Within the context of local councils of the United Kingdom, the term No Overall Control (abbreviated to NOC) refers to a situation in which no single party achieves a majority of seats and is analogous to a hung parliament. Of the 310 councils who had members up for election in the 2007 local elections, 85 (just over a quarter) resulted in a NOC administration.

Typically, under the circumstances that no party achieves overall control of a council, the largest grouping will form alliances to create an ad hoc governing coalition. Due to local council elections tending to return larger numbers of smaller party and independent candidates than elections for higher bodies, this can allow these groups more influence than their numerical representation would otherwise allow.

Examples exist of alliances between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives (Birmingham City Council, Leeds City Council), Liberal Democrats and Labour (Southampton City Council until the 2008 local elections when the Conservatives gained control of the council), Conservatives and Labour in Ashfield and between all major parties and independents or residents associations. Alliances between different parties in this context are often referred to as a "rainbow coalition".




This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_overall_control

This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
×