Your Council

How We Work Together

Guide to Local Government in Hampshire


The aim of this guide

There are three tiers of local government in Hampshire:

  • Hampshire County Council

  • District & Borough Councils

  • Town and Parish Councils

There is also a City Council (Winchester) which broadly takes responsibility for the functions at District/Borough and Town/Parish level.

The aim of this guide is to show how the three tiers work together to provide a range of services to the public.

The guide lists services and functions in a series of charts which then shows which tiers are involved in providing each function.  The ‘Comments’ are designed to clarify the often complex shared arrangements.

Some of the powers given to the Council are statutory.  These can take on various forms: at their most extreme they require undertaking of certain activities to a tightly-defined and rigorously-enforced standard.  Many other powers are discretionary ones which allow the Council to decide for itself whether or not to provide a particular service, and to what standard.  However, it should be stressed that many discretionary functions are central to the day-to-day operations of the Council’s departments and services or have come to be highly valued and expected by residents and therefore could not be dispensed with.

As ‘responsibility’ may suggest a statutory duty, it is perhaps better to think of the county, district or parish councils’ involvement in terms of ‘interest’.  Therefore the relevant columns in the chart have the heading ‘responsibility/interest’.

All parish / town council services are discretionary.

Partnerships

The last part of this guide shows the objectives and membership of the most important partnerships in which Hampshire County Council is involved.

Local authorities increasingly work alongside a range of other service-providing agencies and the Government has been particularly active in creating and funding partnerships, in which local authority officers work with representatives of other public bodies, community groups and private sector organisations.  

As stated in the Hampshire County Council Corporate Strategy, ‘The Council uses an array of partnerships and networks to enhance its capacity, when it has insufficient knowledge or resources of its own and when a joint approach will deliver improved outcomes.’

The partnerships may be informal ones, in the form of networks, or more formal contractual arrangements.

Taking an example from the promotion of the county’s economic well-being, an area where working with partner organisations is particularly important, the Hampshire Economic Partnership (which identifies and champions the needs of Hampshire businesses) has on its board representatives from the County Council, other authorities (Southampton City Council, Eastleigh Borough Council),  the Government Office for the South East (GOSE) and private companies such as Hillier Nurseries.

Roles of local government

These can be summarised as:

- Service provision

- Regulation

- Strategic planning

- Promotion and advocacy

 

An at-a-glance guide to responsibilities**

County Council is responsible for:

County Farms

Education

Highways and transportation – includes constructing new county roads, public transport infrastructure

Leisure and amenities – includes libraries, archaeology, grants to village halls and community projects, museums, open spaces

Planning – includes structure plans, environment and conservation, economic development

Public protection – includes trading standards, registration of births, deaths, marriages, refuse disposal, some markets

Social care (previously Social Services)

Each District Council is responsible for:

Highways and transportation – street cleaning and street lighting

Housing

Leisure and amenities – allotments, museums, open spaces,

Planning – local plans, development control, local land charges, environment and conservation, economic development

Public protection – refuse collection, food safety, markets, control of pollution

Council tax – collection of own tax, plus precepts for county and parishes

Village halls, community centres, allotments, parks, war memorials, street lighting, car parks etc.  Also organise community buses, install CCTV cameras to prevent crime

** Adapted from ‘Local Government in the United Kingdom’ (David Wilson/Chris Game)

(Not definitive for Hampshire as many responsibilities are locally negotiated and potentially overlap)