THE merger between Lancashire and Cumbria police forces has been called off as the rest of the Government's plans for "super forces" look set to be scrapped.

After volunteering to merge, both constabularies wanted the Government to provide a solution to the issue of council tax harmonisation.

This would involve people in both counties paying the same amount in council tax at the moment residents in Cumbria pay more than those in Lancashire.

But it has been revealed that harmonising council taxes would have been against Government guidelines.

Band D Lancashire residents' current bill is around £48 less a year than those in Cumbria, so the proposal was to raise Lancashire's police precept by just over £12 and reduce Cumbria's by £35, so both ended up paying the same for the merged force.

But the treasury pointed out that the 13 per cent increase necessary for Lancashire's new bill would break capping rules.

The only alternative would have been to reduce Cumbria's bill to Lancashire's level, but that would have left the new force having to make £10 million of cuts.

The collapse of the police merger also means that Lancashire Police need to find a new chief constable as the force has been without a permanent leader sine February 2005 and police authority bosses decided there was no point in filling the role if the force was going to merge.

Pendle MP Gordon Prentice said this week: "The Government was pushing for these mergers and had an obligation to meet the costs. There is no way I would have supported a merger which pushed council tax up for my Pendle constituents."

North Yorkshire Police Authority (NYPA) has also responded to the news that the Government is rethinking its policy on force mergers.

It had previously expressed conditional support for a merger - in NYPA's case a merger of all the four forces in the Yorkshire and Humber region.

Coun Jane Kenyon, chairman of the authority, said: "We knew that the Government was having significant difficulties with the previous Home Secretary's intention of establishing strategic forces through the merger of existing forces.

"Those difficulties relate to finance and governance precisely the areas about which NYPA expressed concern and precisely why NYPA's support was conditional.

"So it would be no surprise to us if John Reid, the new Home Secretary, wants to look at alternative options. But I emphasise that we have not yet heard directly from the Home Secretary on this matter and so we are still unclear about his precise intentions.

"Clearly, of all the options on the table at the time, we thought that, on balance, a strategic amalgamation of forces in Yorkshire and Humberside offered the best solution to ensuring that the residents of North Yorkshire had good protective service provision while ensuring people received the levels of neighbourhood policing they require."