Neil Willcox, Shropshire Council’s Locality Commissioning Manager to provide an update on Shrewsbury boundary changes and future role of Local Commissioning

Mathew Mead introduced Neil and recapped the reasons behind needing to change the boundaries of the Local Joint Committees (LJC’s) in the Shrewsbury area. Currently there are 4 rural and 6 urban Local Joint Committees, and due to reductions in staff at the Council, together with a need to alter the way LJC’s operate these needed to be reduced down to 3 Rural LJC’s and 1 urban LJC for Shrewsbury.

Discussions had taken place with the Shropshire Councillors for the area, and Parish Councils and a number of options had been discussed, with the option of creating an East/West split of the rural LJC’s being the preferred option of the Shropshire Councillors.

This would see Councillor David Roberts electoral division of Loton (Westbury, Alberbury, Great Ness and Little Ness and Montford) join the existing Longden Ford and Rea Valley LJC to form the Loton, Longden, Ford and Rea Valley LJC

Councillor John Everalls electoral division on Tern (Bomere Heath, Bicton, Astley, Upton Magna, Uffington and Withington) join with the Severn Valley electoral division to form a new Tern and Severn Valley LJC. A map of the proposed areas was shown.

The basis behind the new areas was that:

Each Shropshire Councillor division should not be split between two LJC’s

There should be approximately the same population within each LJC area

There should be some similarities of geography and interests between communities in each LJC

However both Shropshire Councillors and officers acknowledged that the proposed new LJC areas were not perfect and had to be a compromise of a number of different issues. The concerns of Bomere Heath, Bicton and Great Ness and Little Ness Parishes had been raised in the consultation process and were acknowledged as being significant issues in the new LJC boundaries.

Neil went on to talk more about the new role proposed for Local Joint Committees. Rather than simply being a forum where issues were discussed the new LJC’s would play a role in the devolving of decision making and resources to a more local level.

Local Joint Committee’s would take a role in identifying the local needs within their area, and start to allocate resources to tackle these issues. The first of these areas of work would be youth services. Less youth activity would be delivered directly by Shropshire Council, but it would instead commission community led organisations to deliver services that met identified needs of young people.  LJC’s would help identify these issues and discuss how best to tackle the issue, with the Community Enablement Officers and Councils Commissioning team then helping the LJC’s to commission the new services. The town and parish Councils on the LJC would not be employing staff directly, this would still be done through Shropshire Council.

Committee members gave their initial views on the proposals.

Councillors from the Loton division said they could see the thinking behind linking them with the Longden, Ford and Rea Valley LJC, as they perhaps looked more to Pontesbury and Minsterley for some of their services, and these areas also fell within the Mary Webb School catchment area, which was important from a youth perspective

Councillors form the Tern division expressed concern that the area was too large and Parishes to the north west of Shrewsbury (Bicton, Bomere Heath, Nesscliffe) had little in common with the Severn Valley and would be better suited to the Longden, Ford and Rea Valley or Five Perry Parishes LJC. 

Members of the LJC also expressed concerns that the commissioning model was simply one aimed at saving money and passing too much decision making down to a Parish Council level. Neil acknowledged that the new youth commissioning budget was significantly less than the previous budget, but that these levels of budget reduction were happening across the Council, and the Council couldn’t continue to deliver services in the way it had. It was a risk of the new model that some Parish Councils might chose not to take part in the new LJC’s.

Councillors Everall and Roberts acknowledged the issue of the geographies not suiting every parish, but felt that moving some parishes to different areas would alter the populations so one LJC had a much larger population than another. They also put forward the idea of holding meetings in one or two central venues to help reduce travel times and costs for the Councillors.

Over time the housing developments in Shrewsbury and Bicton, and also in areas such as Bomere Heath and Nesscliffe would mean a boundary review was needed, and that would provide an opportunity to alter the electoral divisions in a more equitable way. However the new LJC’s for a first step in looking to work in a different way.

Mathew and Neil stated that the new proposals and commissioning model still needed to be confirmed by Shropshire Council, but that it was hoped the new LJC’s would start to operate and look at allocating funding early in 2015. It would therefore be necessary to hold an initial meeting of the new LJC’s before Christmas to start to discuss the local issues.

While an area might be in one LJC there was no reason why they couldn’t work closely with neighbouring LJC’s, and attend their meetings. Many services are delivered across boundries and using local knowledge to identify these would be important. Community Enablement Officers would also be able to support cross boarder work, and on a day to day basis their work with Parish Councils would remain unchanged.