Local Government 20,022 contacts:

The Local Government database covers all Local Authorities and Police and Fire Authorities in the UK.

The structure of Local Authorities varies across England/Scotland/Wales and Northern Ireland and also in different areas of England . Following major re-organisation in the 1990’s, Wales and Scotland merged all the District and County Councils creating a single Authority type for each area, these are known as Unitary Authorities and provide all Council functions.  Due to individual considerations for each area, it was decided that in England there would be a mixture of 'single tier' authorities - Unitary / Metropolitan / London Boroughs. With the rest of the Country covered by 'Two Tier' authorities - English Country Councils and Districts Councils – where functions are divided between the two authority types.

The following table shows how functions that vary between authority types are divided:

Local Authority functions are divided up within each authority into a number of Departments, with the smaller District Councils tending to have two to three departments and Mets/Unitaries/Counties/Boroughs having four to five. Councils are run based on edicts, rules and legal requirements created by Central Government, though they have autonomy in how they provide these functions and how they organize themselves. Consequently all Councils are organized somewhat differently. The autonomy of the individual departments varies from one authority to another and from one authority type to another. Often it depends on the overall configuration of the organisation. Though it is often the case that with larger authorities it is often worth considering the departments as quite separate from each other, often they are based at different addresses, with different functions and separate departmental purchasing/finance and other corporate functions.

Local Authorities are funded by a combination of local tax revenue, grants from the Central Government, Investments and Financial Reserves, plus and other Local charges.

The Oscar database covers all Chief Executive and Corporate/Top Level functions, plus all 'Second Tier'/Heads of Service, plus approximately 10,000 functional/departmental managers and officers.

The database is extensively categorised by organisation type/level of management and has nearly 200 functional categories and areas of responsibility. The details of these are all available on our Local Government category guide please click here. The number of contacts and depth of information is constantly being expanded with new functions and statutory positions. Department names and numbers of employees are also a recent addition to the database

The following is a breakdown of the Oscar database firstly by coverage of key fields and then by the 4 key selection areas of the database.