Durham County Council

Durham County Council is the local authority for the unitary authority area of County Durham in North East England. The unitary authority area is smaller than the ceremonial county of Durham, which additionally includes Darlington, Hartlepool, and part of Stockton-on-Tees. The council has its headquarters at County Hall in the city of Durham, and consists of 98 councillors. It is a member of the North East Combined Authority.

Since the 2025 Durham County Council election the council has been under the majority control of Reform UK. The chair of the council is Robbie Rodis, and the leader is Andrew Husband. The council had a Labour Party majority from 1925 until 2021, when it fell into no overall control.

Between 1889 and 1974 Durham consisted of an administrative county governed by a county council, and several county boroughs with their own councils. In 1974, as part of reforms to local government in England, Durham was reconstituted as a two-tier non-metropolitan county governed by a county council and eight district councils. In 1997, the Borough of Darlington was reconstituted as a unitary authority, making it independent of the county council. Durham County Council was itself reconstituted as a unitary authority in 2009, when the seven remaining district councils were abolished and the county council took on their responsibilities.

Elected county councils were established in 1889 under the Local Government Act 1888, taking over administrative functions previously carried out by unelected magistrates at the quarter sessions. The boroughs of Gateshead, South Shields and Sunderland were considered large enough to provide their own county-level services and so they were made county boroughs, independent from Durham County Council. The county council was elected by and provided services to the rest of the county, which area was termed the administrative county.

Additional county boroughs were later created at West Hartlepool in 1902 and Darlington in 1915. In 1967 West Hartlepool merged with the neighbouring borough of Hartlepool (which had just covered the old town), with the enlarged county borough thereafter being called Hartlepool. Stockton-on-Tees, Billingham and surrounding areas were removed from the administrative county in 1968 to become part of the County Borough of Teesside.

The first elections took place in January 1889 and the county council formally came into being on 1 April 1889. On that day its first official meeting was held at the old Shire Hall on Old Elvet in Durham, the courthouse (built 1811) which had served as the meeting place of the quarter sessions which preceded the county council. The first chairman of the council was John Lloyd Wharton, who was the Conservative Member of Parliament for Ripon (in Yorkshire); he had also been chairman of the Durham Quarter Sessions since 1871.

Durham was the first county council to be controlled by the Labour Party, which won the most seats in 1919.

In 1974, the county was redesignated as a non-metropolitan county under the Local Government Act 1972. As part of those reforms the county ceded territory in the north-east to the new county of Tyne and Wear and in the south-east to the new county of Cleveland, but gained the former Startforth Rural District covering the part of Teesdale south of the River Tees from the North Riding of Yorkshire, and Darlington was brought back under the county council's control.