The Borders Party - Standing up for the Scottish Borders. News National Parties Surrender Local Powers

National Parties Surrender Local Powers

Referring to plans to share Scottish Borders Council functions with other local authorities, MP Michael Moore tells us “Our key aim is to ensure the ability to make decisions for the Borders remains here” (The Southern Reporter, 21 Janurary 2010). That’s a bit rich when his party, with the Tories and the SNP, surrendered irrevocably SBC’s strategic planning powers to SESplan, the new Edinburgh City Region planning authority, despite the fact that consultation on city regions drew more responses from the Borders than all the rest of Scotland put together, and 95% of them were strongly against joining.

Two years on, how is it going? The Planning Act was meant to speed up the planning process and to improve public “engagement”. But as the Borders Party predicted this new layer of authority is counterproductive; the SESplan programme is nearly a year behind original schedule, and its activities are almost completely unknown to the public.

There are of course savings to be made by joint working, but we mustn’t just look to other local authorities. Non-roads SBC staff were recently employed to clear snow and so was the Borders Farm Machinery Ring: there are real lessons in efficiency to be learned in using the SBC workforce more flexibly and forging closer partnerships with local businesses.

But not all partnerships save money. Being part of SESplan actually costs the Borders more than when we did our own strategic planning.

This article was published as a letter by The Borders Party Leader, Nicholas Watson in The Southern Reporter on 25 January 2010.