The quarterly full meeting of North Yorkshire Council Picture: LDRS
A compromise solution to creating fairer democratic representation in North Yorkshire has been pushed forward amid concerns it will see some urban communities split and some councillors handed rural areas so large they are impossible to cover.
North Yorkshire Council’s executive heard a working group created to review the number of elected representatives on the authority had been divided between calls to cut the number of politicians to 72 and raising their number to more than 100.
Ahead of the executive unanimously forwarding a recommendation of 89 councillors a cross-party working group had reached, corporate services executive member Councillor Heather Phillips told the meeting: “This figure was not plucked out of the air. There was a lot of discussion before it.”
The decision over the number of councillors on the authority is being viewed as key to the future working of the council and will be debated at a full meeting of the authority later this month, before being sent to the Boundary Commission for approval.
Due to wide variations in the number of electors in each division when the boundaries were set up using district wards in 2021, keeping a similar number of councillors will mean some rural divisions being significantly expanded and some urban areas seeing divisions reduced in geography.
Councillor John Weighell, who led the working group, said 89 councillors was a compromise that 40 per cent of the group had opposed.
The meeting heard some councillors believed more members were needed to properly represent communities across UKs second largest council area, which already had one of the country’s highest number of voters per councillor.
Coun Weighell said any increase in the number of councillors would increase the already difficult challenge of creating equitable representation for residents.
Nevertheless, the meeting was told some councillors believed reducing councillors to the 72 there were at North Yorkshire County Council would save public money and make it easier to keep some communities in one electoral division.
Coun Weighell, who led North Yorkshire County Council for 14 years, said: “It’s only when you start putting the lines on the map you realise how impossible these higher figures of members is to do.
“You will end up with most of our larger market towns, Skipton, Ripon, Knaresborough etc where you end up with a big housing estate on the edge of one of those towns in a rural area and that doesn’t fit with anybody.
“It’s not perfect. Whatever we do there will be very difficult decisions.”
Liberal Democrat councillor Philip Broadbank told the executive until the merger of the district, borough and county councils last year there had been 311 councillors serving the county’s 615,000 residents.
He added: “The Scottish Highlands, the largest area geographically, has a 240,000 population and 74 councillors.
“Local democracy to me is about having local councillors who can connect with the local areas and use that knowledge when issues come up. The bigger the areas you get the less likely that’s going to happen.
“You are going to have huge rural divisions with 89 councillors.”
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