| Summary: |
Now that it is into its third edition, this book has come to resemble my grandfather’s axe, of which my father
replaced the blade and I replaced the handle. The years since Local Government was first published in 1982
have been a period of tremendous instability for local government. On the one hand, it has been under
sustained attack by the successive Conservative administrations which have held power since 1979. On the
other hand, the ‘new urban Left’ brought a period of stimulating development of new policies, especially in
economic development and equal opportunities, during the 1980s.
The increased variation and experimentation with local authority management processes and structures
which developed after reorganisation in 1974–1975 in Scotland—has continued to develop apace, with the
result that it is now even more difficult to generalise about local authorities’ policy-making and management
structures and processes than it was a decade ago. The internal decentralisation initiatives of the 1970s and
1980s; the imposition first of compulsory competitive tendering on a widening range of services and then of
the community care scheme, have presented local authorities with a new range of management challenges,
to which they have responded in varying ways. Financial pressure has forced local authorities to review
their budgetary processes and has produced major conflicts between the Government and individual local
authorities, notably Liverpool City Council and Lambeth Borough council.
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