Over 100 East Midlands Lib Dem councillors back campaign to save boroughs and districts

As part of the campaign to defend district and borough councils, more than 100 Liberal Democrat councillors from the East Midlands have signed a letter to Robert Jenrick, the local government secretary.

Derbyshire Live quotes from the letter:

"We believe that these proposals are fundamentally wrong in every respect. They would mean that all the councils involved would spend the next two and a half years arguing over and concentrating on, the expensive business of large-scale closure, merger, defining and reapplying for jobs, redundancy and closing down sites. This is the last thing we need when tackling Covid-19, and its economic fallout should be the number one priority.

"District and borough councils are rooted in and represent the interests of their local communities in a way which large unitary authorities cannot remotely do.

"Most recently this has been clearly shown during the Covid-19 outbreak when the flexible, local knowledge and expertise of district and borough councils has provided the cutting edge of distributing local business support grants, delivering food parcels to the local shielded population, advising their local retail businesses on social distancing strategies and much else."