North Kent or nowhere?

As ministers demand fewer, bigger councils, Kent’s authorities struggle to agree on who goes where

Regular readers of Local Authority will be well aware of the significant changes to local authority structures in Kent and Medway (and indeed across England) and of the colourful discussions that are going on between the Kent authorities trying to figure out what they all want the new world to look like in this area.

With the deadline for proposals to be submitted to government on 28 November, this seems like a good time to step back from the immediate cut and thrust of the discussions and have a deeper look at what this whole change is all about and what it will mean. It’s fairly meaty stuff, so this will be a two-parter. In this part, we’ll look at how and why we got here in the first place and in the second instalment, we’ll look in more detail at what some of the changes this could mean in the real world.

Are you ready? So, er, sorry about this, but we’re starting the story in 1974, the date of the last big top-down major local government reorganisation. That was when the basic model was set up of county councils (or city metropolitan areas) doing education, highways etc, and local district councils underneath them doing the bins, playgrounds, leisure centres, and so on. This was a fairly uniform model across the country.

Map of Kent councils today

Now, there have been lots of changes since then, but they’ve been rather piecemeal. One major phenomenon that started in the 1990s was the creation of more and more unitary authorities, such as Medway, in which all council functions are combined into a single authority. So, when Medway Unitary Authority was created in 1998, it essentially meant independence from Kent County Council. Lots of other districts around the country have become unitaries and, more recently, some whole counties, such as Cornwall, have become unitaries, with all the districts beneath them being abolished.