...we'll have to just disagree on planning and area committees.  As you can gather anyway I'd much rather reparish.  We have one of the highest ratios of representation on average that most of the rest of the democratic world in Britain I believe.

Personally I'd prefer to go much further .  But you raise an interesting point about parishes and inequalities.  Just thinking about the current North East Area, if that happened to be a town council in its own right, it would probably justify a full 25 town councillors, and instead of with the current city wards which all seem to be made up, crudely in places, of a wealthy part and a less well off part, these would all get their own representatives, and I'll bet even in the North East Area the "not so well off" areas' representatives would be in the majority.  At the moment the wards are big enough to be multiple neighbourhoods

With my experiences of two of Oxford's four parishes, I'd trust them much more to eke out their income more efficiently and be much more reactive to local needs and requests.  Case in point; the city is large enough to need to set an annual timetable for grants applications and so on, the parishes react whenever an application comes in mainly.  That time difference could be make or break for local initiatives.