Scarborough Borough Council Closes Today

After 49 years, Scarborough Borough Council will cease to exist at midnight tonight.

It's being abolished as part of the biggest changes to local government in North Yorkshire since 1974.

Tomorrow a new "North Yorkshire Council" will take over the roles of both the borough and county councils and will inherit the borough council staff and facilities.

The Borough Council's final leader - Steve Siddons - is hopeful that the redevelopment work started by the council will be continued.

The mayor of the borough, Cllr Eric Broadbent, will complete his current mayoral term of office today as Scarborough Borough Council is dissolved.

Reflecting on the changes he said:

“To a certain degree I’m sad, but I’m also excited. It’s the start of a new era and I’m confident it will work.

I’ve been elected to the new council. I will get to see how it goes and will be part of it.”

Scarborough Council has said that while its services will be moving to a new website, it can still be contacted on its existing phone number at 01723 232323, with customer services set to remain open at the Town Hall in Scarborough and Whitby Job Centre Plus as usual.

Councillor Steve Siddons says the future of the borough will be “different and obviously much larger” and said he hoped people on the coast would not be “forgotten about or minimised in any way”.

Speaking to the Local Democracy Reporting Service, he said:

“It is going to be a much, much bigger operation than Scarborough Borough Council was and the challenges are going to be quite large.”

Cllr Siddons predicted that the biggest challenge “will probably be money” but said he hoped devolution would bring “some additional money into the area, though it won’t be enough”.

Alongside the local government reorganisation scheme, a plan for devolution in North Yorkshire is also being sought and if approved by the government, it could deliver greater local powers and decision-making.

Ahead of North Yorkshire Council launching across England’s largest local authority area tomorrow, its leader Councillor Carl Les said he was serious about improving services for all of its 605,000 residents.

The intention to provide bespoke services for communities from Filey to Hawes and from Skipton to Staithes follows a barrage of claims from elected members of the county’s district and borough councils that residents will be the poorer without their focus on a smaller area.

However, Coun Les and chief executive of the incoming authority Richard Flinton have roundly rejected the claims, saying the lion’s share of council services have been run across the same geography for the last 50 years.

Nevertheless, the authority has developed a strategy to tailor services to the needs of different areas, replicating its long-established highways management areas across all services.

Mr Flinton said:

“We will have locally-based managers who have a strong understanding of the issues in their areas.”

In addition, the authority will establish a number of ways to connect into communities, with a large “locality team” of officers and through the use the constituency area committees, in which councillors will make some decisions, mainly over smaller scale issues.

Scarborough and Whitby MP, Sir Robert Goodwill has welcomed the changes and believes the area committees will keep decisions local, especially in the area of planning.

The new authority will have 90 councillors, a reduction from the 319 currently sitting on the county, district and borough councils. They will take on extra and responsibilities for time-consuming issues such as planning. Opponents of the unitary authority have questioned how councillors representing more than ten parishes will have time to attend to meetings and issues across their patch.

Responding to claims that having 90 rather than 319 councillors representing North Yorkshire’s communities would mean worse representation, Coun Les said as one of three elected members for Bedale, councillors there had been “falling over each other” as there had been “very little to do”.

He said:

“Representation by numbers doesn’t work. What matters is if you’ve got energetic people in the cohort of 90. The great benefit of reducing from 319 is that we have saved £750,000.

“I think we’ve got enough members to represent the people and continue the political process. You don’t have to go to a parish meeting to understand what’s happening in that parish.”

The authority’s leadership says while one safeguard against parochialism on the new authority would be in its executive members representing communities from across the county, another is by retaining its headquarters in Northallerton.

Mr Flinton said:

“If our headquarters was in Harrogate or Scarborough then there might be more of a concern that we would be focused on that as the council view of the world. Being in a fairly modest market town mitigates against that.”

Although the unitary authority’s basic infrastructure has been created ahead of its launch, major changes to council services are set to happen over the coming year, such as pulling together seven separate housing or planning services into one.

Mr Flinton said:

“This isn’t about just getting through and holding together everything that happened before. This is looking at it service by service as to how we can make improvements.”

He said “snagging issues” were expected when the new council launched due to the scale of the merger and “eight different ways of working” being fused.

Mr Flinton said:

“If things are still not right in a year’s time we can really be held to account. Our aspiration is the vast majority of people will still get a really strong service and where things go wrong to get on top of it quickly and put things right. It’s almost a call to arms – if people see things that could be better let us know.

“We are hoping it is a bit like the Millenium Bug where everybody thought the world was going to end and planes would drop out of the sky when it turned out that it was all fine.”