please empty your brain below

If they had these super boroughs already your random borough posts would have been completed by now.

I was waiting for the GLC punchline and wasn't disappointed. :)

Interesting post. We may as well just have five boroughs as was suggested as an alternative in 1965, but rejected. The population numbers would be similar to New York.

On the one hand, there are too many boroughs by any reckoning. Actually, I'd rephrase that as "too many contracts". I suppose the boroughs can stay.

On the other hand, being a giant monolith of local government has never helped Birmingham all that much.

Zzzzzz This old chestnut just won't go away. Rest assured, the people that actually provide the services will lose out, not the 'management'. Your council tax will NOT go down as a result.

Forget snide references to the GLC when I left the UK there was still a LCC, and Middlesex still independent County.

Merton and Sutton councils have also long been looking at how they can work together. They announced in 2009 that they were going to share HR facilities between the two.

Greater integration makes some sense in some ways. For example, Merton's main refuse centre sits right at the edge of the border between the two. Most of the houses that sit near it are mostly in Sutton. But they can't use the facility on their doorstep because it's the wrong council.

In Manchester such things are run centrally - whilst the GMC was abolished, things like the Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority was set up to coordinate certain functions. Councils still organise doorstep collections and local recycling facilities, but things like refuse centres and waste disposal organisation - things that don't really vary at all between boroughs - are centrally managed.

Some councils have already come together in London. There are four waste disposal authorities already, covering 22 councils. So why do the other 11 need to be separate? Why can't the whole thing be run centrally? It would certainly save cash.

And also, what's the point of a mayor when so much power is divested in 33 different organisations?

Five boroughs, Central Borough (for the city area) then North, South, East and West boroughs. (Named Northborough, Westborough etc.)
Simple and save money.
Less council executives receiving huge salaries.

GLC? what a good idea. we could get that Ken Livingstone chap to be in charge of it again. He could then do another "I've been interuppted.." line again, double whammy!


Just two: north of the river and south of the river. Clearly defined boundaries, no arguments about different services on the oposite sides of the same street. We even have a ready-made name for the northern one, which has lain dormant since 1965.

Perhaps they could have separate Hackey Carriage Offices - after all they famously never want to cross the river!

Difficult for Richmond - which occupies land both sides of the river (more like East and West of the river down their way?).

DG: I like your divisions, though. The boroughs in each one have a lot in common.

Yes, get rid of some boroughs - there are too many!! Some I've never even heard of - I mean what on earth goes on in Redbridge or Sutton?? As for Barking - what a silly name!! And let Barking and Dagenham join Essex - we know they want too.

How about just:

Inner London West for posh rich people

Inner London East for poor people

Outer London for people who like to go to shopping malls and garden centres?

Greenwich's Labour rulers would have a shitfit about being merged in with Tory Bexley and Bromley.

In a way, merging like with like wouldn't work because you'd just entrench the crap politics of London where single parties have run boroughs for nearly all of their existences.

I'm with Ken Livingstone on this:

"I think those should be the five London boroughs. No government will have the nerve to reorganise London government. The five wedges have coherent transport links, and they all have wealth and poverty and a suburb. And also by creating these larger units in local government, they would attract the best officers, you could have perhaps 60 members in each, you might get some real talent."

Does mrs_jones have a column in the Evening Standard? She should have one.

As has already been pointed out the gradual amalgamation of London has been going on quite a while, first with the creation of the Country of London, then the transference of powers from old parishes and the like to the new borough system in '65. Of course with the end of the GLC London suddenly found itself with what were effectively 33 unitary authorities which is madness.

There is no way anyone would choose to tun a city this way starting from scratch. Really London should go back to be being more like a county. Or even better maybe it should be run more like a small country.

Yes and get rid of the borough wherever those dreadful people who dress like idiots and ride fixie bikes come from.

Ken Livingstone's idea, mentioned by Darryl above, was to have five boroughs based on London's five official sub-regions. There's a map of these here.

Five slices of cake, each with "wealth and poverty and a suburb". Might work.

3 out of 4 Londoners want a single elected authority for London

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25825879@N05/2440232157

Nah, five super-boroughs would be too distant from the electorate as each one would have c1.5 million people in its area. That's not to say that services can't be combined between the existing authorities to exploit potential economies of scale, as H&F, K&C and WCC are attempting.

The whole point of creating 32 London boroughs in the mid-1960s was to promote such economies of scale across the whole London area (although for some services this hasn't worked particularly well) while maintaining democratic representation at a local level. On the whole, the London set-up has worked fairly well, especially since the reintroduction of a strategic pan-London tier in 2000, and it's fair to say that the only reason for combining local operations now is to save money. Despite talk of a "merger" there is no proposal to combine the political machinery of the three authorities; they will still remain as three separate, albeit "slimmed down" entities.

I should declare an interest - I work for one of the three boroughs but I'm not saying which one. ;-)

You see, I've never understood why this happens.

For example - here in Manchester we have a limited number of landfill sites, all run by Greater Manchester Waste, a collaboration between all the boroughs. However, waste collection varies between boroughs, and even sometimes within boroughs.

Why can't there just be one team to do this? I understand that different councils will have different views on things like libraries and social housing etc. but things like waste collection and road maintenance that need to happen can only be helped by economies of scale, surely?











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