All hail for the new senate?

The 17-seat senate, named after the American upper house, is the brainchild of Hampshire County Council leader Ken Thornber, who will be the self-anointed chairman.

The Daily Echo can today reveal £100,000 in taxpayers' money has already been set aside to set up the body, which is the first of its kind in Britain.

Council tax campaigners have branded the concept a waste of money and a desperate attempt to cling onto power by the Tory county council leader.

Cllr Thornber says the senate is needed to stop the county council and 11 local authorities being merged into super-councils known as unitary authorities, similar to Southampton and Portsmouth.

The new body will be made up of Cllr Thornber, plus the 11 district and borough council leaders and the chairmen of the police and fire authorities. It will not include representatives from either Southampton or Portsmouth City councils, which are unitary authorities.

In a groundbreaking move, unelected representatives of the Army, primary care trust, voluntary and business communities will also have a say on how millions are spent on services from health to waste and crime.

The nature of their powers has yet to be defined, however Cllr Thornber wants the 17 senators to each have an equal vote on spending, just as in the American Senate.

He claims the senate will save Hampshire taxpayers "millions" by improving the delivery of council services.

Cllr Thornber said: "We want to see if there is a way that we can forget our party and our parochial attitudes and work across the whole of Hampshire to reduce the cost and improve the services we are delivering to the people."

Campaigners, however, say it is simply another unnecessary tier of bureaucracy.

Christine Melsom, from the tax campaign group Is it Fair?, said: "It's just going to cost more money and more expenses, which the Hampshire taxpayer will, of course, have to pay for."

Taxpayers' Alliance campaign director Mark Wallace said the senate would only replicate the work of other regional development agencies and local area partnerships.

"The last thing people need is yet another organisation and batch of bureaucracy clogging up the public sector," he said.

"If any lessons should be learned from the experience of recent years where taxes have boomed and services have struggled, it should be that the public sector needs streamlining and not adding to even more.

"People are sick of hearing that yet another quango, yet another talking shop is going to sort everything out, because it isn't. The more of these bodies they create the less accountable what they are doing becomes."

Social sciences expert Gerry Stoker, chairman of governance at the University of Southampton, welcomed the concept of the Senate.

"I think something that is about getting public institutions working together for the public good is a positive move, if it can made to work well," Professor Stoker said.

"I think the name senate is an interesting choice because the United States has a senate and Rome had a senate. I think it's trying to say it's a place for serious reflection on the concerns of the people of Hampshire."

However, he questioned the idea to give unelected representatives from the Army, public services and business community the power to vote on spending.

"That really does raise issues of accountability, but I imagine that is a fairly tokenistic element to the proposal as I think the vast majority of decisions will be made on a near consensus basis."

The Conservatives will dominate the senate as they control nine district and borough councils in Hampshire, while the Liberal Democrats hold two, in Eastleigh and Gosport, and Labour none.

Cllr Thornber said the senate would empower local councils to have a greater say on issues of county-wide importance.

"The senate is a response to the unitary county movement. I see it as maintaining the benefits of the two-tier system while improving them to such an extent that government will say we don't need unitary councils in Hampshire," he said.

"I was never happy with the unitary movement when my own government introduced it. We saw Southampton and Portsmouth split from the county and frankly the cost benefits that were put forward in doing that haven't yet been achieved."

Cllr Thornber defended the senate's £100,000 setting up costs as it was taken from £1.9m in savings made by the county council last year - and not taxpayers' money.

However, Ms Melsom said that this was ridiculous as any money spent by the council was public money. She added: "How on earth can he say that?

"Of course it is taxpayers' money, he saved it from somewhere else it should be going in the kitty and lowering our council tax and not setting up another quango, because that is what it is."