ANOTHER North-East council has added its support to a proposal to merge Durham's district councils into three.

If the public votes for a Regional Assembly, it is likely that one tier of local government will have to be abolished.

Chester-le-Street District Council is backing the bid to merge County Durham's seven district councils, thereby abolishing the county council.

On Thursday evening, councillors decided that should this happen, they would wish to merge with Derwentside district.

The district council's proposal to combine with Durham had already been rejected by the Boundary Commission, which will finish consulting on the boundary changes on February 23.

It will then take the various views into account, before making a final decision.

Councillor Simon Henig, deputy leader of Chester-le-Street District Council, said: "When the Boundary Commission rejected the option of us merging with Durham, they came back to us with three options. So we have to choose between having three or two unitary authorities in Durham, or one."

Derwentside, Easington, Sedgefield borough, Teesdale and Wear Valley district councils have already added their backing to merging into three separate unitary authorities.

As well as merging the two North Durham councils, they want to unite Durham with Easington for east Durham and Sedgefield, Teesdale and Wear Valley for South Durham.

The authorities feel this would be better than one council for County Durham, representing 500,000 people.

The other option was creating two unitary authorities for the north and south of County Durham.

The merger of Derwentside and Chester-le-Street would create a council with a population of 140,000. Both councils, which border Tyne and Wear, have similar demographics.

Coun Henig said: "We already share an MP, who very effectively represents both Chester-le-Street and Stanley.

"Chester-le-Street is very small, which makes things hard for us, because money is allocated per head of population."

Durham County Council supports the creation of one county-wide authority.

It said the county council delivers 86 per cent of local government services in County Durham and it would cost two-and-a-half times more to create three unitary councils than a single authority