West Dorset District Council and Weymouth and Portland District Council, having already amalgamated, are now seeking further amalgamation with North Dorset District Council in a bid to save money.
An appropriate aim, we taxpayers would no doubt think as we watch many of our beloved services dissolve. But where will it end?
Will this new tri-partite group then seek to amalgamate further with East Dorset, Purbeck and Christchurch? That would be the logical thing to do... and, lo and behold, we than have the whole county amalgamated together. Wonderful.
Except, just a moment, isn’t that council already covering the whole county called ‘Dorset County Council’?
Why do we need a duplicate? Surely, more money would be saved by eliminating this whole layer of local government. Let’s examine the case for doing away entirely with West, East, North, Weymouth and Portland, Purbeck, Christchurch district councils – then we could really hope to save a significant amount of money.
Alternatively, let’s keep the new entity and eliminate the existing Dorset County Council as it is currently organised.
We can then rename the new entity... ‘Dorset County Council’.
I am no great fan of Dorset County Council, which often seems to be run by its unelected officials rather than by councillors for whom we vote, but what is going on now just shows how nonsensical the whole local government set-up has become.
Hazel Robinson Charmouth
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