The Uniting the Conurbation campaign is gaining increasing interest and support from across the community.

The daily news reports locally serve to strongly make the case for a single council for Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch.

Increasing traffic gridlock cries out for innovative and visionary thinking within an overall conurbation plan to address this over the next 25 years.

Meanwhile, Christchurch is desperately trying to save itself from being swallowed up in supermarkets whilst Poole is apparently struggling to come up with a plan to regenerate its town centre shopping.

If only there were a powerful retail strategy for the whole conurbation setting out what we wanted in terms of out of town, high streets and community shopping.

That at least would send the right signals to investors and give more ammunition to fight the might of the brand market share giants from dictating what we get – for the benefit of all.

In Bournemouth the council talk a good game about visions but all it seems to have produced over 10 years is residential developers building on council land. And now, they are actually getting into legal disputes to stop leisure investment development?

Patrick Collins, senior reporter with the Mail on Sunday, rightly congratulating the Cherries on their great performance against Liverpool, described the town of Bournemouth as a “winter-drowsy seaside resort”. So, that’s the view from the City.

Whilst the four councils representing the 380,000 folks of Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch continue to grapple separately with their destinies, the one, single, Liverpool City Council – representing 466,000 souls – has continued with its exciting waterfront developments which have enhanced the economy and culture of its community, locally, nationally and internationally.

And all this without even mentioning the potential financial savings of merger with all our councils currently claiming shortage of cash.

Surely, all these are proper reasons to ask that our councillors seriously and urgently look at moving forward to express the needs and aspirations of our very special area as one council, one city, one voice.

Alderman Douglas Eyre, Kirby Way, Bournemouth