Local Government Commission For England (1992) - Establishment

Establishment

Local government was at the time organised under the Local Government Act 1972, which had been passed during Edward Heath's Conservative administration. Before this, local government in England had been a mixed system, with large urban areas being covered by unitary authorities called county boroughs, and the rest of the country having administrative county councils and many smaller district councils, with different competences. The 1972 Act abolished county boroughs, making them districts in two-tier counties. This, and the consequent loss of education, social services and libraries to county control, was strongly regretted by the larger towns outside the new metropolitan counties, such as Bristol, Plymouth, Stoke, Leicester and Nottingham. The abolition of metropolitan county councils in 1986 left the metropolitan boroughs operating as unitary authorities.

Michael Heseltine, who had been a junior local government minister during the passage of the Local Government Act 1972, was appointed as Secretary of State for the Environment (and thus responsible for local government) in John Major's first cabinet of 1990. Heseltine was an enthusiast for unitary local government, and was also an early proponent of the idea of directly elected mayors, to be taken up by Tony Blair's government in the 2000s.

A wide range of political opinion had always favoured in principle the establishment of unitary authorities. The Labour Party had planned to implement the Redcliffe-Maud Report in the 1970s, and the party's 1982 statement of policy "Labour's Programme 1982" said "There is an irrational split of functions between the two tiers compounded by a confusing overlap of responsibilities ... We favour the creation in England and Wales of unitary authorities". Heseltine announced in 1991 that the government would be looking at the creation of unitary authorities in the non-metropolitan counties as part of a more general review of local government, including the abolition of the Community Charge, or poll tax, and oversaw the passage of the 1992 Act through Parliament.

Heseltine was replaced by Michael Howard in April 1992 after the 1992 general election. Whilst Heseltine had expressed a wish for most of the country to become unitary authorities, Howard issued revised guidance on the basis that the "two-tier structure may be appropriate in some areas", and that the costs of reorganisation might be too much for the recession-hit UK economy to take.

The Commission, chaired by John Banham (named to the post in November 1991, before the legislation had been passed to create the Commission), started the reviews in July 1992. The process was originally supposed to take some years, with the shire counties being considered in five waves, or "tranches", and it was hoped that the reforms would come into effect from 1994 to 1998. The process took longer than expected, with the Commission unable to recruit enough staff until November 1992. The first tranche, covering Avon, Cleveland, Derbyshire, County Durham, Gloucestershire, the Isle of Wight, Humberside, Lincolnshire, North Yorkshire and Somerset was nearly done by the end of 1993. Banham had said that the Commission was expecting "early wins" in Cleveland, Humberside and Avon: three counties created in 1974, based on rivers, that had not achieved public acceptance.

The first recommendation, published in 1993, was the quite uncontroversial one to make Isle of Wight a unitary authority. The island had been split between South Wight and Medina boroughs, with an Isle of Wight County Council, since 1974.