,000. Cumbria can have two unitary authorities, but North Yorkshire has one. You wonder why.
I picked out at random a London borough for comparison. The council of North Yorkshire will serve a population four times that of the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, and it covers substantial challenges of geography and size. It includes two wonderful national parks, the Yorkshire Dales and the North York Moors, and very scattered populations, again as you have heard. Connectivity is not good. A noble Lord has already mentioned how difficult it is to acquire mobile signals in parts of the dales, and bus services are being cut as we speak. Access by road can be hugely difficult, especially in winter. I have chosen a simple example: if you want to go from Settle in the west to the county town of Northallerton, which is fairly in the middle of North Yorkshire, it is about 60 miles but will take the best part of two hours. It is not easy and it will not be easy for a unitary authority to govern that vast area effectively.