Time to move Selby out of North Yorkshire - here’s why: Yorkshire Post Letters

THE battle for supremacy between North Yorkshire County Council and its constituent boroughs is not a new one. To those of us on the outer fringes of the county it may seem like we have a choice between Balkanisation and remote control.

A third suggestion, to split the county in two along the A1 corridor, seems like a return to the kind of messy thinking surrounding the changes made following the Local Government Act 1972 – the internal and external boundaries imposed on Yorkshire in 1974 were widely assumed to have been drawn up with a blunt pencil on a soggy beermat one lunchtime by an inebriated junior clerical assistant based in a London back office.

Having lived in the East Riding until a couple of years ago, I see it is a good model for a unitary authority following the abolition of its borough councils.

In the case of North Yorkshire, perhaps an authority covering the whole of the county as it stands would be something of a behemoth and Northallerton would seem far away to many councillors and residents on the fringes of the county.

To me the logical solution is to slim the county down, but use history as a guide and undo some of the mistakes made in 1974, rather than repeating them by creating two unpopular new counties with no sense of history, and centred around the Dales and North York Moors, with the former East Yorkshire Wolds ignored.

That hypothetical junior clerk made a couple of major errors in our area. One of those was moving boundaries with no regard to local feeling to create new boroughs with an administrative capital near the centre.

So the northern boundary of the old East Riding following the River Hertford was replaced by an arbitrary line across the Wolds to allow the formation of Ryedale and Scarborough boroughs, thereby carving up an area with a strong common geological, cultural, and historical integrity, throwing a long strip of the chalk Wolds together with the North York Moors.

Meanwhile the new Selby borough, a vast area carved from the old East and West Ridings with no links whatsoever to the old North Riding, was bundled up into North Yorkshire, from which it is now almost separated by the expanding City of York.

So the solution would seem to be obvious. Detach Selby borough with its 84,000 population and reassign the parishes to West Yorkshire and the East Riding where they formerly belonged, and restore the pre-1974 boundary from Filey to York.

At a stroke North Yorkshire would be reduced by over 100,000 residents and a few thousand square kilometres to a more manageable size, but following the grain of history for once rather than cutting across it. Simple.

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Thank you

James Mitchinson