Hampshire County Council is an upper tier authority and provides services for the entire county of Hampshire with an annual budget in the region of £1.9 billion. Underneath Hampshire County Councils are 11 District Councils spread throughout Hampshire. These 11 District Councils are middle tier authorities. Under each of these District Councils will be a number of Town or parish Councils.
Up until around 1969, all councils outside of the metropolitan regions consisted of several tiers of government, with County Councils at the top; District Councils beneath them and at the bottom tier, some area had town and parish councils. However, from 1969 there was a move to simplify local government by replacing these tiers of bureaucracy with a single tier, known as Unitary Authorities. Unitary Authorities are easier for the public to understand since they do not need a degree in public services to know which council to call about what service or indeed which councillor to vote for at what tier of government. Today, relatively few Unitaries exist and you may wonder why that is if they are meant to simplify local democracy. It may be to do with who makes the rules and therefore who can change them. The majority of County Councils are in rural areas, where the Conservatives generally receive the highest vote share. Perhaps there has been a resistance to convert Counties to Unitaries, because there is a perception that they would lose this vote share since the majority of Unitaries are in urban areas such as Portsmouth and Southampton where other Parties tend to receive a higher proportion of the vote.
Hampshire County Council does not cover all of Hampshire as its name suggest, since in Hampshire there are the two Unitary Authorities of Portsmouth and Southampton. These are the only two Unitaries in Hampshire and they are not at all hierarchical in that they are single-tier local government. If you need to speak to a councillor about a particular issue, you do not first have to find out what that councillor’s responsibilities cover, since if it is a locally provided public service then the councillor will be responsible for it.