Resources raised by taxpayers in the Ribble Valley should be spent in the Ribble Valley. This Petition calls for a Local Referendum to take place on any proposed changes in the Structure and Organisation of Local Government in Lancashire. Its's the only way to make the process democratic and accountable.

This Petition seeks to ensure that any changes in the Structure and Organisation of Local Government in Lancashire have the support of the majority of the Voting Public in a series of Referendums based on Individual Authorities. As in 1974 there is a Democratic Deficit at the heart of proposals which have been put forward. Full scale re-organisation will be carried out without the Consent of the Electorate. Democracy is the key - the accountablity of the local council NOT a series of Super Authorities - these new hair brained schemes will only benefit Blackburn - Blackpool and Preston all other areas will lose out.

A significant distrust of politicians and institutions has already grown up in this country fuelled by a sense among large numbers of the general public that they no longer have a voice in the national and in this case the local conversation. Re-organise local government boundaries without meaningful public consultation at your peril. Not least because the larger the Unitary the more remote and removed the locus of decision-making and administrative centre. Residents in the Ribble Valley will not wish to travel all the way to either Blackburn or Preston to sort out their Council Tax or Planning Application.

A group of Labour MPs want to abolish all of a county's 15 councils in a bid to create a simpler local government in Lancashire. The Labour MPs have written to the government asking to replace the councils in Lancashire with just three or four local authorities and create a Lancashire mayor. Each replacement Unitary Authority would deliver all services in their own area rather than splitting responsibilities between county and district authorities, they said. The MPs' plan would see Lancashire County Council, the dozen district councils, as well as Blackpool and Blackburn with Darwen councils axed within 18 months. It would also lead to a vast reduction in the nearly 700 councillors. The plan is backed by the majority of the county's Labour MPs.

Meanwhile, in blueprints drawn up by Burnley and Brierfield Labour MP Oliver Ryan would see one unitary authority for the six East Lancs districts: Blackburn with Darwen, Burnley, Ribble Valley, Pendle, Rossendale and Hyndburn. An Area with a Combined Population of 556,453 and a Current Combined Council Tax Requirement of £32.2M.  However, the Labour MP also suggested an alternative four-council option, which would generate population sizes of between 353,000 and 420,000 per authority. In that scenario, the areas that would join up would be: Preston, Fylde, Ribble Valley and Pendle with a smaller Combined Population of 401,765

In the document Mr. Ryan stresses the financial stability of all the suggestions as a result of separating out the larger population centres of Preston, Blackburn and Preston into different council areas. He concedes that a Preston-Fylde-Ribble Valley-Pendle authority would be "long". There is a distance of more than 50 miles between Lytham in Fylde and Barnoldswick in Pendle. Mr. Ryan said he believes local authority reorganisation and the creation of an elected mayor are necessary components of how Lancashire moves forward.

He also said that the Lancashire County Council elections, due next May should be cancelled so as not to "waste" the £2m it costs to stage them - given that the authority could be abolished in the near future depending on progress towards a deepening of the county's devolution arrangements, which the Labour government has said it hopes to see set in train by next autumn.

Explanation/Rationale

But Cllr Stephen Atkinson, Ribble Valley Council's Leader, said: "This [would be] civic vandalism, creating ever more remote decision making – they are removing local democracy." He predicts huge disruption, less responsive and remote services and millions wasted on re-organisation, while we are not concentrating on delivery.

A new localism – a new local identity based on a sense of place – citizens’ unique experiences of their place in the particular environments where they live and work has emerged and is growing stronger.

Place identity concerns the meaning and significance of places for their inhabitants and users. It also relates to the context of history (statues and historical reference points – buildings and monuments) are important to those who live in particular areas – in some cases most of their adult lives. Being familiar is to approve, to admire, to respect, and in some cases to show love and affection for the place where you reside.

When you meet strangers on holiday and they ask you where you live, likely as not, you will communicate a powerful emotive attachment and not a little pride in where you live.

When that sense of identity is threatened by what appears like arbitrary re-organisation, the likely reaction is a feeling of dislocation and loss of identity. The fear of hyper local change, the challenge to local identity is much stronger amongst the older generation but also amongst non-university educated workers whose employment has been secured within local networks and who are likely to work for local businesses whose presence is familiar to and recognised by members of their peer to peer networks across towns and villages, particularly in rural areas.

Feelings of security and freedom enable community transformation. As soon as this local identity is challenged we are in trouble. This goes beyond emotional bonds between person and place. This is the origins of the psychology of distrust and we all saw the incredibly powerful impact of what happened during Brexit and the election of Trump. Political elites please take note.

We live in an era of place-based politics. Identity is now at the very core of political debate – but for many people it is local identity.

Really big decisions affecting people’s lives like the proposed creation of unitary authorities (a previous petition was signed by 14 per cent of the total voting population of the Ribble Valley in days of the petition being launched) require active public consultation, not decisions forced upon them.

The majority of Lancashire's population lives in urban area however, quite a large proportion of the county consists of rural areas, villages and small towns which. because of their smaller population, have fewer councillors. Consequently, there is a very real danger that some Councils and Councillors will fail to recognise the needs of those of us resident in the more sparsely populated areas of the County. As residents of the Ribble Valley, we are such. We hope that all councillors recognise that they should consider the needs of ALL the county's residents, not just the urban majority. Municipalities can work well in densely populated areas and cities where sorting the likes of efficient public transport systems is relatively straight forward but you can't run a regular bus service every 10 minutes into remote villages quite as easily.

These proposals would lead to well managed councils like RVBC see their reserves plundered (in Ribble Valley's case £18M of reserves) to stop profligate Labour-run neighbouring authorities like Pendle going bust. The likely collapse into insolvency of a swathe of Authorities across Lancashire: Hyndburn, Pendle, Blackpool, West Lancashire, Blackburn would be deeply embarrassing for the Government who could not afford to financially rescue such a large number of authorities. Far better to re-set Council Tax across a series of larger unitaries at a much higher level as it has done in other areas like Birmingham; severely prune back the Council Staff who deliver services, reduce the number of Council Officers moving residents to Self-Serve Web-Portals and Apps served by shared call-centres (probably outsourced) and raid the substantial reserves built up by a small number of well-run Authorities (Fylde, Ribble Valley & Wyre) and finally let us not forget the huge influx of revenue that would result from the disposal of town centre assets belonging to Local Authorities.

Pots of cash from central government would be swallowed up providing essential services like social care and schools anything else would be added to a long list of "nice to haves" and good luck getting through to somebody in Blackburn or Preston when your bin in Clitheroe doesn't get emptied and you can kiss goodbye to weekly collections as refuse collection budgets are slashed!

The Ribble Valley is made up of 35 Parish Councils made up of hundreds of unpaid parish councillors, people who know the areas they live in and know all about local issues, these people do the job for the good of the community not for financial gain giving up their time for free, these would fall by the wayside under these proposals. This is an assassination attempt on local democracy and will not work in Lancashire purely because of the county's diverse needs.

Disruption of such networks will not be regarded as a progressive act, likely to shake-up levels of government to overcome perceived decision-making inertia. Instead the loss of local benchmarks and reference points is likely to lead to the kind of the preferencing and privileging of other areas over the hill or across the border thought to be the reason for forcing mergers or getting rid of the existing borders in the first place. The public reaction is likely to be marked by a backlash against even more remote, inaccessible and unaccountable power centres like Blackburn or Preston.

Forced reorganisation means that some districts will lose out at the expense of others within the new frameworks. Will more deprived areas lose out to more high growth and prosperous areas? Or will the less well performing areas hold back the high growth areas using them as “cash cows” to resolve their problems of social deprivation including burgeoning social care budgets?

The problem with top-down re-organisation including forced re-organisation of district councils is that someone gets excluded paradoxically by being included in a community they don’t want to be part of. In sociological speak, that perpetuate oppression by creating segregated spaces for marginalized communities, in this case marginalised affluent communities being bled dry by deprived communities to solve their long-term social care problems.

Deliberately forcing prosperous areas together with areas of deprivation is a recipe for economic and socio-demographic disaster. The intention is clearly to raid the back accounts of more affluent households in order to compensate for the limited tax base of mostly A and B Band Properties in areas of high deprivation where Council Tax collection rates are extremely poor. This will lead to enormous resentment on the part of those that lose out. Of more concern it will lead to mass levelling-down as huge economic transfers are made to benefit areas of deprivation.

Of course Labour would clearly benefit politically from not having to fight a series of damaging early-term elections. The more that it could delay or defer whilst it builds a new tier of Local Government across Lancashire the better.

Furthermore this was not in the government’s manifesto – this is not something they have a mandate to do.