Assessment - County Councils and District Councils - 23/03/11

23/03/11

I have to admit that I knew very little about the differences between the County and District councils before starting this course. The most obvious difference is that the County council is responsible for an entire county; where as a District council is only responsible for a small area within a county. However there are many other differences between the two, such as the responsibilities they have, and the budgets they have to work with. 

The members of a County council are elected every four years by the public. A cabinet is then drawn from members of the largest political party to be voted in, and then the cabinet are responsible for choosing a council leader. Each member of the cabinet is an executive member for each of the responsibilities of the council, For example, in the Hampshire County Council, Felicity Hindsman is the executive member for adult social care. Some of the responsibilities of a county council include transportation, education and the emergency services.

While each member is a portfolio holder, the cabinet members still vote when propositions are made; it is not down to the executive member of a particular field to make the decision.  I saw an example of this system when I attended the Hampshire County Council meeting this term. A proposition was made that everyone in Hampshire should have access to high speed broadband connections. Raymond Ellis, the executive member for economic development and rural affairs was asked for his views on the matter, but the whole cabinet took a vote to support the proposition.

Civil servants also work for the County council; they are non-political, permanent members, and are not elected. The tax payer pays for the salary of a civil servant. I was shocked to learn that the annual salary of the Chief Executive of the Hampshire County Council, a civil servant, is £207,969. This could be due to the fact that a County Council has a much larger budget than a District council does.

District council members are elected by the public in their area. The head of the District Council is determined by which political party has the most elected members. For example, Kelsie Learney is the current head of the Winchester City Council because she is the representative of the Liberal Democrats, who are in the majority in the council. Some of the responsibilities of a District council are leisure facilities, council housing, road repairs and tax collection.

All the information about both County and District councils, such as budgets and proposals in available for the public to access, but there are also times where the information is not released to the public. For example when I attended the Hampshire County Council meeting, the public and press were told to leave the meeting for the last piece of the agenda because it was not deemed to be something that the public should hear.

Councillors are also able to release information to the public at specific times to hide bad news. Kelsie Learney told us that she always releases bad news to the Hampshire Chronicle on a Tuesday afternoon around 4pm because she knows that the journalists do not have time to look any further into the stories she gives them.

County and District information is not easy to find but if you dig deep enough you might just find something interesting!

Word Count - 548