A Heightened Awareness: The 1982 Budget

Abstract

17 December 1981 had been a pivotal day for our council in the evolving encounter of law with policy under the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980. On that day new and challenging given law had been added to the mix by the House of Lords’s decision in Bromley LBC v GLC (1981), and new and uncertain policy had been set in motion by the formal ousting of the Labour Left as the controlling faction on the council. How would these two new forces intermesh in the few short months remaining for the preparation of the council’s 1982 budget? The key statutory decisions on rents and rates were imminent and were, in themselves, familiar. They would play themselves out differently, though, in this unsettled new environment of law and policy.