The Greater London Council (GLC) was abolished 40 years ago. At midnight on 31 March 1986, following an epic struggle with Margaret Thatcher’s government, London’s city-wide authority, led at that time by Ken Livingstone, ceased to exist. Its functions were scattered between Whitehall departments, borough-run joint committees, a new, directly elected, Inner London Education Authority and the ominously named London Residuary Body (LRB).
County Hall, the home of London government since it had been opened in 1922 by the GLC’s predecessor, the London County Council, remained in use by successor bodies until it was sold by the LRB to a corporation which developed the site into an eccentric leisure and recreation campus, including hotels, restaurants, an aquarium and a theatre. It is hard to imagine governments in France or the US treating Paris’s Hotel de Ville or New York’s City Hall with such disdain.
The GLC had started life in 1965 as a solution to the problem of how to provide consistent government across one of the world’s largest urban agglomerations. Pressure had existed since the 1920s to provide metropolitan scale co-ordination and planning to address policy challenges such as the need for more road building (yes, really!) and to move people out of life-expired properties in inner London.
A Royal Commission had been appointed in 1957 to review the situation. It made proposals which have profoundly shaped London’s government ever since. Indeed, they became the model for other major cities across England. There were to be two tiers of government – a “Council for Greater London” and 51 “Greater London Boroughs”. The City of London, local authority of the Square Mile, would not be reformed beyond having the powers of a borough added to its wider historic functions. There would thus be 52 councils in total.
The proposed Council for Greater London would have responsibility for major roads, strategic planning, traffic management, the ambulance service, refuse disposal, some housing and elements of education provision such as teacher training. The boroughs were to be the primary unit of government for education, social services, planning decisions, local roads and environmental services.
The Conservative government reduced the number of boroughs to 32 (plus the City) and retained a single education authority for Inner London, but otherwise enacted the Royal Commission’s proposals. After fierce lobbying, Esher, Walton, Weybridge, Banstead, Epsom and Ewell, which the Commission would have placed within the new London, all escaped the metropolis’s expansion.
The 1965 reform created the “bottom heavy two-tier” system which has survived to this day. There were unintended consequences: central London, where previously all road, planning and traffic management provision was delivered by the LCC, was split between 10 boroughs. Thus, Sir Sadiq Khan’s decision to create the Oxford Street Development Corporation has its origins in the political fallout from the 1965 reforms.
But back to abolition. In the 1981 GLC elections, Labour won the council from the Conservatives but immediately after the election Livingstone – nicknamed “Red Ken” – replaced the moderate Andrew McIntosh as Labour’s, and thus the GLC’s leader. The Livingstone regime set about delivering an array of policies tailor-made to antagonise Thatcher’s Conservative government across the river.
Some policies were mainstream, notably “Fares Fair”, which reduced public transport fares by increasing the subsidy from local taxation. This policy was struck down by the courts after a legal challenge by Bromley Council. But the Livingstone GLC also majored on policies about Northern Ireland, the nuclear deterrent, gay rights, race, women’s rights, Palestine and more besides. On industrial policy, it was very conservative: it wanted to protect traditional industries such as the docks and manufacturing from further decline.
This being Britain, with no constitutional protection for sub-national institutions, the Thatcher government’s eventual response to political taunting from Livingstone & Co – famously including a banner on County Hall proclaiming the number of people unemployed in London – was to announce that the GLC and its six metropolitan county cousins would be abolished.
From 1983, the threat of abolition saw Livingstone move from being portrayed as a pantomime left-wing populist to being viewed as a democratic martyr. The GLC mounted a spirited campaign against its own demise, using brilliant advertising campaigns with slogans such as “Say No to No Say”. Many Conservatives had misgivings about leaving a city of seven million with no metropolitan government. Labour and the Liberals promised to restore it. But in the end, majority UK governments get what they want – or at least they used to. The GLC ended its 21-year existence with a programme of events on the South Bank culminating in a massive late-night fireworks display on 31 March 1986.
Abolishing the GLC created a vacuum which its successor, the Greater London Authority (GLA), filled. Just 11 years after abolition, the newly elected Labour government of Tony Blair published proposals to introduce a Mayor of London and a London Assembly. In a 1998 referendum, voters in all 32 boroughs and the City of London voted to create today’s City Hall machinery. Ironically, the authority of the massive mandate given to the Mayor, coupled with powers to deliver a wide range of transport provision, fire and emergency services, spatial planning, economic policy, housing and the Metropolitan Police have made the GLA a more powerful institution than its predecessor.
Unlike the GLC, the GLA is under no serious threat of abolition. The evolution of similar government models in other major English cities has embedded the mayoral city region as a consensual element in British politics.
The boroughs are now UK government’s great survivors, reaching their 61st birthday on 1 April. Despite occasional alarms and excursions about whether, for example, there might be a combined authority to allow the boroughs more say over mayoral policies, or whether the Mayor should have more control over licensing, the GLA and the boroughs coexist reasonably happily. GLC abolition in 1986 seemed reckless and undemocratic at the time, but it accidentally led us where we are today. At its most deliciously ironic, Margaret Thatcher paved the way for Sir Sadiq Khan.
Tony Travers is Professor of Government at the London School of Economics.
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Actually it’s 40 years since the GLC was abolished
Careless slip by the editor (who shall remain nameless…)
The GLC’s greatest legacy is the Thames Barrier and l am not sure the GLA has come anywhere near it yet
Tony, what would happen if London went further and abolished the London Boroughs altogether? I sometimes wonder why boroughs like Hackney have an elected mayor, and we are now a far cry from the times when people lived, worked or went to school in the same borough people live in. And traffic surely needs to be under the control of one singular body.
Not sure about abolishing the boroughs all together, but more powers do need to be centralised within the GLA and Mayor’s office. It is stark how little they control in comparison to other cities such as Paris and New York.
Things like transport policy (the recent borough by borough agreements with hire bike companies are a prime example) and refuse collections (each borough seems to have slightly different policies and processes regarding recycling) are two things that immediately spring to mind.