Abolish Shropshire Council

It Didn’t Fail. It Worked — Just Not for You

Shropshire Council was sold as progress in 2009

One council.
One vision.
One streamlined authority delivering better services for less money.

What we got instead was something far more efficient:

a system that concentrates power, disperses blame, and exports failure.

Let’s stop pretending this is a glitch

Shropshire Council isn’t “struggling”.

It isn’t “under pressure”.

It hasn’t been unlucky.

It is doing exactly what large, remote authorities do when they begin to fail: they push responsibility downwards and keep authority upwards.

That isn’t reform.
That’s survival.

Big enough to decide. Too big to blame

The defining feature of Shropshire Council isn’t efficiency.

It’s distance.

Distance between decisions and consequences.
Distance between budgets and reality.
Distance between councillors, Officers and residents.

When things go wrong, nobody quite owns the failure.

It’s always a partnership, a legacy issue, a future review, or a difficult financial context.

In other words: an excuse factory.

“Devolution” is what failure calls itself in public

When Shropshire Council talks about devolution, what it really means is simple:

“We can’t afford this anymore — you pay for it.”

Temporary funding.
Permanent responsibility.
No guarantee the asset even comes with the service.

Once accepted, the cost never comes back.

We’ve seen this before — Scotland and Wales prove it

After more than twenty years of devolution, the results are clear:

more politicians, more bureaucracy, more spending — and worse outcomes.

Health services struggling.
Education standards slipping.
Infrastructure stalled.

Blame everywhere, accountability nowhere.

Devolution doesn’t remove failure. It creates more places for it to hide.

And now Shropshire Council wants to copy this — in miniature

It keeps the assets, the strategic control, and the right to withdraw funding.

Town and parish councils get the cost, the risk, and the public anger.

This wasn’t sudden.

Same model.
Same outcome.
Just paid for through parish precepts.

The uncomfortable truth

The direction of travel has been clear since at least 2016.

The crisis didn’t create the strategy — it merely gave it urgency.

Shropshire doesn’t have a funding problem.

It has a scale problem.

And Shropshire Council is where accountability goes to hide.

Shropshire Council did not streamline government.
It streamlined excuses — and sent the bill elsewhere.