Metropolitan county Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The metropolitan counties of England are administative counties that cover large urban areas, each with several metropolitan districts. The counties no longer have county councils, as they were abolished in 1986 with most of their functions being devolved to the individual districts or taken over by joint-boards.The metropolitan counties are:
- Greater Manchester (Manchester, Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale, Salford, Stockport, Tameside, Trafford, Wigan)
- Merseyside (Liverpool, Knowsley, Sefton, St Helens and Wirral)
- South Yorkshire (Sheffield, Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham)
- Tyne and Wear (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Gateshead, South Tyneside, North Tyneside, Sunderland)
- West Midlands (Birmingham, Coventry, Dudley, Sandwell, Solihull, Walsall, Wolverhampton)
- West Yorkshire (Leeds, Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees, Wakefield)
The metropolitan counties were established by the Local Government Act 1972, and came into being in 1974 as part of a general local government reform by the Conservative government of Edward Heath.
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.
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, and pursued left wing policies which conflicted with those of the central government.
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.
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. Despite the abolition of the MCCs, some local services are still run on a metropolitan county-wide basis, administered jointly by the metropolitan boroughs, these include: emergency services, public transport, waste disposal and civil defence.
The Greater London Council (GLC) is often considered as one of the MCCs (particularly over the question of abolition), but it was a very different authority established on a different statutory basis.
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. Elected regional governments are a more likely option.History