This year marks the fortieth anniversary of local-government reorganisation in England and Wales in 1974, except in London where new authorities had been created in 1965. In Scotland reorganisation took place in 1975.

The advocates of reorganisation believed it would strengthen local government and local democracy.

They looked forward to a period in which controversies about local-government structure had been resolved and the full potential of local government could be realised, although there were concerns that the new larger local authorities would be remote from local communities, as marked often by the names adopted for the new authorities which concealed rather than proclaimed the communities within them.