The Counties

England has thirty-nine historic counties, formally recognised by the government in 2013 and mapped by Ordnance Survey in 2015. They are not museum pieces. They are, for most English people, the answer to the question "where are you from?" — and they remain the most intuitive and widely understood way of describing where places are. A system of local government that ignores them in favour of invented regions and arbitrary groupings starts with a legitimacy deficit that no amount of administrative efficiency can overcome.

The proposal is not that every administrative boundary must follow a county line to the yard. A thousand years of urban growth, industrial development and population movement have produced situations where rigid adherence to a medieval boundary would be absurd. But the default should be alignment, and departures from it should require justification. The burden of proof should fall on those who wish to draw a line that cuts across a historic county, not on those who wish to preserve one.

The most important consequence is that every strategic authority should be composed of one or more complete historic counties, not fragments of several. Where a county must be subdivided into unitary authorities, the county name should be preserved with a geographic prefix — West Norfolk, East Surrey, North Hampshire — rather than an invented name that severs the connection to place. And where a city's boundaries have expanded beyond its historic county, those boundaries should be reconsidered, with suburban and rural areas returned to the county to which they properly belong.

The following table proposes a pattern of strategic authorities covering the whole of England outside Greater London, which is addressed separately in Item VI. The unitary authorities within each strategic authority — the single-tier councils that deliver local services — are addressed in Item V. Each authority is built on the footprint of one or more historic counties. Where an authority departs from historic boundaries — as it must in several cases — the departure is noted.

The government's current programme of devolution and local government reorganisation is already creating many of these structures. Where the emerging pattern aligns with historic counties, this proposal endorses it. Where it does not, alternatives are suggested.

Yorkshire is a single historic county — the largest in England — but it has been divided into three Ridings since at least the ninth century. The Ridings (from the Old Norse þriðjungr, a third part) are not administrative inventions but divisions of great antiquity: the West Riding, the North Riding and the East Riding, each with its own character, economy and sense of identity.

The 1974 reorganisation ignored the Ridings entirely. It created South Yorkshire by carving Sheffield, Barnsley, Rotherham and Doncaster out of the West Riding; it created Humberside by merging the East Riding with parts of Lincolnshire; and it established West Yorkshire as a metropolitan county covering only part of the West Riding. The result was a set of boundaries that meant nothing to anyone who lived within them. Humberside was abolished in 1996. South Yorkshire persists as a combined authority boundary, but it has no historic basis and commands no local loyalty.

The proposal is to replace the current fragmented pattern with three strategic authorities based on the Ridings. The West Riding authority would reunite the current West Yorkshire and South Yorkshire areas, covering Leeds, Bradford, Sheffield, Wakefield, Barnsley, Rotherham, Doncaster and the surrounding districts. The North Riding would correspond to the current York and North Yorkshire area. The East Riding would correspond to the current Hull and East Yorkshire area. In each case, the boundary would follow the historic Riding boundary as closely as modern settlement patterns allow.

Parts of the historic West Riding were transferred to Greater Manchester in 1974 — most notably Saddleworth, which is now in the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham. The return of such areas is desirable in principle but may not be achievable in the short term. They should be noted as anomalies and addressed when the opportunity arises.

No historic county suffered more from the 1974 reorganisation than Lancashire. The creation of Greater Manchester and Merseyside stripped away its two largest cities and most of their surrounding towns. What remains — the area from Lancaster and Morecambe in the north to Chorley and Leyland in the south, centred on Preston and Blackburn — is a rump of the county that existed for nine centuries before the boundary commissioners arrived.

A purist approach would dismantle the metropolitan county boundaries entirely, returning Wigan, Bolton, Bury, Rochdale and St Helens to Lancashire and Stockport to Cheshire. This is appealing in principle but would require unpicking fifty years of institutional arrangements — shared services, transport networks, planning frameworks — that now depend on the existing boundaries. The pragmatic course is to acknowledge the mismatch openly, establish Manchester as a tightly drawn city authority covering the urban core (Manchester and Salford), and consider the return of boroughs that retain a stronger connection to their historic county than to the metropolitan area. Wigan, which sits at the western edge of Greater Manchester and has always regarded itself as a Lancashire town, is the strongest candidate.

The same logic applies, with local variation, to the West Midlands. The current combined authority covers seven metropolitan boroughs, most of which are historically in Staffordshire (Wolverhampton, Walsall, parts of Sandwell and Dudley) or Warwickshire (Coventry, Solihull). Birmingham, which sits on the historic border between the two counties, should be established as a city authority. The surrounding boroughs should be considered for return to their historic counties, with Staffordshire and Warwickshire each forming strategic authorities that include the boroughs that historically belonged to them.

These are not proposals that can be implemented overnight. They require negotiation, transitional arrangements and a willingness to accept that the final pattern may fall short of the historic ideal. But the direction of travel should be clear: where metropolitan boundaries cut across historic counties, the eventual aim is to restore the county line, not to entrench the anomaly.

Police force areas, NHS trust boundaries, fire and rescue service areas and judicial circuits should all be aligned with the boundaries of the strategic authorities. The present situation — in which a single county may fall under one police force, two health trusts, a different fire authority and yet another judicial circuit — is a source of chronic inefficiency, confused accountability and public bafflement. No citizen should need a reference map to work out which public body is responsible for which service in their area.

This alignment would not happen automatically. Police force mergers in particular are politically sensitive and have been resisted in the past. But the principle is sound and the practical benefits are considerable. A strategic authority whose police, health, fire and local government boundaries are coterminous can plan services as a whole, share data without institutional friction and present a single coherent point of accountability to the public. The alternative — the current patchwork — serves nobody except the administrators whose jobs depend on its continued complexity.

Local government in England is expected to fund two fundamentally different kinds of activity from a single pot: social services (adult social care, children's services, homelessness support, education support) and community services (roads, waste collection, parks, leisure, planning, environmental health). The first category is driven by need and demography, varies enormously between areas, and is largely outside the control of the local authority. The second is driven by local choices about the quality of services that residents wish to enjoy and are willing to pay for. Funding both from the same combination of council tax and central government grant produces a system in which councils with high social care costs have little money left for roads and parks, while councils with low social care costs can fund generous community services at modest tax rates.

Social services should be funded directly from general taxation, allocated to each local authority according to a transparent formula based on assessed need. The money would come from the centre but would be spent locally, by the unitary authority, without the present uncertainty about how much grant each council will receive from year to year. Council tax would then fund community services alone — the genuinely local choices about how clean the streets should be, how often the bins are collected, whether to keep the library open on Saturdays. Each authority would set its own council tax rate to match the level of community services its residents want. An authority that invests heavily in parks and leisure centres would charge accordingly; one that takes a more austere approach would charge less. The connection between local taxation and local provision would become legible again.

This separation would not solve every problem of local government finance. Council tax itself is in need of reform — its valuations date from 1991, its bands are regressive, and the relationship between property value and ability to pay is weaker than it was thirty years ago. But these are questions for another day and, in the case of council tax valuation, for the authority itself to address within its own boundaries. The immediate reform is structural: to stop pretending that a system designed to fund local choices can also bear the weight of national social obligations, and to fund each from the source that makes sense.