Alarm at threat to merge county with neighbours

Making Herefordshire join up with neighbouring counties could backfire for the county, opposition figures have warned.

Herefordshire is vulnerable to pressure to merge due to its relatively small population of under 200,000, less than half that of its English neighbours.

Unveiling its English Devolution White Paper just before Christmas, the government said it would “make devolution the default setting across a range of policy areas” including housing, transport, education and skills.

But Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said that for most areas, the proposals “will mean creating councils with a population of 500,000 or more”, though “there may be exceptions to ensure new structures make sense for an area”.

Conservative MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire Jesse Norman said he was “instinctively very nervous about further top-down reorganisations of local government, as any sane human being should be”.

“The risk is that here we have yet another piece of half-baked, botched and hasty legislation from the new government,” he said.

North Herefordshire Green MP Ellie Chowns was also asked to comment.

Herefordshire Council wrote to the government last September saying it would rather remain as a single, non-mayoral authority.

Its chief executive Paul Walker later assured councillors: “If devolution goes ahead, the council will exist as it does now and will continue to provide the same services.”

Any decision to form devolution partnerships with neighbouring counties “is a decision for all elected councillors, with officers here to advise”, he added.

Conservative councillor Bruce Baker said at the time: “If it does happen, I can virtually guarantee that being a small authority we will be the losers, especially if we get lumped with a dead loss of an authority somewhere else.”

He said he also worried that a future regional mayor “could cancel tricky decisions we want to introduce”.

Neighbouring Gloucestershire County Council is currently considering whether to back a “Three Counties” authority with Herefordshire and Worcestershire under a single mayor. But the other two must first merge into unitary (single-tier) counties, as Herefordshire is already.

Herefordshire Council has meanwhile been looking the other way, having begun regional meetings under a “Marches Forward Partnership” with Shropshire, Powys and Monmouthshire.

But Mr Walker said this partnership “wouldn’t fit well with the devolution framework because of the English-Welsh nature of the arrangement”.

Herefordshire was part of a joint authority with Worcestershire between 1974 and 1998 – when according to many recollections, it very much had the junior role.