Cllr Tom Harvey is the opposition leader for the Conservatives on South Lakeland District Council and runs his own business in Milnthorpe. Here he tells of his hopes for 2020.

Being given the opportunity to voice my hopes for 2020 comes as something of a relief. 2019 may have seemed like about three years of political vitriol rolled in to one for most of us.

Thankfully, a national consensus has been reached, and whatever your politics, there’s now an unambiguous direction of travel.

As a local councillor I’m glad that we can finally refocus on what we have been elected to do, namely deliver local services at a local level, and that we concentrate on that instead of headline-grabbing grandiose gestures that are way outside our sphere of influence. But before we focus on the future, we need a realistic base to build on.

It’s abundantly clear to me, and it's something I have voiced concern over for many years, that we do not need seven principal councils, 368 councillors, seven chief executives, seven finance officers, and so on to represent just half-a-million people.

And for better or worse, a lot of this boils down to money. As Mrs Thatcher famously said: “There is no such thing as public money – there is only taxpayers’ money". We, residents of Cumbria, are the one's paying for all these councils. Maybe you disagree? Well, here are some easy questions to see if you know which council does what.

Who would you contact if your road hasn’t been properly gritted? Or if you needed help finding an affordable home or you want to get rid of some excess recycling? Congratulations if you got all three right - you’re clearly a councillor or involved in local government! For the rest of us - good luck in getting to the right place. It is, of course, a slightly flippant point but I am probably not too far away in saying that most people just refer to 'the council'.

So why do we need seven of them? As one of those 368 Councillors, I may seem like a turkey voting for Christmas, and during the election, I was called a lot worse. But I would be delighted if political leaders in Cumbria can put their empire-building to one side and finally understand that the way that people want their council to work now differs greatly from when the current set-up came into being and instead of tinkering around the edges, deliver real reform for the taxpayers of South Lakeland and Cumbria as a whole.