We dive into the murky world of local authorities.
Don’t know your Metropolitan Districts from your county councils? Your two-tiers from your hybrids? No need to worry (if indeed you were), you’re not alone. Fortunately we’ve got the authoritative guide to local authorities, so come with us as we borough down (borough/burrow, it’s a witty council-themed joke, sorry) into the long, confusing history of councils.
Anyone who has to deal with local authorities on a regular basis will be fully aware that they never do things simply if there’s a horribly convoluted way to do it instead. Nowhere is this more apparent than looking at the various types of authorities and the various conventions around their naming. In order to explain what’s what, we need to combine it with a brief history lesson.
Cast your minds back to 1972. Obviously the most important thing that happened that year was that The Godfather was released. But closer to home, the government made sweeping changes to the way local authorities worked. The Local Government Act (1972) was an attempt to create a simple local government structure throughout England and Wales (oh, the irony etc.)
It dissolved a lot of existing councils and created a new structure throughout England and Wales. (We’ll ignore London for a minute, partly because it’s totally different to the rest of the UK, and partly because being made to think they’re not important for a few minutes will really annoy anyone from London).
The 1972 act created six metropolitan counties – Greater Manchester, Merseyside, South Yorkshire, Tyne & Wear, West Midlands and West Yorkshire. The rest of England and Wales was divided into non-metropolitan counties.
Each of these metropolitan counties had a single unitary council (as in there’s only one of them) serving the whole region. The non-metropolitan areas had a county council, providing county-wide services such as education and social services, and several district/borough councils, providing more local services such as housing and planning (known as a two-tier structure).
So far, so simple. However, two years later, the government introduced a similar two-tier system in metropolitan areas, and then, in 1985, the Thatcher government abolished metropolitan county councils. This made the district/borough (we’ll get to that distinction shortly) councils in those areas unitary authorities. Hence the reason areas like Birmingham are known as metropolitan councils and don’t have a related county council.
Then, in the 1990s, there was a reorganisation of the non-metropolitan counties (presumably on the grounds that things were still relatively sensible). Throughout Scotland and Wales, unitary councils were created. However, as England has to be different, a Local Government Commission was created to look at its council structure. They decided that a ‘one size fits all’ approach wouldn’t work throughout the country and that counties should be organised in one of three ways, dependent on the needs of each county. Either a unitary or two-tier model in some places, or a hybrid model in others – with the two-tier county/district model in most of the county, and a unitary authority in one or more cities in the region.
This is now the arrangement throughout England, with counties operating either a unitary (such as Rutland), two-tier (Lincolnshire) or hybrid structure (Nottinghamshire). Some authorities, such as Cornwall and Shropshire have since transferred to a unitary structure (most recently in 2009) just in case people were feeling a bit too complacent.
In total, there’s currently 418 principal local authorities (either unitary, or upper and lower tier) throughout the UK, of which, 375 are in England and Wales.
Still with us/awake? Finally we have the distinction between city, borough and district councils. We’ll start with the obvious, city councils (for example Derby city council) apply to, well, cities. So that’s nice and simple.
So that leaves districts and boroughs (such as Melton Borough Council and Forest Of Dean District Council). The difference here is simple. It refers to whether the Queen has conferred borough status on an area. It’s a ceremonial title given to an area by Royal Charter. There’s little difference in practical terms (they have a mayor or, in the case of cities, a lord mayor). There’s also a few Royal Boroughs (such as Greenwich) which is another title granted by the monarch.
So nice and simple so far? Good. That just leaves London, which just likes to be different to everywhere else. This consists of 33 (count em!) unitary authorities – 32 boroughs and the City Of London. These take on all the responsibilities of other unitary authorities, such as education, but unlike other unitary authorities, also has the Greater London Authority. They take on some (but not all) of the responsibility of a county council, such as transport, policing and strategic development. Plus they kept Boris Johnson out of (relative) trouble for several years, which can’t be a bad thing.
So that’s it. Nice and clear isn’t it? Obviously we’ve not talked about town and parish councils because, frankly, we’re amazed anyone’s made it this far. And of course there’s random anomalies like Berkshire (comprised of non-metropolitan, unitary authorities but without county status) along with areas with partially devolved powers and elected mayors because this in England and we don’t like doing things simply if we can possibly avoid it.
Obviously we’re not giving you all this useful (?) information for nothing. We provide searches of local authority records (comprising the CON29 and LLC1), which are compiled at district council level, incorporating data from the county council where necessary. Or, in areas with only one council, by the unitary authority (just in case you were thinking we wrote this out of the goodness of our hearts).
For a list of the various authorities within the Severn Trent region (and of course, to order searches), have a look here.