Merger talk gets politicians hot under the collar

"Over my dead body" is how a Telford politician recently responded to the suggestion Shropshire's two councils should merge.

Shropshire Council leader Lezley Picton has cited it as one of the reasons she will not stand at the local elections in May.

The county is governed by two unitary authorities, Telford & Wrekin Council, which went unitary in 1998 and Shropshire Council, which followed in 2009.

But, as part of its plans to move power out of Westminster, the Labour government is seeking to create new larger local authorities and introduce more regional mayors across England.

Politicians have been frantically trying to work out what this could mean for their areas.

Picton, who runs a council for 323,000 residents, thinks the government's plan to have 1.5m people under a strategic authority is undemocratic.

"Devolution takes away the very essence of local government," she said.

"Decisions should be made locally and a lot of these decisions in future won't be.

"I don't see it as devolution, I see it as centralisation."

The government has already identified six areas of England, such as Cheshire and Warrington and Norfolk and Suffolk, where residents could be electing a new mayor for the first time in May 2026.

Areas outside of that have continued to speculate, with council leaders phoning around to negotiate possible partnerships for the future.

Staffordshire councillors have discussed a one-council strategic authority, which would include Shropshire and Telford and Wrekin as well as Stoke-on-Trent.

Telford's Labour MP Shaun Davies, who led Telford and Wrekin Council for eight years, does not want that to happen.

He said he would rather the town joins a growing West Midlands Combined Authority (WMCA), which was established in 2016.

"I genuinely believe there is an opportunity for us to play a significant leading part in the West Midlands," he said.

"If you look at the M54, the train line and the businesses that are located in Telford, and how they look across towards Birmingham, Wolverhampton and the Black Country, then that case is made stronger for me.

"But we're not going to see any significant change until the end of the decade because they've just had a mayoral election."

Davies, who recently set up a cross-party parliamentary group on West Midlands affairs, has asked the government to ensure that "Whitehall's petty rules" do not prevent Telford and Wrekin becoming a member of the WMCA because it does not have a land link.

None of the above is set in stone and we remain in the early stages of devolution in our corner of England.

But merger talk has got council leaders and MPs hot under the collar. The government's white paper wants new authorities to have a population of at least half a million, but it may never happen.

However, tinkering with power was always going to unsettle those who wield it, or risk losing some of it in future.

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