Local Authority Reforms...

[Ripsaw]

John Rimmintion (DoLGE) has become the latest person to take up the challenge of Local Authory Reform.

 

His plan is to reduce the current 24 local Authorities to five, North, South, East, West and Douglas.

 

Considering the size of the Island and it's population, do we even need five?

 

I fully appreciate that in the "olden days" when travel and communications weren't as easy as they are now, it benefitted the local community to have a local 'tribal' meeting to discuss and plan the local issues.

 

In my opinion Mr Rimmington has looked at the numbers of councillors and commisioners and tried to cut them down, rather than looking at the services that are required and adding up the numbers of people required to fufil those services.

 

Why don't we have a single board that collects an all Island rate and administers the services required by all of the residents? Sure enough, there would still need to be various Depots spread around the Island to carry out works, but why does there need to be multiple administrations to allocate the services?

 

If a streetlight is out in the South of the Island, why do we need a dedicated Southern Authority to report it to, and a dedicated Southern Electrician to go out and fix it? Surely it makes sense to have a single board that handles all of the Island's street lights and it would contact the Southern Electrician to do the work.

 

I know that light bulbs are a low cost item, but when they are purchased in large numbers, wouldn't an all Island board negotiate a better price for the bulbs than half a dozen boards each purchasing one sixth of the quantity each, or worse still the current 24 Authorities?

 

When you apply that buying power to more expensive items, how much money is wasted by each board looking after their own supplies.

 

The local Authorities appear to look after their own little patches, yet the Island is small enough to be thought of as a single entity.

 

One of my work collegues dispairs at Local and National Government, claiming that Hong Kong with a population of millions was run by a core of 8 people, with responsibilies delegated to Departments below them.

 

I don't know enough about Hong Kong to back this up or not, but really, how many chiefs are needed to administor for 80,000 indians?

 

In fact, why aren't most of the services administered by managers within the Civil Service?

[Addie]

Sounds sensible to reduce some layers of beaurocracy.

 

We could be very mean though and keep all the local authorities exactly as they are and have one person, salary circa 50k elected to represent us all in Westminster?

 

Or even cheaper we could ask John Wilkinson to cover for us.

 

From a manx radio news item

 

A Conservative MP has outraged his constituency by claiming to live in the Isle of Man.

 

John Wilkinson of Ruislip has a house in London, which has enabled him to claim almost £50,000 in housing expenses since 2001.

 

But his first home is an apartment in Port Erin, leading to accusations from other MPs that he's abusing Westminster's expenses system.

 

He says he isn't breaking any Parliamentary rules and prefers the island's lifestyle to that of London: