There's a meeting of the Pendle ‘Lancashire Local’ committee this week, and it won’t get very many of people queuing to hear the proceedings.

And I don’t suppose there will be lots of folk marching in the streets at the news that the Conservative leader of Lancashire County Council, Geoff Driver, has announced that he wants to abolish this and the other eleven Lancashire Locals in the different districts of the county council’s area.

In Pendle ,at least, this will be a shame. These meetings were set up by the previous Labour administration as part of the developing agenda to devolve and decentralise services and decision-making to the lowest possible levels.

Nationally it’s now all the rage amongst all the parties under the label ‘localism’. Everyone seems to mean different things when they claim to be localists, but just having the debate is a step forward.

Now the new Lancashire County Council leadership want to take a step backwards.

Cynics suggested that the original Lancashire moves were just part of the county council's bid to become one enormous unitary council and do away with the district councils such as Burnley, Pendle and Rossendale.

But in Pendle at least the Lancashire Local has proved its usefulness. It’s not perfect by any means, and too often tied up in the county’s particularly bureaucratic way of doing things, but it’s a lot better than nothing.

It consists of the six county councillors for Pendle with an equal number of Pendle councillors.

Its relative success compared with some others was perhaps down to the commitment of its first chair, Liberal Democrat David Whipp, and the enthusiasm and support of the admirable LCC liaison officer for Pendle, Jan Styan.

County Councillor Driver’s alternative ‘offer’ seems to consist of making decisions about things like yellow lines by one person 30 miles away in Preston, and discussing more strategic issues in behind-closed-doors one-to-one chats between the leaders of the two councils.

It’s still open for consultation, though, and I hope that people who do believe in decentralisation and local democratic involvement will tell Mr Driver that he’s wrong, and his ideas will do local people (and the Tories) no good at all.