All Change
Glenys Adams looks back on the effects of the Local Government Act 1972
Fifty years ago, on Monday 1 April 1974, I woke to find my family and I had moved from Cheshire overnight. On the same morning, my grandmother in Bournemouth found herself in Dorset having gone to bed in Hampshire. Was this an April fool? Apparently not. So, what had happened?
The system of local government in Britain at the time had been in place since the late 1800s, when life was very different. Harold Wilson’s Labour government felt things should be updated, and the Royal Commission report of 1969 made many recommendations which were incorporated into the 1972 Local Government Act for England and Wales. In 1970, Edward Heath’s Conservative government had come to power, but Wilson was back in No 10 just under a month before the Act came into force in April 1974, ushering in changes throughout England and Wales, but excluding London. It met with mixed reactions.
I am Cheshire born and bred, but found myself, still in the same house, no longer in Cheshire, but in the newly created metropolitan county of Merseyside. My home town of Bebington had also moved from being on the Wirral peninsula to being in Wirral, one of the local authorities comprising the new county. We Wirralians were now lumped with the scousers in Liverpool, and the great sprawl on the other side of the “Murky Mersey” and we were not impressed. Liverpool was equally unimpressed, regarding the Wirral as a snobby outpost. We had little in common.
Around the country, many other borders changed overnight, with greater or lesser implications. Rutland, England’s smallest county, was swallowed up by Leicestershire, while Cornwall, Devon, Norfolk and Suffolk boundaries remained unchanged.
After centuries of ambiguity, and without bloodshed or the involvement of Owain Glyndŵr, Monmouthshire was officially integrated into Wales. Elsewhere, the Local Government (Scotland) Act 1973 also came into force in 1974, with the introduction of nine regional authorities and three island councils. Northern Ireland was unaffected by the changes, maintaining its six county boundaries.
One of the biggest changes in England came with the creation of metropolitan counties incorporating nearby towns. These were Greater Manchester, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, West Midlands and Merseyside. Other non-metropolitan counties such as Avon, Cleveland and Humberside also came into being.
For many, the new boundaries were seen as threatening their centuriesold county loyalties. However, many maintained their traditions while regarding the new arrangements as purely administrative. In 1996, the Friends of Real Lancashire, finding themselves now in Merseyside, established Lancashire Day, marked on 27 November, the day in 1295 when the red rose county first sent representatives to parliament.
On the south of the Mersey, many of us on the Wirral declined to include “Merseyside” in our addresses,
continuing with Cheshire. That is, until the Post Office declared it would no longer deliver letters addressed to Wirral, Cheshire. We still did not write Merseyside, but grudgingly relied on our L for Liverpool postcodes. (In 1999, due to popular demand, Wirral addresses replaced the L with CH, for Chester, Cheshire’s county town. A small reconnection.)
On 1 April 1974, the Liverpool
Echo and Daily Post ran one small article headed “All change but no fireworks”, pointing out that for the city of Liverpool itself there would be little change for local residents. The changes for communities in the rest of Merseyside had a greater impact.
The new metropolitan county was divided into five new local authorities: Liverpool, Knowsley, St Helens, Wirral where I grew up, and Sefton, which became my home in 1988 when I did the unthinkable. I drove through the Mersey Tunnel and moved to the other side of the river, to Waterloo, just north of Liverpool, and have lived there ever since. And this month I am involved in events to mark Sefton’s half century.
In March 1974, my then local weeklies, the Bebington News and Birkenhead News, and what later became my local papers, the Crosby Herald and Bootle Times, were filled with comments, information and reports on the new arrangements. They also published supplements explaining what the changes meant locally and included maps and information about public services as well as lists of new councillors, with contact details. They all printed the following message from John Silkin, the minister for planning and local government.
“The reorganisation of local government which is now taking place will change the pattern of life in this country and will affect us all in one way or another. It is the most important change of its kind which has been made this century. It will have a far-reaching effect on local government, both as the expression of local democracy and as the provider of essential services.”
In the first week of April, local papers carried articles about events that had marked the end of the old order. There were reports of civic dinners, gala concerts, parades and church services, mainly on Sunday 31 March. I was in my early 20s, not interested in politics, local or otherwise but, as an officer in a uniformed organisation (Girls Venture Corps, Air Wing), I was part of a parade through Bebington, until then a borough in its own right. We were led by the mayor and town clerk, and Lord Leverhulme, whose grandfather had established nearby Lever Brothers.
He was lord lieutenant of Cheshire and continued as such even when his own Wirral home ceased to be in Cheshire. The brass band led us past the town hall to St Andrew’s Church, where the service was taken by the bishop of Chester. In his sermon, he thanked those councillors who had served in the past and warned them about the dangers of the new local government system, expressing concern that it could become impersonal. He asked them to be on their guard.
He was not the only figure of authority urging caution. Over the previous two years, new councillors throughout Merseyside, and presumably all over the country, had been working towards the transition, by which time, in Sefton at least, there would be fewer local representatives. Reports of the final meetings of councils in all areas recorded civic leaders speaking of hope for the future, but also sadness, regret and misgivings, with concerns about the implications.
Crosby’s retiring mayor, the wonderfully named Alderman Edward Grimbaldeston, said his argument was against “people who think, for the sake of easy administration in Whitehall, they have to destroy a way of life”. Two-thirds of his sitting council would be “jettisoned”, with reduced access for local people to bring concerns, and the borough council would cease after 480 years of service.
A similar sentiment was expressed by another Sefton councillor. He stated that it was: “Stupid, that when industry was trying to decentralise, government was trying to centralise.” He added: “Sefton has got a lot to learn.”
The creation of Sefton was controversial. It combines six former autonomous local authorities, stretching up the coast from Liverpool to Southport, and is named after a tiny village near its centre which boasts a 12th century church, an inn and a handful of houses. Southport felt it had little in common, financially and socially, with the towns near Liverpool, which were and still are among the most deprived areas in the country.
A councillor, writing in the Southport Visitor, asked if anyone in Southport “preferred to be incorporated in the new county of Merseyside, with its connotations of industrial strife and violence”, rather than the historic county of Lancashire. He suggested they fly the flag at half-mast on 31
March and continued: “Not one elected representative of any political persuasion supports the changes which are being bulldozed through.”
Southport’s MP was more positive: “I believe that we in Sefton have attained the best of all possible alternatives open to us; a unit of local government as near to the ideal for the future as one could get. Big enough to deal with education and social services, small enough to remain truly personal.”
Less enthusiastic, but more pragmatic was Wirral’s new mayor. She is reported to have said: “No one wanted the local government reorganisation, but it is here now, and we must make it work.”
Whatever the local feeling, and an innate resistance to change, the new arrangements were here to stay. Or were they? Among other reversals, the small and historic county of Rutland was reinstated (as a unitary authority) in 1997. On 1 April 2014, Merseyside was absorbed into the Liverpool City Region, although, unnoticed by many, Merseyside Council had ceased to function in 1986. It is still regarded as a metropolitan county, but power had been devolved to its smaller constituent authorities. Big is not always beautiful. With the sidelining of Merseyside and acknowledging my current home’s history and my own Lancastrian heritage (and unopposed by the Post Office), I write “Lancashire” where forms require the name of a county.