Talk:Huntingdonshire

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I've been looking into why Huntingdonshire wasn't given unitary authority status in the 1990s round of reform. It's all a bit odd. John Major was apparently very keen on the idea. Huntingdonshire was in the list of districts referred to the Local Government Commission for 're-consideration'.

And they recommend out of this list, Rutland, with a far smaller population. One theory could be that Rutland simply has a much stronger local identity. The administrative county of Rutland was scheduled to be incorporated into Leicestershire in the mid 1960s, at the same time as the creation of Huntingdon and Peterborough. But Rutland fought this off, and delayed it till 1974. And it was able to get unitary status in 1996, despite its tininess (one of the smallest (by population) _districts_ in England - let alone counties!)

Another factor may have been that unitary status would have left the Cambridgeshire County Council covering too few people to be viable in itself... Morwen - Talk 17:17, 10 Jun 2004 (UTC)