Redcliffe-Maud: The greatest local government reorganisation we never had

Oh don’t tell me you aren’t interested.

In 1965, London assumed its current boundaries. The new Greater London was not as expansive as had once been proposed – affluent Surrey commuter towns like Epsom especially managed to stay outside the city limits, as I noted in OnLondon back in February 2021. But it was significantly bigger than the County of London which had preceded it.

Now Harold Wilson’s Labour government had a taste for reorganisation, it wanted to reform the entire system of English local government. In June 1966, it appointed John Redcliffe-Maud – civil servant, academic, baron – to rethink things from the bottom up, and to come up with a system that didn't rely on country boundaries first set in the age of King Alfred.

Redcliffe-Maud published his proposals in 1969. He proposed abolishing the existing patchwork of councils – county, county borough, borough, urban district, rural district – that had been in place since the 19th century. In its place would come London-style metropolitan counties covering the big conurbations, with metropolitan districts beneath them; unitary authorities, with towns or cities at the heart, covering the rest of the country; and eight provinces to handle strategic and economic development. 

Here’s a map:

Bigger version here. Image: The Ares Project/creative commons.

There are some oddities, from a modern point of view.  The regions around Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool are treated to full-scale metropolitan councils – but no attempt is made to fit Yorkshire into that model, and Leeds and Sheffield are treated as simply the biggest of a whole series of Yorkshire cities. The Wilson government planned to partially ignore this: it proposed two more metropolitan councils, covering West Yorkshire and, more confusingly, Southampton/Portsmouth.

Talking of which: the Isle of Wight is thrown in with Portsmouth, despite there being quite a lot of water in the way. But Sunderland and Newcastle are treated as two cities, rather than a single metropolitan region. Essex is dismembered, with parts going to Hertfordshire or Suffolk; and the traditional two Sussexes are split into three. 

Oddest of all is the proposed name for what would become Greater Manchester: SELNEC, an acronym for South East Lancashire & North East Cheshire. Good luck with that one. 

The report’s take on the Midlands and M62 corridor. The Birmingham metropolitan area is smaller than we got, the Manchester and Liverpool ones bigger.

But on the whole this looks pretty great. The report accepted that cities should run their hinterlands; two of the three metropolitan areas, and many other city-based unitaries, would have been bigger than they are today. By the same logic, the South Eastern province is bigger than the South Eastern region that sort of exists today, taking in the home counties north of London, too, rather than pretending that places served by the literal tube have more in common with Kings Lynn than with suburban Surrey. Best of all, it is much, much simpler than what preceded it or what we actually got.

Even more fun is the memorandum of dissent, written by Derek Senior, a freelance writer who, bafflingly, ended up on a commission to redesign British local government. (My DMs are open, guys.) I mean, look at this beauty:

Bigger version here. Image: The Ares Project/creative commons.

Senior proposed five provinces instead of eight, merging Yorkshire with the North East, East Anglia with the South East, and the East and West Midlands. Some areas would be unitary councils; most would also have regional councils, named for cities but essentially replacing counties, with districts beneath them. Greater London would remain as it was and is, but a metropolitan planning area would cover the entire commuter belt, from Reading to Southend and Stevenage to Crawley.

Senior’s south east.

Again, though, bits look weird from a modern perspective. Hereford is in the south west, not the West Midlands; the Sheffield-facing bits of Derbyshire are in the same province as Newcastle, rather than Derby. Wigan is given to the Liverpool region, rather than the Manchester one. Berwick-Upon-Tweed, meanwhile, is given an unspecified special status, though I can’t for the life of me work out why. (In case Scotland wanted it back?) 

Senior’s version was rejected as too radical, but in the event Redcliffe-Maud never happened either. The Tory-dominated rural district council association campaigned on the painful slogan “Don’t Vote for R.E. Mote” (geddit?), which would have stayed a ridiculous political subplot if Labour hadn’t unexpectedly lost the 1970 election. The new government, under Prime Minister Ted Heath, came up with its own proposals instead. These were implemented in 1974, and – aside from the Thatcherite abolition of the metropolitan councils – largely survived into modern times. 

All of which is a bit of a shame. I look at a streamlined system of local government with major employment centres, not the division of King Alfred’s forces, at its heart, and just think: look at what we could have won.

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