Devon County Council claims Exeter would lose almost £2M a year in local transport plan funding if the city council gained unitary status.
Exeter City Council was one of only four urban authorities to make the 16-strong shortlist of unitary hopefuls last month (Surveyor, 29 March). However, the county council estimates that LTP funding for Exeter would be £1.4M a year until 2011, if it gains unitary status – less than the £3.2M a year the city is set to receive from Devon under current arrangements. The projection is based on the current level of funding for small unitary authorities, such as Torbay, Slough and Blackburn. Cllr Margaret Rogers, Devon County Council’s executive member for environment, said: ‘There is likely to be a massive shortfall between what we are spending now in Exeter and the funding that would be available to a unitary city council. ‘Plans to ease congestion and improve air quality for residents would have to be drastically cut back. ‘Exeter would be in danger of falling behind its regional counterparts, if there wasn’t enough money available to continue the programme of transport improvements.’ But John Rigby, director of development at Exeter City Council, dismissed the ‘rather selective’ analysis which formed Devon’s estimates. He said the sample of other unitary councils’ LTP funding did not include York, which had received generous LTP funding based on ‘the great transport success it had achieved since becoming a unitary in 1996’. Also, it was impossible to make accurate estimations until the announcement of this year’s Comprehensive Spending Review, he added. Elsewhere, a new report has undermined Wiltshire County Council’s unitary bid, warning that transition to a ‘super-sized’ authority would cost at least £3M more than the county estimated, ‘in excess of £21M’. Professor emeritus, Michael Chisholm, wrote: ‘There are serious doubts about the figure of £18m for transition costs, and there are good reasons for thinking it is a significant under-estimate. ‘If there is to be a genuine increase in the local delivery of services in comparison with the present, and greater engagement with communities, then it is inevitable that there would be higher costs, not lower costs.’ His report – A critique of Wiltshire County Council’s ‘We’re ready’ – was commissioned by Salisbury District Council, Kennet and Wiltshire, three of the four district councils facing abolition. However, Wiltshire, like most of the unitary bidders, said the creation of a single point of contact would reduce duplication and eliminate confusion among the public.
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