The pattern of local government in England is complex, with the distribution of functions varying according to the local arrangements. Legislation concerning local government in England is decided by the Parliament and Government of the United Kingdom, because England does not have a devolved parliament or regional assemblies.
Principal authorities
England has since 1999 been subdivided into nine regions. One of these, London, has an elected Assembly and Mayor, but the others had a relatively minor role, with unelected boards and Regional Development Agencies due to be abolished in 2012. Below the region level and excluding London, England has two different patterns of local government in use. In some areas there is a county council responsible for services such as education, waste management and strategic planning within a county, with several district councils responsible for services such as housing, waste collection and local planning. These councils are elected in separate elections. Some areas have only one level of local government, and these are dubbed unitary authorities. The City of London and the Isles of Scilly are sui generis authorities, pre-dating recent reforms of local government.
Regions
Regions of England
At the highest level, all of England is divided into nine regions that are each made up of a number of counties and districts. The 'government office regions' were created in 1994[2] and since the 1999 Euro-elections have been used as England's European Parliament constituencies. The regions vary greatly in their areas covered, populations and contributions to the national economy.[2] All have the same status, except London which has substantive devolved powers.[3]
There was a failed attempt to create elected regional assemblies outside London in 2004 and since then the structures of regional governance—regional assemblies, regional development agencies and local authority leaders' boards— have been subject to review. Following the change of government in 2010 these have been scheduled for abolition by 2012 at the latest.
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Counties and districts
For non-administrative purposes, England is wholly divided into 48 counties,[4] commonly known, but not named in statute, as ceremonial counties. These counties are used for the purposes of appointing Lords Lieutenant[4] who are historically the Crown's representatives in those areas. Ceremonial counties are often different from the metropolitan and non-metropolitan counties used for local government as they include the areas covered by unitary authorities. They are taken into consideration when drawing up Parliamentary constituency boundaries.England
For local government, England is divided into areas with a two-tier structure of counties and districts governed by two local authorities, and unitary authority areas where there is one local authority. The arrangement varies in different parts of the country and there are four main configurations: non-metropolitan two-tier 'shire' areas, six metropolitan counties, unitary authorities, and Greater London.
Two-tier non-metropolitan counties
Most of the geographical area of England is within a two-tier non-metropolitan arrangement. In 27 of these areas the county councils provide the majority of services, including education and social services, and the 201 district councils have a more limited role.[1] Non-metropolitan districts can additionally have the status of borough or city, although this has no effect on their powers or functions. All two-tier non-metropolitan counties are also ceremonial counties.county 4 Berkshire is an anomaly in this arrangement whereby its districts are unitary authorities, but the non-metropolitan county was not formally abolished[5] and it is also a ceremonial county.[4] Bedfordshire and Cheshire are two former non-metropolitan counties that continue to exist only as ceremonial counties.
Metropolitan counties
Six large conurbations of England correspond to metropolitan counties.[1] Each metropolitan county had a county council providing limited strategic services, such as public transport and planning, from 1974 to 1986.[1] Despite no longer having county councils the metropolitan counties still legally exist, and are each a ceremonial county. County-level functions, such as public transport, are exercised by joint-boards and other arrangements organised by the district councils. In the metropolitan counties, the 36 district councils operate effectively as unitary authorities and provide the majority of services, including education and social services.[2] All metropolitan districts additionally have the status of borough, and some are cities, although this has no effect on their powers or functions. From April 2011 there will be a formal upper-tier structure in Greater Manchester with the creation of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.[6]
London
The Greater London administrative area created in 1965 corresponds to the London region. Through incremental change, culminating in 2000, the upper-tier authority is the Greater London Authority, comprising an elected Mayor of London and the London Assembly.[7] Greater London is divided into 32 London boroughs, also dating from 1965, each governed by a London borough council. The ancient City of London forms a 33rd division and is governed by the City of London Corporation, a sui generis authority unlike any other in England[7] that has largely avoided any of the reforms of local government in the 19th and 20th centuries.[8] The City of London, and the rest of Greater London, each form a ceremonial county. The London borough councils and the City of London Corporation provide the majority of services, for example they are education authorities and co-ordinate waste management, whereas the Greater London Authority is responsible for the key strategic services of public transport, the police, economic development and emergency planning.
Unitary authorities of England
Outside London and the metropolitan counties, some parts of England are governed by a single council, commonly called (but not named in statute) as a unitary authority.[1] Unitary authorities are a combined non-metropolitan county and non-metropolitan district, undertaking the functions of both.[9] Unitary authorities can additionally have the status of borough or city, although this has no effect on their powers or functions.
46 unitary authorities were created between 1995 and 1998 and nine more were created in 2009. They were formed either by non-metropolitan districts taking on county-level functions, or by counties taking on district-level functions. In some cases, borders were altered or districts were combined during this reorganisation. Berkshire is an anomaly in this arrangement whereby its districts became unitary authorities, but the non-metropolitan county was not formally abolished.[5]
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Isles of Scilly
The Isles of Scilly are a governed by a sui generis local authority called the Council of the Isles of Scilly. The authority was established in 1890 as the Isles of Scilly Rural District Council. It was renamed but otherwise unreformed by the changes in local government that occurred in 1974 in the rest of England outside Greater London.[10] Although effectively a unitary authority, for example it is an education authority,[11] the Isles of Scilly are part of the Cornwall ceremonial county and combine with Cornwall Council for services such as health[12] and economic development.[13]
Civil parishes
The civil parish is the most local unit of government in England.[1] A parish is governed by a parish council or parish meeting, which exercises a limited number of functions that would otherwise be delivered by the local authority. There are no civil parishes in Greater London and not all of the rest of England is parished. The number of parishes and total area parished is growing.
Parishes
Below the district level, a district may be divided into several civil parishes. Typical activities undertaken by a parish council include allotments, parks, public clocks, and entering Britain in Bloom. They also have a consultative role in planning. Councils such as districts, counties and unitaries are known as principal local authorities in order to differentiate them in their legal status from parish and town councils, which are not uniform in their existence. Local councils tend not to exist in metropolitan areas but there is nothing to stop their establishment. For example, Birmingham has a parish, New Frankley. Parishes have not existed in Greater London since 1965, but from 2007 they could legally be created. In some districts, the rural area is parished and the urban is not - such as the Borough of Hinckley and Bosworth, where the town of Hinckley is unparished and has no local councils, while the countryside around the town is parished.[1] In others, there is a more complex mixture, as in the case of the Borough of Kettering, where the small towns of Burton Latimer, Desborough and Rothwell are parished, while Kettering town itself is not. In addition, among the rural parishes, two share a joint parish council and two have no council but are governed by an annual parish meeting.
People
Councillors and mayors
Main articles: Cabinet-style council and Elected mayors in the United Kingdom
Councils have historically had no split between executive and legislature. Functions are vested in the council itself, and then exercised usually by committees or subcommittees of the council. The post of leader was recognised, and leaders typically chair several important committees, but had no special authority. The chair of the council itself is an honorary position with no real power. Under section 15 the Local Government and Housing Act 1989, committees must roughly reflect the political party makeup of the council; before it was permitted for a party with control of the council to "pack" committees with their own members. This pattern was based on that established for municipal boroughs by the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, and then later adopted for county councils and rural districts.
In 2000, Parliament passed the Local Government Act 2000 to require councils to move to an executive-based system, either with the council leader and a cabinet acting as an executive authority, or with a directly elected mayor – either with a mayor and cabinet drawn from the councillors – or a mayor and council manager. There is a small exception to this whereby smaller district councils (population of less than 85,000) can adopt a modified committee system. Most councils are using the council leader and cabinet option, while 52 smaller councils have been allowed to propose alternative arrangements based on the older system (Section 31 of the Act), and Brighton and Hove invoked a similar provision (Section 27(2)(b)) when a referendum to move to a directly elected mayor was defeated.
There are now twelve directly elected mayors, in districts where a referendum was in favour of them. Many of the mayors are independents (notably in Hartlepool and Middlesbrough, which in parliamentary elections are usually Labour Party strongholds). Since May 2002, only a handful of referendums have been held, and they have all been negative apart from Torbay. Of the mayors, all but Stoke-on-Trent's are mayor and cabinet-based. The Executive, in whichever form, is held to account by the remainder of the Councillors acting as the "Overview and Scrutiny function" - calling the Executive to account for their actions and to justify their future plans. As a relatively new concept within local government, this is arguably an under-developed part of local municipal administration. In a related development, the Health and Social Care Act 2001, Police and Justice Act 2006, and 2006 local government white paper set out a role for local government Overview and Scrutiny in creating greater local accountability for a range of public-sector organisations.
Boroughs in many cases are descendants of municipal boroughs set up hundreds of years ago, and so have accreted a number of traditions and ceremonial functions. Where borough councils have not adopted a directly elected mayor, the chair of the council is the mayor. In certain cities the mayor is known as the Lord Mayor. The chairman of a town council is styled the Town Mayor.
Councils may make people honorary freemen or honorary aldermen. A Mayor's term of office denotes the municipal year.
Elections
The area which a council covers is divided into one or more electoral divisions – known in district and parish councils as "wards", and in county councils as "electoral divisions". Each ward can return one or more members; multi-member wards are quite common. There is no requirement for the size of wards to be the same within a district, so one ward can return one member and another ward can return two. Metropolitan borough wards must return a multiple of three councillors, while until the Local Government Act 2003 multiple-member county electoral divisions were forbidden.
In the election, the candidates to receive the most votes win, in a system known as the multi-member plurality system. There is no element of proportional representation, so if four candidates from the Mauve Party poll 2,000 votes each, and four candidates from the Taupe Party poll 1,750 votes each, all four Mauve candidates will be returned, and no Taupe candidates will. Although this has been said by some to be undemocratic,[3] minor and local single-issue parties do tend to do much better at local elections than they do in general elections, so the case for reform is perhaps less clear. In any event, the system is not likely to change for the foreseeable future.
The term of a councillor is usually four years. Councils may be elected wholly, every four years, or "by thirds", where a third of the councillors get elected each year, with one year with no elections. Recently, the "by halves" system, whereby half of the council is elected every two years, has been allowed. Sometimes wholesale boundary revisions will mean the entire council will be re-elected, before returning to the previous elections by thirds or by halves over the coming years. Recent legistation allows a council to move from elections by thirds to all-up elections.
Often, local government elections are watched closely to detect the mood of the electorate before upcoming parliamentary elections.
Officers
Councillors cannot do the work of the council themselves, and so are responsible for appointment and oversight of officers, who are delegated to perform most tasks. Local authorities nowadays have to appoint a "Chief Executive Officer", with overall responsibility for council employees, and who operates in conjunction with department heads. The Chief Executive Officer position is weak compared to the council manager system seen in other countries (and in Stoke). In some areas, much of the work previously undertaken directly by council employees has been privatised.Councils also have a general power to "promote economic, social and environmental well-being" of their area. However, like all public bodies, they are limited by the doctrine of ultra vires, and may only do things that common law or an Act of Parliament specifically or generally allows for - in contrast to the earlier incorporated municipal corporations which were treated as natural persons and could undertake whatever activities they wished to. Councils may promote Local Acts in Parliament to grant them special powers. For example, Kingston upon Hull had for many years a municipally owned telephone company, Kingston Communications.
Funding
Local councils are funded by a combination of central government grants, Council Tax (a locally set tax based on house value), Business Rates, and fees and charges from certain services including decriminalised parking enforcement. The proportion of revenue that comes from Council Tax is low, meaning that if a council wishes to increase its funding modestly, it has to put up Council Tax by a large amount. Central government retains the right to "cap" Council Tax if it deems it to be too much.[citation needed] This is an area of debate in British politics at the moment, with councils and central government blaming each other for council tax rises.[citation needed]
Council Tax is collected by the district-level council. Authorities such as the GLA, parish councils, county councils, passenger transport authorities, fire authorities, police authorities, and national parks authorities can make a precept. This shows up as an independent element on council tax bills, but is collected by the district and funnelled to the precepting authority. Some joint ventures are instead funded by levy.[citation needed]
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