Neill signs up to Carter plan ‘ideas’
Author: Local Government Chronicle |
Shadow local government minister Bob Neill said it was a “timely document that flags up a lot of things that a Conservative government needs to address” but stopped short of a making concrete any pledges.
Mr Neill was speaking at the launch of Cllr Carter’s paper, Bold steps for radical reform, which outlines plans to devolve powers currently held by quangos to voluntary groupings of councils based on traditional county boundaries.
He added that “David Cameron’s commitment to localism could not be clearer” but that local government needed to demonstrate it had the “imagination and verve to take it forward”.
As exclusively revealed by LGC, the paper called for councils to be grouped into 46 county and city-region units and calculated savings of 21bn in a three to five years if the plans were implemented and councils were freed from many inspection burdens.