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| A 2022 map showing a potential future Greater London. 49 is Mole Valley. 47 is Reigate & Banstead. Both border London. 48 is Crawley. Moving Crawley into Surrey makes London expansion easier to take Crawley |
In two-tier council areas like ours, local authorities are being forced by the Labour Government to merge to become a single-tier councils. An initial joint submission to the government was made by all eight councils in West Sussex, but an additional submission from Crawley Borough Council and Reigate & Banstead was sneaked in at the last minute, claiming a new single-tier council made up of these two councils was the best option.
That’s clearly ridiculous,
including that the combined population of Crawley and Reigate is barely half
the government’s required minimum population for all new single-tier councils. However,
Crawley Labour are pushing joining Surrey hard, including a senior Labour councillor
emailing all Crawley borough councillors insisting, “this is the obvious way
forward” and “Let’s all get behind this option”.
What might be the real agenda
behind Crawley Labour trying to move Crawley northwards into Surrey? I have my concerns.
The London Mayor, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, often makes statements about Gatwick
Airport, which is not only outside London, but which has the additional
Surrey/West Sussex county border further separating Gatwick from London, giving
Crawley a strong second line of defence from being absorbed into Labour-dominated
London.
The secretive Crawley and
Reigate submission repeatedly mentions London, and says “historic county
boundaries are now illogical”. It references being “strongly connected
to the London economy” and highlights railway links to London and the M25
and M23 motorways. Note that using the M23, the London/Surrey border near
Coulsdon is only 12 miles from the Crawley/Surrey border at Junction 9.
Crucially, any new council with Crawley within Surrey will mean Crawley’s new council will border London! With London needing more housing, it’s easy to foresee Sadiq Khan and Crawley Labour then pressing for the London boundary to expand to absorb the new neighbouring council that includes Gatwick.
One Labour Councillor in Crawley has already been letting his guard slip. At a seminar for Councillors on local government reorganisation held by Crawley Borough Council, when talking about the potential to join with Reigate and Banstead, one senior member of the Labour Cabinet said to everyone "We are all basically Londoners here in Crawley".
Crawley has always proudly been part of our historic county of West Sussex. Our new single-tier council must remain within West Sussex and not move to Surrey, which feels like the first stage of an underhand two-stage plan to make Crawley and Gatwick part of a new London borough.
2 comments:
Why do we have councillors in Crawley West Sussex that see any sense in this ludicrous move of boundary's to Surrey? What if any are the benefits to Crawley Residents, if this goes ahead??? The only thing that I can see that they might see as a benefit would be the Expansion of housing west of Crawley. Perhaps they ought to shutdown some of the Golf Courses in the Reigate area to encourage more housing to be built which would in turn increase their revenue, or perhaps sell of some of the big houses and all the land that comes with them to build housing.
Under this proposal, the housing to the west of Crawley would be in a different council area within West Sussex, so we would have no influence on that.
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