I was born in 1973, so I can't be held responsible for the Local Government Act of 1972, but the despoilation of the locality of England that was begun with that Act is ongoing to this day.
Let me start at the beginning; until 1972, we had a system of local authorities that related pretty well to people’s actual local identities. Small towns had UDCs (urban district councils), rural areas had RDCs (rural district councils) which were divided into parishes (each village was a parish) and big towns had county boroughs. Cities had county boroughs too, but they called them city councils. The RDCs and UDCs were combined together in county councils; county boroughs were unitary authorities in the way that we now have.
While it was far from perfect – small towns that were near cities had no real connection to them, as the small town connected to the county council, and the city didn’t, what it did do was match up councils to people’s self-identity.
In 1974 (when the LGA1972 came into force) all that changed. Six metropolitan counties were created based on the cities of Newcastle, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Birmingham. Each of these now comprised a set of metropolitan borough councils (MBCs) but that meant not only destroying the independence of the cities and county boroughs, but completely destroying the independent existence of town after town. Towns like Newton-le-Willows, Ashton-in-Makerfield, Prescot, Whiston – and those just in my own part of St. Helens – were absorbed into vastly extended MBCs. These places still exist. The vast majority still have separate identities (a handful, like Fallowfield, are now effectively districts of a greater city or town). But they no longer have self-government.
In the rest of the country, all the county boroughs were abolished – all of our ancient cities and towns with borough charters that stretched back centuries were reduced to the status of a District Council. Counties that had lumps hacked out for the new Mets were either left as they stood, or were slashed again for the creation of three new pointless “rural” counties – Humberside, Cleveland and Avon. Counties, or the surviving remnants thereof, that were “too small” were absorbed into others – Worcestershire after the loss of Coventry and Herefordshire were forced together in a shotgun marriage; Rutland was subjected to Leicestershire.
For the next eleven years, we only had three models of local government in England, one of which only applied to London. Everyone had two councils, a local one, either district or borough, and a county (or the GLC).
The next phase came in 1985, when the Metropolitan County Councils and the GLC were abolished. Then, starting in the nineties and still ongoing, has been the effort to go from two councils two one for everyone else. Because many of even the inflated post-1974 district councils were still “too small” to take on all the responsibilities of their county councils, the result of this has been merging districts together to get even bigger than the already oversized districts of 1974, or the abolition of district councils altogether and the arrival of the unitary county. Both of these processes have brought local government even further away from being local, while simultaneously detaching the council boundaries from identifiable communities. There were a handful of exceptions – the recreation of many of the old County Boroughs as unitary authorities (e.g. Warrington) and the destruction of the worst of the artificial entities created in 1974 (Avon, Humberside, Hereford & Worcester and the reinstatement of Rutland). But now, we have reached the point where the ancient county of Cheshire, already shorn in 1974 of Stockport (to Greater Manchester) and the Wirral (to Merseyside)and having gained and lost Warrington and Widnes (in Halton) is so utterly unvalued that it is torn into two halves, neither of which has any history or local identification.
Scotland and Wales each have their own tales of woe and of artificial entities (Clwyd, Strathclyde) coming and going.
There is a traditional principle of self-determination in national borders. I think it’s time we started recognising that local government should be based on self-determination too.
If that means some administrative inconvenience, then that’s democracy. The fact that some European countries are the size of Luxembourg or Malta and others are as big as Germany or France is certainly an administrative inconvenience. But as long as the citizens of those small countries wish to remain independent, no democrat would deny their right to self-determination.
So why is it that the UK is happy to tell so many people that their town isn’t entitled to be its own place, isn’t entitled to its own mayor and its own council, isn’t entitled to make its own decisions – and all because it’s “too small”?
I think that’s as much as I should put in one post – part two will be about what I’d like local government to look like and then part three will be “how do we get there from here?”.
