Does our administration division system need to be revised and simplified?

[swt class 450]

A bit of a rant here but does anyone think our current administrative division system is ridiculously complicating and has no consistency? Doesn't it need a complete revision and simplification?

Firstly there are unitary councils. So this is when one council covers everything and there is no separate two/three tier system. In some Counties they have a mix of unitary councils and non unitary council two/three tier systems (eg Cambridgeshire and Kent etc), in some counties they have one unitary council covering the entire county (eg Cornwall and Northumberland etc), in some counties the entire county is made up of multiple unitary councils (eg Berkshire and Wiltshire etc), so it can get very confusing.

Many different unitary councils have different suffixes despite the fact that they all have the same status and function exactly the same, some are just simply called "Council" (eg "Cornwall Council" and "Wiltshire Council" etc), some are called "County Council" (eg "Northumberland County Council" and "Rutland County Council" etc), some are called "Borough Council" (eg "Reading Borough Council" and "Swindon Borough Council" etc), some are called "City Council" (eg "Derby City Council" and "Nottingham City Council" etc), so it varies a lot. And then if you go in to Wales you get lots of councils called a "County Borough Council" as well.

To make things even more confusing certain unitary areas are further split up in to Parish Councils or Town Councils who deal with the small basic things. But many others are not.

Secondly you have the two/three tier council system (eg Surrey and Oxfordshire etc). So this is when there is a County Council that deals with some things and then a District or Borough or City Council that deals with other things and often (but not always) a Parish or Town Council as well that deals with the smallest basic things.

The second tier councils often have different suffixes despite the fact that they all have the same status and function exactly the same, some are called "District Council" (eg "Mid Sussex" and "Mole Valley" etc), some are called "Borough Council" (eg "Runnymede" and "Waverley" etc), some are called City Council (eg "Cambridge" and "Oxford" etc), so again it varies a lot.

Then we have the third tier councils which are sometimes called a "Parish Council" or sometimes called a "Town Council" (or "Community Council" in Wales). These only exist in certain areas. Some counties are 100% third tiered with Parish or Town Councils throughout the entire county, whilst other counties don't have them at all, and other counties are mixed with some random areas having Parish or Town Councils and other random areas not having them, finally some unitary councils have them as well. So this third tier of council can be very confusing.

Thirdly some of our borders are very confusing and put in ridiculous places. A lot of the borders really need to be withdrawn. In some places we have borders going right through the middle of busy residential areas. There are some roads where the border randomly goes through and the road can only be accessed by going back in to another division. The borders in some areas really don't make sense.

Personally i think we really need to add some consistency and completely revise this system. I would either have one unitary "County Council" for each of the UKs counties or i would use a three tier council system for the entire UK. I would also heavily redraw and tidy up the borders (particularly the county borders) in a lot of areas of the UK.

What do you think? I would be interested to hear your views? Do you find this current inconsistent system confusing as well? What would you change about our administrative division system if you could?

 

[NorthernSpirit]

One thing you forgot to add is Metropolitan County Councils, these were operated slightly different to those of Shire Counties. All Metropolitan County Councils have since been abolished and the county council functions such as transport, trading standards, emergency services funding, etc are now managed by Joint Boards with Combined Authorities dealing with the Transport & Highways part (give it long enough and WYCA will be wanting to take over the management of griting West Yorkshire's roads).

However the odd exception is Berkshire County Council (abolished in 1998) who used the elements of being a Metropolitan County Council in all but name, also has a Joint Board however public transport is dealt with on a local level and not on a countywide level.

To be perfectly honest I’d rather see all unitary councils e.g. Calderdale deal with public transport on a local level and not on a countywide level as it is with West Yorkshire, as the council can focus on its area rather than having a quango based miles away who will use taxpayers cash on various vanity project such as the super cycle highway in Leeds. I don’t see anyone in South Elmsall, Marsden or Todmorden using it but yet they’ve paid for it through their council tax.

I'd also would love to see Wiltshire Council being broken up and reverted back into their former borough / district councils and seeing the introduction of a "Wiltshire Joint Services" board by using a similar stance to that of both Berkshire and West Yorkshire. Having a single tiered district council doesn't seem to work on what was a county council.

An interesting type of Parish Council is that of Salisbury whose City Council functions on parish council level. I can't think of anywhere else other than Holmfirth who comes under the Holme Valley Parish Council. HVPC also manages the Holme Valley Minibus and the local toilets.

 

[edwin_m]

For administering regional railway services the optimum sized body is larger than a county, as most of them run through more than one. However it should be smaller than the whole of England, as DfT is too remote from the needs of the regions outside the south-east. I suggest the jury is still out on how well TfN works as a regional transport body, although Transport Scotland does reasonably well with a smaller population over a larger area.

I appreciate this topic is meant to be about general administration not specifically transport, but this is an illustration of how the optimum administrative size is different for different types of public service.

 

[Bletchleyite]

I am in favour of moving to a unitary model based on areas that actually relate to other areas - for instance, for a town and its immediate hinterland. Milton Keynes Council is an excellent example of how unitary authorities work. Looking at other cities, it would make most sense for them to take up the whole city area - so looking at Liverpool, having parts of it farmed off to Knowsley and Sefton make no sense - the Liverpool City Council should be a unitary authority covering basically the entire city area.

I do however think Parish Councils are a waste of money and need to be abolished. Local services should be provided within the unitary authority, or for things like community centres by charitable trusts or companies limited by guarantee. Things like the Milton Keynes Parks Trust, where the parks and a set of commercial properties are owned by a self-funding trust that does an excellent job of maintaining and promoting park use in MK are also models worth looking at for community resources like parks and buildings.

The one possible exception is transport, where groupings of such authorities will in some cases need to work together, such as the "PTE areas". But there is no reason you couldn't have a wider PTE type authority that only deals with public transport and nothing else.

 

[GusB]

I have to admit that I find the situation in England quite confusing. Here, since 1996, we've had unitary authorities dealing with more or less all services except police and fire and rescue which continued to be administered by regional boards, and water which was split between into three administrative bodies (all subsequently merged into single Scotland-wide organisations). Before that we had the two-tier district/regional council structure.

 

[underbank]

It's all a confusing and inefficient mess. We have a parish council, city council and county council. No one seems to know who is responsible for what, not even the council's themselves. I'm involved in a local "save the library" action group and having to deal with the local authorities has been an eye opener. Part of it was reading the Parish council meetings, and they make it clear that even the Parish council don't know what they're responsible for as regards infrastructure such as roads/pavements/footpaths, some street lighting, car parks, children's play areas etc - I've been reading meeting after meeting where they've been reading out letters from city and council arguing between themselves who's responsible for the repair of a seating bench on a road verge. Another case is a canal bridge carrying a road and footpath - arguments going on for over a year now on who is liable to repair some vehicle damage to the bridge. Completely bonkers. If they don't know what they're responsible for, heaven help Joe Public.

On a micro scale, the waste is baffling. We have six different "contractors" coming to mow the grass, one doing the library grounds, one doing the village green, another doing the school playing fields, yet another doing the graveyard and a sixth doing the grass verges. One team doing the whole lot would save a massive amount of time. But, what we've got are six lorries, all taking 15-30 minutes to unload their equipment, spend maybe 30 minutes cutting, then another 15-30 minutes to load it on their lorries again. That's just one small village, all because the local authorities simply don't work together.

 

[edwin_m]

The one possible exception is transport, where groupings of such authorities will in some cases need to work together, such as the "PTE areas". But there is no reason you couldn't have a wider PTE type authority that only deals with public transport and nothing else.

But again, where do you draw the line? There's a lot of sense in integrating transport with land use planning, because it's a good idea to build developments where they can be served by public transport, but under this model planning remains with the individual authorities. Similarly a cross-regional PTE-type authority might have no direct control over the highways its buses and trams run over.

 

[Meerkat]

It’s a tricky question. The counties are out of date with the cities - ie northern Derbyshire facing Manchester or Sheffield rather than Derby - but the people living there might not want the inner city politicians and large electorates outvoting them on tax rising etc.
I tend to think the outer suburbs should have to suck it up and join City regions if that is where they go for work and, more importantly, public services.
However it is really hard to be consistent when drawing the map, and you get areas that don’t fit the model.
Also it is hard to choose the right size - functional linked areas can be so big that you lose local democracy and responsibility.

To summarise - I dunno!

 

[si404]

Many different unitary councils have different suffixes despite the fact that they all have the same status and function exactly the same

Actually, while they function the same, they don't have the same status - there's at least three different types of unitary authority (itself not a term in law).

Those counties run by county councils with district functions:
Cornwall, County Durham, Isle of Wight, Northumberland, Shropshire and Wiltshire

Those counties run by district/borough/city councils with county functions:
Bath & NE Somerset, Bedford, Blackburn, Blackpool, Bournemouth, (Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole from 1st April), Brighton & Hove, Bristol, Central Bedfordshire, Darlington, Derby, (Dorset from 1st April), Halton, Herefordshire, Hull, Leicester, Luton, Medway, Milton Keynes, NE Lincs, N Lincs, N Somerset, Nottingham, Peterborough, Plymouth, Poole, Portsmouth, Rutland, S Gloucestershire, Southampton, Southend, Stoke, Swindon, Telford, Thurrock, Torbay, Warrington and York

Those borough/district/city councils with county functions as they are in counties without county councils:
Berkshire (Bracknell Forest, Reading, Slough, W Berks, Windsor & Maidenhead, Wokingham),
Cheshire (Chester & Cheshire West, Cheshire East),
Cleveland (Hartlepool, Middlesbrough, Redcar & Cleveland, Stockton),
Greater Manchester (Bolton, Bury, Manchester, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, Wigan),
Merseyside (Liverpool, Knowsley, St Helens, Sefton, Wirral),
South Yorkshire (Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham, Sheffield)
Tyne & Wear (Gateshead, Newcastle, N Tyneside, S Tyneside, Sunderland),
West Midlands (Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall, Wolverhampton),
and West Yorkshire (Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees, Leeds, Wakefield)

The whole thing is a mess and almost every change we have made in the last half a century has been either undone, or was undoing another change. We made Ceremonial Counties in the late 90s to hide the fact that most unitaries are counties in their own right (and the unitaries were created to restore the concept of County Boroughs after 20 years of them not existing), and 'Combined Authorities' in the 10s to undo the abolition of the Metropolitan County Councils (which existed for just 12 years in the first place!), and even the creation of unitary authorities (eg Cambridgeshire).

 

[DarloRich]

The solution is that we should have one level of local government, of the same type with the same powers, everywhere and as long as my bins are emptied once a week i don't really care what the local authority is called!

Those counties run by county councils with district functions:
Cornwall, County Durham, Isle of Wight, Northumberland, Shropshire and Wiltshire

Re County Durham - you are right apart from Borough of Darlington which is a separate Unitary Authority

 

[whhistle]

Many different unitary councils have different suffixes despite the fact that they all have the same status and function exactly the same, some are just simply called "Council" (eg "Cornwall Council" and "Wiltshire Council" etc), some are called "County Council" (eg "Northumberland County Council" and "Rutland County Council" etc), some are called "Borough Council" (eg "Reading Borough Council" and "Swindon Borough Council" etc), some are called "City Council" (eg "Derby City Council" and "Nottingham City Council" etc), so it varies a lot. And then if you go in to Wales you get lots of councils called a "County Borough Council" as well.

I live in the county so come under the county council.
Those who live in the city come under the city council.
Any land in the city boundary is the responsibility of the city council.
Outside of that, but still within the county is the county council's responsbility.
We then have a district council that has an area of responsibility within the county (the city doesn't have this).
And within that area there can be even smaller "parish" councils.

There have been talks of merging them all together but it's difficult as not every council works the same way.

I have a wheely bin for all recycling, one for general, one for garden. No black plastic recycling is accepted.

A neighbouring area has only just got this; they used to have boxes and things for all sorts of different recycling.

Another neighbouring council doesn't have a wheely bin for all recycling, you have to split glass, tins, paper and even seperate cardboard. But they accept black plastic.

A district not far away from me doesn't have bins at all - just bags... still.

Not easy to merge things together when a simple thing such as bin collection is so different.

 

[si404]

Re County Durham - you are right apart from Borough of Darlington which is a separate Unitary Authority

Darlington is rightly listed as a county run by a district/borough/city* council.

Constitution of new county of Darlington
8.—(1) Darlington shall cease to form part of Durham.

(2) A new county shall be constituted comprising the area of Darlington and shall be named the county of Darlington.

(3) Section 2(1) of the 1972 Act (which provides that every county shall have a council) shall not apply in relation to the county of Darlington. ​

Or as the explanatory note says "Article 8 provides for Darlington to cease to form part of Durham on 1st April 1997 and for a new county of Darlington to be constituted on that date (but without a county council)."

And if Darlington is part of County Durham, then so is Hartlepool and the part of Stockton north of the Tees (both in the county of Cleveland, due to the way the SI was written), per the Lieutenancies Act 1997, which lists "Durham, Darlington, Hartlepool and so much of Stockton-on-Tees as lies north of the line for the time being of the centre of the River Tees" as being the County of Durham for the purposes of this act. It came into force 1st July 1997, though it's worth noting that other counties were split in the same way as Durham later, with them being added to the list of "the areas which are to be regarded as counties for those purposes by virtue of paragraph 3".

The Lieutenancies Act passed in March 1997, with the only 'UAs' that had been made counties that weren't before being the 4 ex-Avon, the 4 ex-Humberside, and York. Milton Keynes, Brighton & Hove, Poole, Bournemouth, Derby, Swindon, Portsmouth, Southampton, Leicester, Rutland, Stoke and Luton would cease to be part of their old counties and become new counties on 1/4/97 - just after the Act became law, but before its provisions took hold (they are included in the original text, save Rutland, to smoosh them back in their old counties for the purposes of the act).

Halton, Warrington, Plymouth, Torbay, Telford, Blackburn, Blackpool, Southend, Thurrock, Medway, Nottingham and Peterborough were already slated, by 1996 SIs, to become new counties in 1998 and required amendment of the 1997 Act to undo that wrt the ceremonial function of Lieutenancy (unlike 1998 creations Herefordshire and Worcestershire which didn't). As did the 2008 set of new 'Unitary Authorities', where necessary.



This mess, which comes about to partially undo changes before/as/just after they are made kind of typifies the cluelessness that the UK has undertook wrt local government - once a decade making big changes, and then undoing them or redoing them just a couple of decades later. Here, it's in the same set of reforms!

*which are, of course, also different statuses as well, despite - here at least (city councils can also be parish council level) - being functionally identical.

 

[DarloRich]

Thanks for the lecture. You best deliver it to Darlington Borough Council who are labouring under the misapprehension they are a unitary authority.........................

( BTW I am sure the legislative framework relates to and speaks about a new county of Darlington. I can promise you that no one ever thinks of the borough council as a county council. No one. Not even the council themselves! DBC is a unitary authority.)

Personally I don't care about the name. All local authorities should have the same powers.

 

[si404]

I can promise you that no one ever thinks of the borough council as a county council. No one. Not even the council themselves!

That's because it is a borough council! Neither I, nor the secondary legislation I quoted, say it is a county council - in fact, what I quoted both times where the SI explicitly says that Darlington is a county that doesn't have a county council (in the text itself, and in the explanatory note)!

And, if the red mists hadn't descended, causing you to lose your ability to do basic comprehension, you'd have seen that I had already said in my OP:

Actually, while they function the same, they don't have the same status - there's at least three different types of unitary authority (itself not a term in law).

...

Those counties run by district/borough/city councils with county functions:
Bath & NE Somerset, Bedford, Blackburn, Blackpool, Bournemouth, (Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole from 1st April), Brighton & Hove, Bristol, Central Bedfordshire, Darlington, Derby, ...

and that my later post was just showing my working as to why Darlington was in that category.

Personally I don't care about the name.

Which is why you pointed out (wrongly) that I supposedly got something wrong with County Durham? And then going ballistic when I called Darlington a county with sources to back me up - insisting (despite me saying exactly that) that it is a unitary authority run by a borough council?

Seems like you do care about the name deeply. And here you are shooting the messenger just because you didn't like what you thought he was saying, rather than blaming the problem on the actual problem - that English local government is a mess.

 

[DarloRich]

And, if the red mists hadn't descended, causing you to lose your ability to do basic comprehension, you'd have seen that I had already said in my OP:

that assumes i read your original post! Fair enough. A lesson in that................

Which is why you pointed out (wrongly) that I supposedly got something wrong with County Durham? And then going ballistic when I called Darlington a county with sources to back me up - insisting (despite me saying exactly that) that it is a unitary authority run by a borough council?

Seems like you do care about the name deeply. And here you are shooting the messenger just because you didn't like what you thought he was saying, rather than blaming the problem on the actual problem - that English local government is a mess.

perhaps the messenger should structure his message in such a way that lands the central point quickly then he wouldn't get shot. And anyway it was only a wounding.

Honestly: I don't really care what they are called. County, Borough, Unitary Authority, Town Council, Parish Council. I just want one layer of local government with the same powers and the same service quality. Can we agree on that?

PS I do care quite a bit about County Durham. It was where I was born and brought up and I think it has an identify that i am not sure come county areas do.

 

[Bevan Price]

I would like to see single tier local authorities, based on "natural" centres of population. The boundaries should be decided by local preferences, not drawn by some pillock in Whitehall. So there would be no lumping together of ill-matched communities just to suit some model of "idealised population size". So - unless the local population voted for it, there would be separate councils for places like Southport / Bootle (the artificial lumped together "Sefton") or Wigan / Leigh ("artificially enlarged Wigan"). (And no letting councils decide without a public vote .)

To reduce costs, there should be only one councillor in each ward, not the three currently applicable in many areas, with local elections taking place every 3 or 4 years. So - fewer claims for "expenses", and fewer trips on "jollies" to events of minor relevance to public needs.

I would also get rid of "city regions" - more unnecessary bureaucrats who we have to pay for by additional council tax.

Central government should be compelled to pay in full for any duties it imposes on local councils. That would stop government parties lying about reducing tax when they only mean "reducing income tax" - but they are causing other taxes to increase (Council Tax, VAT, etc.).

However, each council would be required, where appropriate - to cooperate with neighbours - over some matters such as waste disposal, coordination of public transport, etc.

 

[PeterC]

As an example of the public not understanding how the system works I remember a press report from some decades ago. There was a public meeting to launch a campaign against a hospital closure near where I lived at the time. District councillers turned up to support the campaign but were shouted down by their constituents who were convinced that the council was the body responsible for the hospital and hence the for the proposed closure.

 

[swt class 450]

Thanks for all the replies. It does seem ridiculous just how complicating it is. There is no consistency at all. We really need to simplify it with one type of system used everywhere across the country.

Who is in charge of changing and redrawing the county borders and creating new unitary council areas and things like this? Is there a certain government department that deals with this? I wouldn't mind having this job myself! It would be good to sort out this mess!