NORTH YORKSHIRE is a great brand. Just the name conjures up visions of enormous natural beauty, of dales and moors, of rivers and sea, of rolling green valleys and towering cliffs, of traditional market towns and quaint country villages, of abbeys and sand castles, of roaring pub fires and windswept beaches, of sheep and beer named after sheep...

In the post-pandemic world, it is important that North Yorkshire builds on that brand, both to sell itself to the outside world and also to give itself a sense of identity and coherence across its wide geography.

The county is now on the verge of a momentous decision about how it governs itself, and today The Northern Echo throws its weight behind the campaign to keep the county united as a single unitary authority.

The last thing it needs is to slice itself down the middle and create two artificial authorities, neither of which can lay claim to the North Yorkshire brand. This would only spark off internal squabbles about what is based where, what assets belong to whom, and who is called what, when really the county would be stronger together.

There are two models being put to central government about the future of North Yorkshire. One will scrap the seven unitary authorities and create one “mega-council” covering 608,000 people. The mega-council will then join with York – enhancing the North Yorkshire brand with a minister and a city - to elect a mayor.

The second would see the seven district councils split themselves on an east-west basis, break-up the existing county structure, drag in an unwilling York City and somehow fashion two unitary authorities, which would then unite to elect a mayor.

To many people, this all looks like an unnecessary re-arranging of the deckchairs.

But even before the pandemic struck, the Government believed that the mayoral model was the best way forward, with decisions being devolved from Whitehall to the locally accountable figure. With the evidence of the Tees Valley on our doorsteps, it is hard to disagree, and the post-pandemic rebuild of our economy will make this role more crucial than ever.

A mayor can only work with unitary authorities, otherwise there are too many tiers of government.

So for North Yorkshire a decision on the future needs to be made.

It is a momentous decision. The current county structure was created in 1974, so whatever replaces it has to be fit for the next 50 years at least, and it has to stop the internal bickering that has been going on for at least the last 15 years.

The main drawback of the mega-council is its size, particularly in terms of its acreage – it is the largest shire county in the country. To be successful, councils have to be intimately involved in their residents’ lives. They cannot be seen to be based faraway on a distant planet.

But also on our doorstep is Durham, which in 2009 went through a similar process, scrapping seven district councils to create one large unitary covering a population of 530,000. It has created “area action partnerships” which, although not perfect, do bring the council out of its city base and into people’s neighbourhoods.

North Yorkshire has similar plans to upgrade its six constituency committees, create local planning bodies, and to beef up its parish and town councils, so, with care, really local voices and decisions should still be heard and made.

And, anyway, the east-west split model still creates geographically large councils: Stokesley, on the edge of the moors, and Skipton, on the edge of the dales, would be under the same council which could have its headquarters in Harrogate. The distances here are still huge.

Plus, this is unnatural. People don’t live in the east of north Yorkshire or in the west of north Yorkshire anymore than they live in districts like Hambleton, Craven or even Richmondshire. Their sense of identity lies with their local towns and with their great overarching brand of North Yorkshire, which means so much to them and to their visitors.

To break that brand up, and to chop up the county-wide services, would be a self-inflicted wound and we would hope that the Government would see that North Yorkshire is stronger together as one.