Bradford diocese -or what?

The Mail is a paper which makes its money from purveying stories in the most reactionary ways possible. Reactionary inclused scare-mongering about Muslims in Britain and making dismissive comments about the church (except when 'church' can be used as a cipher of a handful of concerns about 'traditional' England). So it's worth noting this: Church Times - Reports of Bradford’s demise ‘premature’: "A report in The Mail on Sunday alleged that the diocese was “facing the axe” and was to be “scrapped”. It cited the rise in the Muslim population of the city as a factor behind declining congregations, which meant that the Church was “struggling to maintain a foothold”."
The CT article does a reasonable job of putting over the facts about the context and process. However, there are a few things that might be added, perhaps usefully. Note that I'm a former Bradford man and proud to have been so (even if I am open-eyed about the flaws of diocesan administration -but they are not uncommon and the kind of thing that other administrations show up). The facts are these: historically West Yorkshire has been less 'churched' in CofE terms than practically anywhere else in the country except for other northern (formerly) industrial cities.

So when the dioceses of Bradford, Ripon, Wakefield and Sheffield were carved out of York (I simplify the historical process somewhat) beginning in the late Victorian period, they were always the literally-poor relations. The continued financial pressures felt across practically the whole of the CofE have meant that the financially more marginal (with fewer historical resources) have felt the pinch soonest: this includes South and West Yorkshire whose dioceses desperately need economies of scale or far fewer diocesan expenses. This is the reason for the dioceses commission to meet. The situation they have to try to make sense of is that the configuring of diocesan boundaries in this area is not easy. Wakefield is probably a dioceses with little reason to exist and if it lost Barnsley to a south Yorkshire diocese and Halifax to a west Yorkshire set-up, well it'd hardly have reason to exist. Halifax and Calderdale would be better with Bradford, which would be well to 'lose' hunks at its northern end to dioceses like Carlisle and Blackburn because the parishes concerned are actually in Cumbria and Lancashire. I'm less sure about Ripon and Leeds, but the new title tells a story.

All in all there is a case for something like an archdiocese of West Yorkshire to be created from Bradford, Wakefield and Leeds which would create a sharing of most current diocesan functions. I would further suggest that these dioceses could then lose 'extraneous' parishes at their extremities to the more natural administrative placings of those parishes in Lancasire, Cumbria, North and South Yorkshire etc.

Even better would be a slide, push or nod towards Gareth Millar's plan. I guess an archdiocese of West Yorkshire or something similar might do that...