With less than 24 hours to go before the results of the Scottish referendum are revealed, Cornwall Council is preparing its case to be given greater powers to raise and spend its own money in the way it wants.

Whatever the decision of people in Scotland on Friday morning, the authority is calling on the government to give Cornwall "more freedom to manage its own affairs".

However this has been questioned by Mebyon Kernow, who say that people are already fed up with power in Cornwall being centralised into a few hands at County Hall, and that "renaming Cornwall Council a Cornish Assembly is not devolution."

Cornwall Council leader John Pollard said: “Over the past few weeks we have seen the government offer sweeping new powers to Scotland. At the same time ministers are doing deals with cities to give them more powers. We want the same freedoms for Cornwall .

“Not only are we a distinct region with a single Local Enterprise Partnership and a single health commissioner covering Cornwall, we were recently granted National Minority Framework Status because of our unique culture and heritage.

“Last month we successfully persuaded the Government to let us decide how to spend the funding we receive from Europe and we now want to build on this success to see more powers transferred from Whitehall to County Hall.”

Adding that transferring powers to the Council would not create an additional layer of bureaucracy, Mr Pollard said that the authority wanted to have a sensible discussion with the government over how any new system would work.

“We don’t want to see the “cities” system imposed on Cornwall – this is not a case of a single devolution model fits all. We know that Cornwall is unique and we need to ensure that we work with the Government to create a model which is right for us”.

The council is currently developing a new strategy which sets out the authority’s aim to create a "sustainable Cornwall, which is prosperous, resilient and resourceful with strong communities where the most vulnerable are protected".

“One of the key aims of the Strategy is to create an “Ambitious Cornwall” which has more local control over Government spending” said John Pollard.

“This is echoed in the strategic economic plan which was recently published by the Local Enterprise Partnership. We don’t want the way we spend our money and deliver services to people in Cornwall to be dictated by the Government – we want to make our own decisions”.

“Cornwall has a proud history of standing up and fighting for what it believes in and we are determined to take advantage of this moment and shape our own destiny. “