Volume 15: Government and Public Administration
9. Local government
How local authorities were run
Elected representatives
Officers and organisation

Elected representatives

9.11 The policies of individual local authorities were determined by locally elected councillors, who served for periods of four years. County and London Borough Councils held elections once every four years. In the metropolitan districts, one third of council seats would come up for re-election each year, with no election one year in four, so there was a rolling programme of re-election. Shire districts could choose their electoral cycle; around 70 per cent of them held whole-council elections once every four years.

9.12 As in Parliament, the political party or group with the largest number of councillors would form the administration, in alliance with another party or group if they would not otherwise have a majority of votes on the council. The largest authorities might have up to 100 elected members; more usually, there would be between 50 and 80. Councillors took decisions by voting at meetings of the whole council or of formally constituted subcommittees. Such votes decided the annual budget, and matters such as the policy for allocating council housing to those on the waiting list or whether to grant a planning application. Most meetings were public, although some agenda items might be discussed in private.

Officers and organisation

9.13 Generally speaking, councils were free to decide how to organise themselves to carry out their functions and what staff to employ. However, during this period, there was considerable pressure on them from central government to contract out tasks or services (to the private sector) rather than to carry them out themselves and employ their own staff to do so. This was compulsory for certain services. ¹

9.14 Most councils had a Chief Executive ² and below him or her a number of heads of department, such as the Treasurer, Chief Housing Officer, Chief Education Officer, County Trading Standards Officer, Director of Environmental Services, etc. Directors of Environmental Services were sometimes also responsible for housing. The number of staff working for each chief officer and how they were organised depended very much on the size of the authority and the size of the service. The housing department in a metropolitan or London authority with many thousands of council houses to manage would be many times the size of its equivalent in a small rural district. Large departments could support units with more specialised functions. Salaries for chief officers and more senior staff depended upon the population of the authority or the scale of the service; large authorities could therefore often attract more highly qualified staff.

9.15 The work of equivalent departments in different authorities reflected differences on the ground. For instance, Mr Gordon Gresty of North Yorkshire County Council said in written evidence, when explaining the context of the work of the Trading Standards Department, that:

The County itself has some 10,000 stockholders, 19 livestock markets which account for some 1,100 plus market days per year and a throughput of livestock through the County running into millions per annum. ³

The context of the work of that department in a London Borough would be very different. In the same way, the Environmental Health Department of a small district in the north of England might devote a large proportion of its resources to dealing with poor quality housing, while a similar department elsewhere, perhaps in a seaside resort, might be more concerned with food hygiene in retail establishments.