Less radical local government reorganisation

[greenhert]

What if the local government reorganisation organised by the Local Government Act 1972 had been less radical, and not made such a mess of traditional ties?

A less radical organisation would involve, in my opinion:

1. No creation of Avon or Humberside, although the parts of Lincolnshire get merged anyway as with the two halves of Suffolk.

2. Westmorland retaining its current boundaries and becoming a full district of Cumbria, without Sedbergh..

3. The Vale of White Horse, along with Didcot and Wallingford, remaining in Berkshire.

4. The 18 districts not originally planned (e.g. Torridge, Oswestry) never being created, except for the two on the Isle of Wight.

5. Earby and Barnoldswick and Sedbergh form part of the Craven district, and are not moved outside of Yorkshire.

6. Herefordshire never merging with Worcestershire, and having only two districts (Leominster and Hereford; many local government areas were coterminous with, or similar to, on constituency boundaries c. 1974)

7. Neither Barrow-in-Furness nor Lonsdale ever becoming part of Cumbria.

8. Teesside keeping its name as a county and not expanding to Hartlepool, which would instead remain in County Durham.

9. Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire remaining separate.

10. The traditional Welsh counties remain largely intact (apart from the parts that could not really have avoided being absorbed into Cardiff), which would mean Clwyd only contains Denbighshire and Flintshire and Powys becomes much larger in this scenario due to Breconshire not losing any villages or towns.

[swanarcadian]

How about the retention of UDCs and RDCs?  They make the goal of tracking down historical election results a much more complex undertaking and would give the Admin of this site a great deal more threads to create, but they would have helped us analyse voting patterns in even further depth.  They were done away with just as political parties were beginning to beef up their involvement in local government at the expense of Independents.

Edit: there's a similar thread created by trident:  vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/5224/1974-local-government-reorganisation-happened

[Pete Whitehead]

Jun 11, 2018 21:12:07 GMT swanarcadian said:

How about the retention of UDCs and RDCs?  They make the goal of tracking down historical election results a much more complex undertaking and would give the Admin of this site a great deal more threads to create, but they would have helped us analyse voting patterns in even further depth.  They were done away with just as political parties were beginning to beef up their involvement in local government at the expense of Independents.

Edit: there's a similar thread created by trident:  vote-2012.proboards.com/thread/5224/1974-local-government-reorganisation-happened

I'm not sure they would have been in greater depth. You might think that because the councils covered smaller areas they would have had smaller wards but this was often not the case. In my own area for example, in Bushey there were three wards on the old urban district council - 2 of them with 6 members - and these were retained for the first elections to Hertsmere council in 1973. When there was re-warding for the 1976 elections the two larger wards were split and the area then had 5 two-member wards. You see similar situations elsewhere - eg Chesham Urban district had two multi-member wards but was split into about 8 wards shortly after it was merged into Chiltern district

[swanarcadian]

I'm obviously being overly parochial.   My patch was different.  Baildon UD was split into four wards (North, South, East and West).  Queensbury and Shelf UD was split into five (Ambler Thorn, Queensbury North, Queensbury South, Shelf East and Shelf West).
But I fully take your point that this kind of situation didn't apply everywhere.

[Pete Whitehead]

Jun 11, 2018 21:41:39 GMT swanarcadian said:

I'm obviously being overly parochial.   My patch was different.  Baildon UD was split into four wards (North, South, East and West).  Queensbury and Shelf UD was split into five (Ambler Thorn, Queensbury North, Queensbury South, Shelf East and Shelf West).
But I fully take your point that this kind of situation didn't apply everywhere.

Yes it's probably six of one and half a dozen of the other. I was also looking recently at all these wonderful single member ward we used to have in Richmond and Barnet which date back to the old Urban districts. I think we can agree that we should move to small single member wards everywhere (i have actually drawn up a quite credible plan for single member wards in St Albans which I will submit when that district is next up for review, however futile that may be)

[J.G.Harston]

Jun 11, 2018 20:34:01 GMT greenhert said:

A less radical organisation would involve, in my opinion:

2. Westmorland retaining its current boundaries and becoming a full district of Cumbria, without Sedbergh..

4. The 18 districts not originally planned (e.g. Torridge, Oswestry) never being created, except for the two on the Isle of Wight.

5. Earby and Barnoldswick and Sedbergh form part of the Craven district, and are not moved outside of Yorkshire.

7. Neither Barrow-in-Furness nor Lonsdale ever becoming part of Cumbria.

8. Teesside keeping its name as a county and not expanding to Hartlepool, which would instead remain in County Durham.

I think putting Hartlepool in Teesside is ok, it's putting Guisborough in that was the mistake. They were trying to do whatever they could to get all the pink bits into one county, something like this would have been better.

I've always thought Westmorland as a single district in Cumbria would have been a lot simpler - but I think it was inevitable that North Lancashire would end up in a Lake District authority.

Isle of Wight should have been a unitary authority, the silly two-district split only happened because the legislation didn't allow a county to only contain a single district.

For all the emotional attachment, I can see sensible reasons why some bits of Yorkshire on the wrong side of the Pennines should be administered in Lancashire. It's always puzzled me why the Pennine watershed isn't the Yorkshire/Lancashire border, at some points Yorkshire almost touches the Irish Sea.

Hollingworth shouldn't be in Greater Manchester.

[cibwr]

I think in reality the Welsh Local Government Reorganisation would have happened fairly much as it did, maybe Cardiff and perhaps but not very likely Swansea would have retained unitary status, Merthyr and Newport certainly wouldn't. Breconshire would have lost its southern more industrial villages to West and East Glamorgan. The rest would proceed as history showed.