MAKING Herefordshire join up with neighbouring counties could backfire for the county, opposition figures have warned.

Herefordshire is vulnerable to pressure to merge due to its relatively small population of under 200,000, less than half that of its English neighbours.

Unveiling its English Devolution White Paper, the Government said it would make devolution the default setting across a range of policy areas, including housing, transport, education and skills.

But Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner said that for most areas, the proposals “will mean creating councils with a population of 500,000 or more though there may be exceptions to ensure new structures make sense for an area.

Conservative MP for South Herefordshire Jesse Norman said: "I am instinctively very nervous about further top-down reorganisations of local government, as any sane human being should be.

"But in any case, these plans from the government are so rushed and underdeveloped at present that it is impossible to say what they actually amount to.

"Until we have more clarity as to the process to be followed, the powers to be allocated, the local authorities to be involved, the relationship to the abolition of district councils in other counties and the expected timetable, no one is in a position to make any meaningful assessment of what is being proposed. "The risk is that here we have yet another piece of half-baked, botched and hasty legislation from the new government."

Herefordshire Council wrote to the government last September saying it would rather remain as a single, non-mayoral authority.

Paul Walker Herefordshire’s chief executive later assured councillors: “If devolution goes ahead, the council will exist as it does now and will continue to provide the same services.”

Any decision to form devolution partnerships with neighbouring counties “is a decision for all elected councillors, with officers here to advise”, he added.

Conservative councillor Bruce Baker said: “If it does happen, I can virtually guarantee that being a small authority we will be the losers, especially if we get lumped with a dead loss of an authority somewhere else.”

He said he also worried that a future regional mayor “could cancel tricky decisions we want to introduce”.

Cllr Terry James who leads the Liberal Democrats at Herefordshire Council believes there will be a lot of public backlash to local government organisation in the county and added: “Nobody is very keen on any of the options. The public aren’t going to like it. The idea of a metro mayor doesn’t really work for most of us.”

The most likely option for Herefordshire is that it would tie up with Shropshire as it is already involved in a joint local enterprise partnership with them while others prefer the ‘Marches Forward Partnership’ with Shropshire, Powys and Monmouthshire, but this is fraught with difficulties because of the English-Welsh nature of the arrangement.

Another idea of is rekindling of a Three Counties a tie up between Herefordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire because of its historic association.

Neighbouring Gloucestershire County Council is currently considering whether to back the Three Counties proposal under a single mayor.