Institutional arrangements - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 170

counties of Avon, Humberside and Cleveland created in 1974 plus - peculiarly -
Berkshire). There are now 18 unitary councils in these four areas.

3 An intermediate arrangement where the former counties remain but with their

boundaries revised to exclude one or more districts which have been given
unitary status. Mostly these are the larger freestanding cities (e.g. Southampton
and Portsmouth which have been extracted from Hampshire, and Nottingham
which has been extracted from Nottinghamshire to leave the county with a hole
in its middle!). However one or two other unitaries have also been created (e.g.
Rutland, Herefordshire and the Isle of Wight) which owe their existence solely
to some geographical or historical quirk and local political pressure. There are
currently 28 freestanding unitary councils of this kind.

There remain 34 shire counties (some, like Hampshire and Nottinghamshire, pale
versions of their former selves because of the abstraction of their main urban areas)
containing 238 districts. A listing of the current arrangement in each former county
area is given in Table 10.4.
In Scotland and Wales reviews conducted at the same time were focused on the form
that a unitary system should take rather than on whether (or the extent to which) unitary
councils should be introduced. As a result both the process of reorganisation and its
outcome were much more straightforward. Geographically and politically they are much
more sharply divided between predominantly urbanised and extensively rural areas,
unlike the relatively close juxtaposition of freestanding towns and semi-rural hinterlands
in lowland England which gives rise to political friction. As a consequence the unitary
councils in Scotland (32) and Wales (22) vary enormously in their physical size, reflecting
their extremes in population density. (For further discussion and a comprehensive list of
local authorities throughout Great Britain see Cullingworth and Nadin 2006.)
As well as the system of local government prevailing in any area the boundaries
designated for individual councils have major implications for planning. This is
because the focus of land use/transport planning is on the interaction of activities
across space (in a way that, for example, the provision of education or social services is
not). Difficulties tend to arise when 'functional areas' (i.e. areas which have cohesion
as far as travel to work and other day-to-day activities are concerned) are divided
between separate authorities.
Many of the shire county boundaries are mediaeval in origin and unsurprisingly are
very variable in how well they happen to relate to present-day functioning. Some, like
Oxfordshire or Lincolnshire have territories based on a traditional, dominant county
town (Oxford or Lincoln) plus its rural hinterland which is still a dominant feature.
Others, like Surrey or Somerset, have no such coherence. Particularly significant
for planning is the fact that traditional county boundaries often do not fit well with
major modern developments - the division of the Crawley New Town/Gatwick
Airport complex between Surrey and West Sussex is a good example. The recently
designated Milton Keynes/South Midlands growth area is an even more extreme case
as it embraces not only several separate local authorities but also falls within three of
the Government's administrative regions!
Attempts to change the status of councils or to revise boundaries to match present-
day settlement patterns and functioning are always extremely controversial. 'Logical'
outcomes like the one secured at York (where the creation of a unitary council
was accompanied by the extension of the city boundaries to include its immediate
commuting area) are the exception rather than the rule. For the most part the 1997