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A unitary authority is a term used in a two-tier local government system to describe a unit of local government that operates as a single tier.
New Zealand
In New Zealand a unitary authority is a territorial authority (district
or city) which also performs the functions of a regional council. New Zealand has three unitary authorities: Gisborne District, Nelson City and Tasman District.
United Kingdom
The term 'unitary authority' itself first surfaced in the Redcliffe-Maud Report, to describe the sort of authority the report recommended cover most of
England. These sorts of authorities already existed and were called county boroughs; but the term was urban in character. The Report was rejected
by the incoming government after the 1970 general
election, and county boroughs were abolished in 1974. It was not until the 1990s that unitary authorities would be created in the UK.
Creation of unitary authorities
Unitary authorities can be created by statutory instruments, so do not require separate legislation, under the terms of the
Local
Government Act 1992. Typically a district of an administrative county is designated as a new administrative county, but without a county council. The
borders of the original administrative county are adjusted to exclude the unitary authority area. In common usage unitary
authority areas are not usually referred to as counties, although there are exceptions such as the unitary authority of county of Herefordshire, which along with Rutland was a reinstatement of an administrative county lost in the 1974
reorganisation, and the road signs of Herefordshire now refer to it as a county.
In some cases, such as the boroughs of the metropolitan counties and Berkshire the
unitary authorities are not legally counties in their own right, but have instead had all functions transferred to them and the
county council has been abolished. This is in practical terms the same thing.
Scotland and Wales consistently use
unitary authorities. They have been becoming common in England since the 1990s. However the two-tier arrangement (increasing to three-tiers, for the remaining county
administrations) has remained in a different form due to the introduction of a regional level of administration.
London boroughs (including the City of London), the Isles of Scilly, are also
counted as unitary authorities.
Listings of unitary authorities in England can be found by region, or in Subdivisions of
England.
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