Historic first meeting of North Northants shadow unitary tonight

The first meeting of the new shadow authority that will become the new Northants unitary is being held this evening (June 4).

It will be a virtual start for the North Northants shadow authority as the existing councillors from the four borough and district authorities will all gather online at 7pm for the inaugural meeting in which the foundation for the new unitary will be laid.

The unitary, which is expected to launch next April, will merge the existing councils in North Northants and the county council, after the Government ordered a shake-up of local government in the county in the wake of NCC’s financial collapse.

However currently, due to the cancelling of last month’s local elections, all of the councillors who will make up the new shadow council and its cabinet are all part of the old guard.

Current Kettering Council leader Russell Roberts has already been appointed by the Government as the shadow leader of the temporary council and Wellingborough Council’s leader Martin Griffiths will be his deputy.

They will be joined by a shadow executive made up of existing councillors which will meet officially meet for the first time on June 11. The executive will set up a series of task and finish groups to work on important matters such as council accommodation and council tax levels.

Tonight’s meeting will formally appoint the interim leaders, the senior officers and the committees as well as electing a new chairman.

Managing director of Wellingborough Council Liz Elliott is expected to be given the job of interim boss of the shadow council, with East Northants Council’s Glenn Hammons set to become the finance boss and Bhupindar Gill, who has recently become the monitoring officer for Kettering and East Northants, will be appointed as chief legal officer.

The cost of setting up the two new unitary council’s has rocketed in recent months and is now expected to cost £55m – an additional £11m to what was originally proposed.

This is despite the fact that the new authorities will be a scaled back version of what was originally intended, with the likelihood that the two councils are linked from the start and share key services, which was not in the original plan.

The shadow authorities will have the option of going to central government and asking for another extension to the start date if they think they cannot open as ‘safe and legal’.

The meeting can be watched by using this link