Tayside Council Merger Back on the Table; Perth Asks for a Clause Guaranteeing It Never Has to Write ‘Dundee’ on an Envelope

By our Local Government Correspondent

Perth and Kinross, Dundee and Angus could one day be run as a single council, as the Scottish Government looks again at whether Scotland needs 32 local authorities.

The idea is at an early stage. Ministers have floated the possibility of fewer, bigger councils, and Tayside is one of the areas where a merger has been mentioned. The three councils currently set different council tax bills: a Band D home pays around £1,598 in Angus, around £1,674 in Perth and Kinross, and around £2,382 in Dundee.

Perth residents have done that sum, and do not like the answer.

“I’m not against working together,” said a retired bank clerk from Kinnoull. “I’m just against working together at £2,382 a year. If we’re merging, I want to merge downwards. Make us all Angus. Angus seems nice.”

Other concerns are more emotional. A Scone man said he had spent his entire life telling people in England that Perth was “near Dundee, but not Dundee”, and did not want to start telling them it was “basically Dundee”. “We’ve got a cathedral, a racecourse and a river that doesn’t smell of jute,” he said. “We’ve got standards.”

In Dundee, meanwhile, the response was relaxed. “Perth will be fine,” a woman in the Overgate told our reporter, who had driven down especially. “We’ll let them keep their wee sign. We’ll just put ours above it.”

In Angus, people asked politely whether they had to be involved, and went back to their bridies.

The Perthetic notes that the people of Perth and Kinross have survived Tayside Region once before, from 1975 to 1996, and that most of them have only recently stopped talking about it.

The real story: Tayside council merger idea (The Courier)