Local Government in England: 40 years of decline

The aim of this report is to shed such light on the recent history of local government in England - providing an in-depth analysis of the evolution of local democracy from 1979 to the present day, through a review of extant research, official documents and reports. This is no easy task, as the jigsaw of local government in the UK is very complex and hard to reconstruct. Local democracy has been eroded in multiple, overlapping and at times divergent ways. Since 1997, the inception of a process of political devolution in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but not in England, has set the four nations of the UK on very different trajectories. While local government is a devolved matter in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, in England local authorities remain under the tight grip of central government. Different regimes of local government have emerged and the centre-local relationship has taken different forms in each of the UK nations (see Appendix 1). In this report, we focus on local government in England. In so doing, we argue that England is the nation of the UK where local democracy has worn away most starkly. Local government reform in England has been a persistent feature over the past decades. The methods adopted by the centre to achieve this have changed under different administrations, but the direction of travel has been clear and consistent, with more and more powers being increasingly chipped away from local authorities.