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The metropolitan counties of England are administrative counties that cover large urban areas, each with several metropolitan districts. The metropolitan counties no longer have county councils, as they were abolished in 1986.
The metropolitan counties are:
Greater London is sometimes considered to be a metropolitan county, although it was defined differently.
The metropolitan counties were established by the Local Government Act 1972, and came into being in 1974 as part of a general local government reform by the Conservative government of Edward Heath.
The counties were innitially administered by elected Metropolitan County Councils (MCCs) which were meant to be strategic authorities running regional services such as transport, civil protection and strategic town and country planning.
The MCCs, functioned between 1975 and 1986. The last general elections to the councils were held in May 1981.
Just a decade after they were establised: in 1983 the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher published a White Paper entitled Streamlining the cities which proposed their abolition, together with the abolition of the Greater London Council (GLC), the government enacted the report. and the MCCs and the GLC were abolished in 1986.
The government claimed that this was an efficiency measure. Although it is widely believed that they were abolished for political reasons, because all of the county councils were controlled by the Labour Party.
The MCCs were replaced with joint boards of the existing Metropolitan boroughs, or in some circumstances, their assets passed directly to the central government or its agencies.
The Greater London Council (GLC) is often considered as one of the MCCs (particularly over the question of abolition), but it was a very different authority established on a different statutory basis.
They still exist both as legal administrative counties, are used in government statistics, and are also ceremonial counties. Some functions such as emergency services and public transport are still administered on a metropolitan county wide basis.
The abolition of the GLC was extremely controversial, but the MCCs less so. In 1997 Tony Blair's new Labour government legislated to restore a successor body to the GLC - the Greater London Authority. Despite some talk of doing so, so far no bodies have been established replaced the MCCs.
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