Leader calls for unity amid ongoing tensions with Burnley

Blackburn with Darwen’s council leader has called for East Lancashire politicians to unite ahead of local government reorganisation, amid continuing tensions with Burnley over the creation of the new Pennine Lancashire authority.

While the new unitary authority will not take power until April 2028, the council’s chief executive Denise Park and leader Cllr Phil Riley told a scrutiny committee this week that a ‘mountain’ of work was already underway to prepare for the biggest shake-up of county politics in a generation.

That includes standardising the myriad of services provided by Blackburn with Darwen, Hyndburn, Rossendale, Burnley and Pendle councils before May 2027, when elections will be held to select the councillors who will run the ‘shadow’ authority that oversees the transition into the new mega-council.

But it is not just issues regarding bin collections and the forecasted £43m budget shortfall that need agreement from local leaders, as in recent months Burnley Council’s leader Cllr Afrasiab Anwar has voiced concerns about the ever-increasing ‘centralisation’ of services 11 miles away in Blackburn.

Last month, Cllr Anwar’s challenge to the presumed dominance of Blackburn with Darwen in the new authority led to some concessions over the joint committee that will oversee part of the transition.

This committee was set to be dominated by Blackburn politicians, but has since been modified to provide a better balance between East Lancashire’s largest town and only existing unitary authority, and the other smaller second-tier councils.

At the time, Burnley Council’s independent leader said: “This correction is essential for restoring fairness and credibility to the Pennine Lancashire reorganisation process.

“Burnley has been clear from the outset that no single authority should dominate the interim arrangements.”

While Cllr Anwar welcomed this change, he also fired a broadside at Blackburn with Darwen for withdrawing its support for two other measures he wanted to see to lessen the influence of Burnley’s historic rival over the implementation of the reforms in East Lancashire.

He said: “It is disappointing that commitments made in good faith have not been upheld.

“Stability and trust are vital during Local Government Reorganisation, and changing position after securing an advantage does not help build trust either.”

At Wednesday night’s meeting of Blackburn with Darwen’s policy and corporate resources overview and scrutiny committee, the leader of the region’s largest council responded to the criticism.

Cllr Riley told the committee: “The government in their wisdom has picked the fifth option [four unitary authorities], which was our choice, minus Ribble Valley.

“It wasn’t what we wanted, but it’s what we’ve got. So we’ve started meeting with other leaders and chief executives to start picking out the way forward.

“It’s absolutely imperative that, as a group, we start to work to make this work because, on the face of it, this is what we’ve got. There’s no way out of this, this is the answer.

“Particularly, as you can imagine with our friends in Burnley, there has to come a moment where there is no longer any point in going over why we are here and what we would have preferred, or things of that nature.”

With many major issues still needing to be resolved, Cllr Riley shared that local leaders had held a meeting last Friday that ‘went better than some of the previous ones’, with participants contributing to a document that is being sent to the government.

Committee member Cllr Andrew Slater asked the council leader how certain he was that these changes and the upcoming election would go ahead, in light of this year’s local elections being initially called off, and then reinstated by the government at the last minute.

Cllr Riley said the government was capable of changing its mind, but didn’t know if they would, as the current two-tier council system that has been in place since the 1970s has long been a target for criticism.

“For years, off and on, there has been debate about the two-tier system of the county council and the district council and the confusion that causes. And also a great deal of duplicity… sorry, duplication.”

After this Freudian slip caused some agreement and fair amount of laughter, he told Cllr Slater that he was ’99 per cent’ certain that the reorganisation would be going ahead as detailed by the government.

Turning to the many issues like poor housing stock and ill health that will face the new Pennine Lancashire, which has been described as being one of the ‘most deprived unitary authorities in the country’, Cllr Riley said that leaders needed to unite and come up with a new narrative for the body that will rule over 500,000 residents.

He said: “What we are going to do, and we have talked about, is now developing a shared narrative for what is [Pennine Lancashire], what does authority look like, and what are its challenges locally, what are the opportunities for working on that footprint, so that in each of our areas … we have that same story to tell.”

This agreement over the issues common across East Lancashire will not just be a matter of public relations, as every town in the new council will need to form a consensus with others to get anything done.

Even Blackburn as the largest town will have just 27 of the total 95 councillors that will make up Pennine Lancashire.

“They will still need other people,” Cllr Riley explained. “So putting it simply, we have to learn to work with others on bigger issues, and that’s really the story that we started to make to leaders, which is we have to start to see this as a sort of Pennine picture.”

And those councillors when they are eventually elected next year are unlikely to be meeting at Blackburn town hall, despite its large size.

Responding to a question about where the new authority would meet, Cllr Riley admitted: “We have no idea. I think we will have to meet somewhere that is not contentious, which I think probably rules out here.”