In With the New: The 1981 Budget

Abstract

The 1981 budget was the first to be drawn up under the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980. The Act received Royal Assent in November 1980, when planning for the 1981 budget was still in a relatively early stage. The council’s preparations for the new legal framework, however, had been going on ever since the content of the Bill became known a year earlier. Things began normally enough, as an ordinary exercise in the implementation of new legislation, but as the year wore on events veered towards the chaotic. The new given law of the Act (anticipated) combined with further new given law from the courts (unanticipated) and with the ever-increasing turbulence of the council’s ‘internecine hungness’ to cast a variety of new lights on the council’s financial vires.