No government comes into power these days without a programme of "reform" - particularly of local government. This government is no different, but is there a hidden motive behind their reforms of council structures?

People who have worked for both metropolitan boroughs and district councils are familiar with the differences in the way they are organised at a political level. In most district councils in countryside areas, councillors of every political persuasion used to make decisions in an independent way - according to their own view of what was best for their ward, even if that sometimes meant voting against party policy. So many decisions were delegated to committees, and could not be revoked at full council meetings. The only members who were regularly briefed before the committee meeting were the chairman and vice-chairman of the committee.

Most metropolitan boroughs, on the other hand, were controlled by a few senior councillors, who, particularly in the case of Labour controlled councils, imposed their decisions on the rest of the council by using the discipline of an iron whip.

One might think the metropolitan borough model should have been more efficient: in practice, this was far from the case. Every important decision had to be agreed by a meeting of committee chairmen, which might meet only once a fortnight. No important matter would be placed before a committee until it had been agreed at this meeting, which was not open to the press or the public. It should be fairly obvious that there is a limited amount of business that can be dealt with at a fortnightly meeting. Moreover, every matter brought before the meeting had to pass through a long gestation process: a group of officers would have to prepare a report; that report would eventually be submitted to the department's director; if he was satisfied with it, it would then have to go before the chief executive, and, if he approved it, finally to the Council's leader, before being put to the controlling group's meeting of committee chairmen. In a busy council, all meetings of senior officers or members have to be scheduled well in advance, and so it was not unusual for six months or more to pass between the writing of the first officers' report and the presentation of the final report to the committee who were, in theory and law, responsible for making the decision.

In practice, the committee decision was a formality. In many councils, the committees themselves were rigged, so as to keep opposition members off them, and to restrict any debate on any important issue. And so, as the meetings of the committee chairmen, which actually made the decisions, were open to neither press nor public, and the committee itself did as it was told, there was no real democratic accountability.

The last conservative government (with LibDem support) attempted to remedy this situation by requiring every political group to have the same proportion of members on each committee as they had on the entire council. However, as the meeting of council chairmen had theoretically no legal power to make decisions (but only decided how to apply the party whip), the meetings of committee chairmen did not have to submit to political proportionality.

The government has now sought to impose a "cabinet system" on all local councils, whereby most decisions can now to be made legally by a "cabinet", and not by council committees. Very little imagination is required to see that the members of the "cabinet" under the new system are usually the same as the committee chairmen, who attended committee chairmen's meetings under the old system. There are still some committees, including a "scrutiny committee", which, in a politically controlled council, will do as it is told anyway.

It should not be difficult to see the purpose behind the spin: the decision making process has indeed been simplified - but the only processes which have been short-cut or abolished are the democratic ones. Cabinet system councils can now make most decisions at meetings where press and public have no right to attend, and the importance of ordinary councillors has been diminished.

The government would like all councils, including countryside districts, to adopt this anti-democratic model. It goes to the credit of all Ryedale District Councillors that thankfully they did not decide to go down this route.