Interchapter 4

Abstract

During the Labour periods of office 1964–70, the Maud Royal Commission in England and Wales, and its parallel, the Wheatley Commission in Scotland, on local government were appointed in 1966. After their report in 1969 it was during Edward Heath’s Conservative government in 1972 that the new Local Government Acts (the first in England and Wales since 1889) were passed, which adapted the Maud and Wheatley recommendations considerably, redrawing the lines in England and Wales from 141 county and county borough authorities to 54 county and metropolitan councils (including the Greater London Council), and over 1000 urban and rural district councils in England and Wales became 369 district councils. In the second half of the 1970s the new ruling councils set up local authorities and sought to exert their influence by testing political alignments within the newly-constituted areas and regions and sending reverberations through much of the public sector AFE, both by reshuffles in the permanent administration of the LEAs and in the appointments of elected members to important committees and governing bodies of the institutions. Comprehensive reorganisation which had been begun by Labour governments in the later 1960s had its most concentrated effects in the 1970s in England and Wales.