ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that an appointed multi-purpose body with responsibility for local services could not be 'held accountable' to local people in any meaningful sense. One of the most important roles of local authorities is to respond to 'community' in both effective and affective terms, and as the Banham Commission discovered, there is ample evidence to confirm that local community identity at a range of different levels remains significant for large numbers of people. The strength of representative democracy lies in its capacity to promote a view of the public interest that transcends the special interests of managers, professionals, and other sectional interests. Some analysts have argued that economics of scale operate only up to a particular level, after which diseconomies set in, and that there are diseconomies of scale that reflect the complexities of communication involved, which inevitably increase as scale increases.
