Unitary authority is one of the primary units of local government in the United Kingdom. Each unitary authority is supervised by an elected council and is responsible for providing a full range of local services to a specific geographical area. These services include consumer protection, economic development, education, environmental services, firefighting, food hygiene, garbage collection and disposal, housing, leisure and cultural services, libraries, local tax collection, police, road planning and maintenance, and social services.
The first unitary authorities were created in 1992 by the Local Government Act. In 1996, Wales reorganized its local governments to a fully unitary system. Today, unitary authorities form a single level of local government that is directly responsible to the central governments of England and Wales. Previously, the responsibilities for local government had been split between counties and districts in England and Wales. In Northern Ireland, district councils administer local government, but their status is equivalent to that of the unitary authorities elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Scotland’s council areas are also equivalent to unitary authorities.
In England, the situation is more complex because only some of the existing English county and district councils have been eliminated. Throughout much of England, county and district authorities exist alongside unitary authorities. In some of England’s larger cities and towns and in certain other areas, unitary authorities are responsible for all the local government functions. Metropolitan districts and metropolitan boroughs, such as those that administer the metropolitan counties of Greater Manchester and Merseyside, also have status equivalent to the unitary authorities, as do the Greater London boroughs. These administrative areas originally became directly answerable to England’s central government in 1986.
In New Zealand, a unitary authority is a second level of local government that falls below a region, the first tier of local government. The unitary authorities in New Zealand perform the functions of regional councils.
