New appointment boosts Norwich unitary bid

The council, was told by ministers, in July, that it must revise its original proposal to include extended boundaries.

As a result, Paul Spencer has been given the role of director of transformation after the council decided to allocate an extra £400,000 to winning Whitehall support for its unitary plan.

Paul Spencer, who was born in Norwich, has been leading the city’s bidding process for the last 18 months and helped implement a new unitary council in Milton Keynes during the last round of local government reorganisation in the 1990s.

Initial meetings between the council and the Boundary Committee are currently underway.

Spencer has worked at all levels of government - central, unitary, county and district. He has mainly worked in corporate services (finance, human resources, ICT and customer services) but always with an emphasis on driving through major change programmes.