Northamptonshire County Council was the county council for Northamptonshire in England from 1889 to 2021. It was originally created in 1889, reformed in 1974, and abolished in 2021. The headquarters of the council was County Hall in Northampton.
In early 2018, the council announced it was effectively insolvent. Subsequently, a report by government inspectors concluded that problems at the council were so deep-rooted that it should be abolished and replaced by two smaller authorities. Northamptonshire County Council and the county's seven district councils were therefore abolished, being replaced by two new unitary authorities called North Northamptonshire Council and West Northamptonshire Council in 2021.
History
Elected county councils were created in 1889 under the Local Government Act 1888, taking over administrative functions which had previously been performed by unelected magistrates at the quarter sessions. In Northamptonshire, the quarter sessions for the hundred of Nassaburgh in the north-east of the county had been held separately from those of the rest of the county since the 14th century. Nassaburgh was a liberty under the control of the Abbot of Peterborough and so also became known as the Soke of Peterborough. Its administrative independence from the rest of Northamptonshire was maintained in 1889 by being given its own Soke of Peterborough County Council, although it remained part of the geographical county of Northamptonshire for the purposes of lieutenancy.[1]
The borough of Northampton was considered large enough for its existing borough council to provide county-level services, and so it was made a county borough, independent from the county council. The 1888 Act also directed that urban sanitary districts which straddled county boundaries were to be placed entirely in one county, which saw Northamptonshire cede its part of Market Harborough to Leicestershire and its part of Banbury to Oxfordshire. Northamptonshire County Council was elected by and provided services to the parts of the county (as thus adjusted) outside the Soke of Peterborough and county borough of Northampton. The county council's area was termed the administrative county.[2]
Sessions House (left) and County Hall (right), George Row, Northampton
The first elections were held in January 1889, and the county council formally came into being on 1 April 1889. On that day it held its first official meeting at the Sessions House in Northampton, the courthouse (completed 1678)[3] which had served as the meeting place for the quarter sessions which preceded the county council. The first chairman of the council was John Spencer, 5th Earl Spencer, a Liberal peer, who had also been Lord Lieutenant of Northamptonshire since 1872.[4] Finding the courtroom at the Sessions House was poorly suited for council meetings, the council shortly afterwards had a new council chamber built to the rear of the adjoining house to the west; the new chamber was completed in 1890 and the complex of buildings became known as County Hall.[5][6]
Local government was reformed in 1974 under the Local Government Act 1972. Northamptonshire was reclassified as a non-metropolitan county, and the borough of Northampton was brought under the authority of the reformed county council.[a] The lower tier of local government was reorganised as part of the same reforms. Previously it had comprised numerous boroughs, urban districts and rural districts; they were reorganised into seven non-metropolitan districts.
Northamptonshire County Council provided county-level functions. After the 1974 reforms, district-level functions were provided by the county's seven district councils (some of which were styled as boroughs, allowing them to have a mayor):[7][8]
Early in 2018 the county council announced that it "was effectively insolvent."[26]
In March 2018, a government-appointed investigator's report into financial and management failures at the authority recommended the council be broken up. It said the problems at the council were so deep-rooted that it was impossible to rescue it in its current form, and to do so "would be a reward for failure". It recommended that ministers send in a team of external commissioners to take over the day-to-day running of the council until it can be broken up and replaced with two new smaller authorities. The report rejected the council leadership's claim that it had been disadvantaged by government funding cuts and underfunded. It condemned the council's attempt to restructure services by outsourcing them to private companies and charities (the Next Generation Programme). It described the council's budgeting as "an exercise of hope rather than expectation".[27]
Subsequently, the council's Leader, Heather Smith, resigned.[27] Robin Brown, Councillor with the finance brief was later sacked.[28]
To save money, Northamptonshire Council was planning to cut services even for vulnerable people including vulnerable children.[29]Austerity measures are blamed for the insolvency, as is the council's refusal to raise council tax despite the rising costs of providing social services. For half a decade the council used 'accounting ruses' and used financial services inappropriately. In future the council is to provide the legal minimum of services, focused on the most vulnerable—though it is unclear what the minimum will be, or how vulnerable people will be required to be to receive services. The council must find savings of £70m out of its £441m budget during the coming few months, and further savings of £54m during 2019-20.[30]
Cuts were considered for children's services, adult services (investigating learning difficulties, fees, charges and National Health Service contributions), road maintenance and transport (including school buses), waste management, and culture; staff redundancies were also considered.[31] There are to be planned widespread cuts to jobs and services, owing to a funding shortfall of £70m.[32] Proposed cuts to Northamptonshire's library service were challenged in court. A judge reminded the councillors that they have a statutory duty to provide a comprehensive and efficient library service. The judge ruled that the council had not put enough time and effort into establishing whether the reduced service would meet their statutory duties, and ruled the cuts could not currently go ahead as proposed.[33] The cuts are causing hardship to some families with special needs.[34]
Ofsted severely criticised what it saw as inadequate protection for at risk children, 267 young people were waiting up to four months for assessment and for a social worker. Remedial action by management did not have 'sufficient urgency or rigour'. Social workers responsible for child protection maintained they were, "overwhelmed" and "drowning" from pressure of increasing demand. Some professionals were struggling with caseloads of between 30 and 50 children. The council was not in a well placed to invest heavily in turning child protection services round as preventing bankruptcy is a major priority.[35]
The budget cuts proposed in August 2018 were intended to save £70m from the £441m budget in 2018 and an additional £54m savings in 2019-20. As a result, the council expected to be able to provide only the "bare legal minimum of service, focused only on the most vulnerable residents ... No services will go unscathed, even in priority areas like child protection".[30]
Some of the responsibility for the de facto bankruptcy (Section 114) of Northamptonshire must be accepted by the council, according to The Guardian which described "a reckless half-decade in which it refused to raise council tax to pay for the soaring costs of social care, preferring to patch up budget holes with accounting ruses and inappropriate use of financial reserves".[30] Some observers, such as Simon Edwards of the County Councils Network, added another perspective on the cause of the financial crisis, discussing the United Kingdom government austerity programme. "It is clear that, partly due to past failings, the council is now having to make some drastic decisions to reduce services to a core offer. However, we can’t ignore that some of the underlying causes of the challenges facing Northamptonshire, such as dramatic reductions to council budgets and severe demand for services, mean county authorities across the country face funding pressures of £3.2bn over the next two years." Andrew Gwynne, the shadow secretary of state for communities and local government, provided this comment. "Government cuts are pushing our councils into crisis, and the crisis in Northamptonshire is the canary in the coal mine. Despite one of their own councils effectively declaring themselves bankrupt twice this year, we have yet to see [the] government recognise the appalling consequences of their austerity programme for people up and down the country". [36]
Between 2013 and 2016, the Council's children's services were in special measures after being rated as inadequate by Ofsted. In 2016, the service was updated to "requires improvement" and it was taken out of special measures.[39]
In June 2019, the County's children's services were rated "inadequate" by Ofsted inspectors. The report found that there were "highly vulnerable children in care who are living in unregulated placements that are unsafe and unsuitable". Earlier in the same month, two serious case reviews found that council's child protection services had failed to protect two murdered children.[40]
↑ The Soke of Peterborough had lost its ceremonial link with Northamptonshire in 1965 when it was absorbed into the short-lived county of Huntingdon and Peterborough, which was in turn absorbed into Cambridgeshire in 1974.
↑ "Compositions Calculator". The Elections Centre. University of Exeter. Retrieved 21 May 2025. (Put "Northamptonshire" in search box to see specific results.)
↑ Butler, Patrick (1 August 2018). "Northamptonshire's cash crisis driven by ideological folly, councillors told". The Guardian. Retrieved 9 September 2018. Unless we rapidly see a change of direction, Northamptonshire will not be the last council in crisis, and the people of Northants will not be the last to have to bear the burden for Tory neglect.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
