No.81, Tuesday, 24th. February 2026

The garden waste team are outside as I am writing this, but there is no bin out there for me. I have been too lazy or too busy, depending on your point of view, to get any gardening done, but there were a few out in the cul-de-sac. The team to collect my plastics/metals bin, waste paper bag and food waste bin will no doubt be here before noon. I didn’t put the glass/cardboard bin out because there is so little in it.

The recycling service provided by the local council is good. Which got me to thinking about ‘local’ councils and how they have been ‘re-organised’ over the years. Before the current District Council there were two: NAUDC and NARDC – Newton Abbot Urban District Council and the Rural equivalent, both based in the town. They made sense at the time – including geographical sense, recognising the difference between a dense urban area and a very large rural hinterland of small towns, villages and hamlets, all with close links with the town.

It has been my experience in recent decades that whoever draws boundaries at the Boundaries Commission has a poor understanding of social geography and a lack of local knowledge. For example, when most people think of ‘Newton Abbot’ they also think of the ‘Newton towns’ around it – Chudleigh, Bovey Tracey, Ashburton, Moretonhampstead and so on. Pretty much the old NARDC. And yet, when the boundaries of the Newton Abbot Parliamentary Constituency were drawn up, all of this local geography was ignored. Instead of the towns you would expect, we have Teignmouth and Dawlish.

The result is that small towns and villages, where many people shop, work and even go to school in Newton Abbot are not in the Newton Abbot constituency. As for the District Council, we do not yet know what it will morph into, but whatever it is, it will be a substantially larger area than it is now, either a group of District Councils or Devon County Council. I saw how expensive and disruptive the creation of Cornwall Council was. It would appear that we may not, after all, learn from our mistakes.