Alicia Kearns, MP for Stamford and Rutland, has launched a Save Rutland campaign and petition. The move is in response to the Government’s English Devolution White Paper, one consequence of which is likely to be the abolition of the current Rutland Council and the inclusion of Rutland within a larger unitary council with some parts of Leicestershire.
Whilst the historic county of Rutland will continue whatever happens to local government and lieutenancy arrangements, the local feeling is clearly that Rutland should keep its lord-lieutenant. Alicia Kearns has written to Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner requesting that she act to protect Rutland’s ceremonial status regardless of the outcome of Local Government Reform.
The Association of British Counties’ own recent letter to Angela Rayner suggested that the ongoing local government reorganisation provides the Government with the opportunity to tackle the main threat to the identities of the historic counties: their confusion with local government. In establishing unitary councils, the Government should:
- Replace the terms ‘county’ and ‘county council’ within local government legislation, terminology and parlance with ‘council area’ and ‘council’, as used in Scotland.
- Ensure that none of the new unitary councils or Strategic Authorities bears an unqualified historic county name unless the council/authority is close in area to that historic county.
We also suggested that these moves could be backed up by re-appointing the lieutenancies of England to the historic counties, as are many lieutenancies in Scotland (e.g. Banffshire, Caithness, Dunbartonshire, Kincardineshire, Sutherland).
Alicia Kearns campaign to seek just this with regards to Rutland gives the Government something of a dilemma. With one small exception, the lieutenancies in England are based entirely on local government areas. To agree to a Rutland lieutenancy separate from the new local government set-up would drive a coach and horse through this approach. But to deny it would inevitably be portrayed as the Government doing away with Rutland. Would the Government do that?
Our argument is simply this. If Rutland can have a lord-lieutenant, then why can’t Middlesex? Why can’t Huntingdonshire? What can’t all our historic counties?
4 thoughts on “The Fight for Rutland”
It makes a change for a conservative MP to campaign to conserve anything .
Imo, it’d be more helpful if it could go online. It appears for local people only but a nationwide campaign could make more impact.
High sheriffs’ areas ought to correspond to the historic counties as well, although I would like to see the Isle of Wight retain both a high sheriff and lord-lieutenant of its own as opposed to coming under Hampshire’s. I’d also like each of Yorkshire’s ridings to have a lord-lieutenant (York itself too, since the original core of the city – i.e. the part within the walls – has never been in any of the ridings) but not a high sheriff, whose office should ideally unite Yorkshire by having a territory with boundaries coterminous with the historic county’s.
As someone who was born in Staffordshire and who now lives in Rutland (separated by a few years living in Sussex) it is clear to me that one’s identity is very important. I totally agree that identity should be clearly based on the historic counties (taken from a time before boundaries were tampered with). My belief is that the identity label should come from postal addresses and that postal addresses should formally include the historic county name.
It must be possible to have the historic county name attached to each individual postal address, based upon the precise mapping that already exists. This will mean that some addresses with the same first half of the post code, will be in different historic counties. No doubt, there will also be examples of some addresses with the same complete post code that will be in different historic counties. That does not matter, it is merely a question of adding in the historic county name to the address based on the location of that address on the definitive historic counties map.
Of course, high sheriffdoms can also be attributed to the 92 historic counties forming the United Kingdom. Lord lieutenancies can also follow the same boundaries and, if it makes people from Yorkshire happy, they can have four lieutenancies covering the Ridings and the City of York. However, I feel that it is the postal address which gives each person’s own home its real identity.
With regard to the name on my council tax bill, I’m not too bothered whether it continues to be Rutland County Council or “East Midlands Council Area 7”.