MONMOUTHSHIRE councillors rejected the Welsh Government’s vision for a council restructure with another Gwent authority and chose to seek an alternative model.

Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Independent councillors voted to seek a different path to merging with Newport council, as was recommended by the Williams Commission early this year.

Council leader Cllr Peter Fox told a special council meeting yesterday that he supported a regional model based around South East Wales, rather than a new grouping with Newport.

He said: “I believe that the whole idea of mergers is simplistic; it’s unsophisticated. It pushes local authorities together.

“There must be another option — there clearly is another option. We can’t spend a lot of time looking inwardly when we’ve a Wales that is in dire need of economic development.”

He said he was keen to resist pairing up on the say so of Assembly Members: “We’re just to roll over because the minister says we better get on and merge with our Labour authorities. We should just accept that?”

But Labour group leader Dimitri Batrouni said: “We want fewer councils, less bureaucracy, fewer senior officers and better frontline public services. We are open to working with either Newport or Torfaen.”

He said the model’s increased scale, as suggested by Cllr Fox, would leave Monmouthshire councillors with fewer responsibilities.

Newport council last month rejected the option of merging with Monmouthshire. Torfaen and Blaenau Gwent councils’ cabinet members backed plans to start talks on amalgamating on Monday, although councillors will debate the plans before they are accepted.

Yesterday Conservative councillor Sara Jones said local democracy would be “decimated” by the Welsh Government’s proposals, but she said there was a real prospect of the plans being “bulldozed through without listening to our residents”.

Independent group leader Cllr Simon Howarth said the proposals, which also included mergers with Blaenau Gwent and Torfaen, were not “meaty enough” and that there were insufficient detail in the proposals.

But Labour’s Cllr Armand Watts asked the Conservative and Lib Dem councillors why they seemed worried of Newport, which he said they were treating as an “awesome monster” and that they should embrace the opportunities open to them.

The Welsh Government is seeking expressions of interest on council mergers by November 28, with full business cases sought by June.