Leadership in local government: the search for a core executive and its consequences

1. The rise and rise of the core executive For twenty years and more now, there has been a tendency for control over policy and resource allocation in local authorities to become concentrated in the hands of a small group of leading councillors and senior officers, who collec-tively form a core executive. The reasons for this have been a mixture of inadequacies in the traditional systems of local government administration. Above all, four deficiencies in the internal management of local authorities became increasingly apparent to many councillors, officers and academic observers, during the 1950s and 1960s. The first was the chronic inability of local authority departments to communicate with one another and co-ordinate their policies with one another: these departments operated as largely independent empires which took little cognisance of the activities of colleagues in other departments. This tendency towards departmental isolation was reinforced by the narrow professional training of most local government officers (Acton Society Trust, 1966; Poole