Public Affairs Test

We’ve been lucky on our course to have guest speakers and visits to meetings of both our County Council and the Safer Neighbourhood Committee in the past month or so, and I believe these experiences have helped me gain a better understanding of the differences between District and County Councils.

Local government can be formed in different ways with the most common being the two tiered system where the responsibility for services is divided between District and County Councils. Sometimes you can have single tier councils or Unitary Authorities, responsible for all local authority, services and functions such as in Southampton; in all there are 55 Unitary Authorities across the country.

The total number of people employed by local authorities is about 2 million with about 133 billion pounds spent a year. The councillors in these authorities are responsible for matters such as land use (i.e. planning applications), refuse collection and leisure facilities; they agree the local authority budget and make constitutional decisions. They are elected by local people and stand for a 4 year term. When talking about this it is important to remember that this is local government, almost separate from central government in operation and often politics. The only connection to central government is the money.

In the case of Winchester, Hampshire County Council is based in the City and they run the schools, they deal with land use and employ over 40,000 staff, that’s a lot of people and a lot of money. In fact, when we were visited by Kate Ball, the Council’s Communications Manager, she told us that the council has a huge budget of £1.8 billion for the whole of Hampshire, but when you’re covering 500,000 households with 1.4 million residents then maybe it doesn’t seem so much. In comparison we heard from Kelsie Learney, the Leader of Winchester City Council, that their budget is a comparatively small £12.5 million. As well as collecting the rubbish and other things you’d expect from a local authority, they also run the car parks, have health inspectors, distribute housing benefits and look after their estimated 6000 council houses. They run a leader and executive model with the cabinet making the decisions, much like central government, but although the cabinet make the final decisions, policies are set by the whole council. At the moment in Winchester the City Council has a Liberal Democrat leader and cabinet whilst the County Council is Conservative. This would be a problem with any county and city council but in Winchester, the tension is doubled as they’re in the same town. Decisions on issues like the highways can be contentious because although the County Council looks after the highways, the City Council runs the parking. As Kelsie Learney said though, whatever the political issues, they are still civil with each other as they are both aiming to improve the area, despite their differences.

In conclusion, District Councils and County Councils have very similar functions. They both exist to serve the public and do the best for their constituents. County Councils operate on a larger level, affecting the decisions of the district and city councils, but without the district councils, the county councils would surely be too disassociated from the general public to act in their best interests.