Read Leader of Blyth Valley Council Dave Stephens

Ratings back super council
Apr 12 2007
By Dave Black, The Journal
County council leaders in Northumberland feel they are winning the battle over the shape of local government in the county.
Their bid to create a single `super council' under a unitary structure has been rated above a rival plan by the county's six district councils in an unofficial league table compiled by the influential Local Government Chronicle.
The LGC has used ratings given by the Government to all of the 15 unitary council bids selected to go forward for further consultation, and translated them into points to compile the national league table.
The bids were all rated by the Department for Communities and Local Government for their affordability, potential to gain widespread public support, service delivery and other criteria. The LGC league table puts the single unitary bids from Durham, Cumbria and North Yorkshire County Councils at the top with 15 points.
Northumberland County Council's submission comes joint second on 14 points, along with those from Cheshire, Cornwall and Somerset.
The bid by the six Northumberland districts to create two separate unitary councils - one for Blyth Valley and Wansbeck and the other for rural Berwick, Alnwick, Castle Morpeth and Tynedale - is in the league table's bottom three places.
The proposed rural unitary authority gets 12 points in the LGC table and the urban unitary is bottom of the list with 10 points. Yesterday the LGC ratings were welcomed by Northumberland County Council leader Bill Brooks. "It is evidently not just my own view when I said that the quality of the bid we put together demonstrates the quality of our staff," he said.
"But we also based our bid on independent financial advice from Price Waterhouse Coopers, who estimated that a single council would save £17m a year."
But Blyth Valley Council leader Dave Stephens said: "In my opinion, Bill Brooks and the county council leadership are like the captain of the Titanic when it sank, desperately clutching at anything to stay afloat."