A THEORETICAL 'super council' covering everywhere between Swindon and Cambridge could steal power over repairing roads away from local people, Oxfordshire leaders will warn.
The Oxfordshire Growth Board meets several times a year to discuss how £215m of Government funding aimed at building 100,000 homes is spent.
At the board's meeting today (September 22), its members will discuss a letter to the Government, outlining thoughts on plans for a transport strategy in an areas called 'England's Economic Heartland'.
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EEH as it is known, is an area similar but slightly different to the Oxford to Cambridge Arc: including Swindon and Hertfordshire alongside the Arc areas of Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, Milton Keynes, Cambridgeshire, Bedfordshire and Peterborough.
The growth board is run in a similar way to these organisations: it is made up of elected councillors from across a region who discuss big overarching plans, and is described as a 'partnership'.
The area covered by England's Economic Heartland. Picture: EEH
In its response to a consultation on EEH's transport strategy, the board has said it is worried that if EEH becomes a 'statutory body' with legal powers to govern the region, this might steal powers over roads away from Oxfordshire and the other counties involved, impacting on things like potholes being repaired.
However, Tory transport minister Baroness Vere has said in a letter there is no plan to give EEH that kind of power, and sees its future as being a talking shop for different councils to create 'a strategic vision across the area for the benefit of the whole region'.
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EEH has been given a £500,000 budget for 2020-21 to carry out a study into how to plan an improved transport network across the region it covers.
The growth board, EEH, and the Arc are all aimed at different aspects of economic and housing growth in the English counties north and west of London, which the government believes will become an economic powerhouse in the future, because of the amount of science and technology jobs are on the rise locally.
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