THE creation of a single super-council in Oxfordshire would be "expensive and disruptive" according to a government minister.

Oxfordshire County Council leader Ian Hudspeth has highlighted a new report revealing that savings of up to £33m a year could be made by combining the county council with the five district councils.

The report concluded reorganisation would cost a total of £16m and Local Government Minister Kris Hopkins said the Government was not in favour of the move.

It follows the district councils uniting to criticise the report as "error-strewn" and ruling out a switch to a unitary authority.

Mr Hopkins said: “One of the first acts of the coalition Government was to legislate to scrap the last administration's plans for top-down unitary local government restructuring, through the Local Government Act 2010.

"Such top-down upheavals would have been expensive and disruptive, distracting from the need to promote growth and to tackle the deficit left by the last administration.

"This stance is, and remains, Government policy.

“There is great potential for more locally-led joint working and sharing of services in local government."

Mr Hudspeth said earlier that a switch to a super-council could lead to council tax payments coming down but district councils said the report's figures were "fundamentally flawed".

In a statement, the councils said: “It has been written using high-level assumptions and having no regard to actual service delivery arrangements on the ground. Even a cursory review of the figures indicates the savings are vastly overstated and the costs of implementation significantly understated."

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