Metropolitan County History Creation Abolition Of The County

1 History

1.1 Creation

The idea for creating administrative areas based upon the large conurbations outside London, was first mooted by the Redcliffe-Maud Report in the late 1960s which proposed the creation of three large "metropolitan areas" based upon the conurbations surrounding Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham.

The proposals of the report were radically altered when Edward Heath's Conservative came to power in 1970, the metropolitan areas were re-named metropolitan counties, and three new ones were added ( Tyne and Wear, West Yorkshire, South Yorkshire) in their final form the counties were also far smaller than in the original proposals.

The metropolitan counties were established by the Local Government Act 1972, elections were held to the county councils in 1973, and they formally came into being in 1974.

The counties were innitially administered by elected Metropolitan County Councils (MCCs) which were meant to be strategic authorities running regional services such as transport, civil protection and strategic town and country planning . The MCCs, functioned between 1974 and 1986. The last elections to the councils were held in May 1981.

1.2 Abolition of the county councils

Just a decade after they were establised: the MCCs, and Ken Livingstone's Greater London Council had several high profile clashes with the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher. In 1983 the government published a White Paper entitled Streamlining the cities which proposed the abolition of the MCCs, together with the abolition of the Greater London Council (GLC), the government enacted the report in the Local Government Act 1985. And the MCCs and the GLC were abolished in 1986.

The government claimed that this was an efficiency measure. Although critics claim that they were abolished for political reasons, because all of the county councils were controlled by the Labour Party. The assets, and many of the functions of the MCCs passed either to the metropolitan boroughs, or in some cases directly to the central government or its agencies.

1.3 The status today

The metropolitan counties are sometimes incorrectly referred to as "former metropolitan counties", although the county councils were abolished, the metropolitan counties still exist, both as legal administrative counties, and are also ceremonial counties (or geographic counties), they are also used in government statistics.

Despite the abolition of the MCCs, some local services are still run on a metropolitan county-wide basis, administered by joint-authorities of the metropolitan boroughs, these include emergency services, public transport, waste disposal and civil defence.

The abolition of the GLC was extremely controversial, but the MCCs less so. In 1997 Tony Blair's new Labour government legislated to restore a successor body to the GLC - the Greater London Authority. Despite some talk of doing so, no bodies have been established to replace the MCCs. The Blair government instead persued the idea of elected regional governments although this idea now looks dead.

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