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Find out about changes to our services and Christmas opening times on our Festive information page. To find out when your bin will be collected over the festive period, visit Changes to County Durham bin collections at Christmas.

Due to maintenance, the following systems will be unavailable from 11.45am on Tuesday 24 December until 8.00am on Thursday 2 January: our online Council Tax, business rates and housing benefit services, and our welfare assistance form. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Council structure


We provide the majority of council services in County Durham. Find out more information about us and the services we deliver.

To deliver our services, there are six directorates:

Our services range from teaching young people to caring for our older residents, from lending the latest best sellers to protecting 900-year-old documents' from fixing road bridges to creating bridges in our communities, from helping children to swim to helping adults into work, from planting trees in nature reserves to recycling paper from our homes. In fact, any local service you can think of, we probably have a hand in it somewhere.

We have a budget of around £1.3billion, which helps us provide services for more than 513,000 people. We have over 18,000 staff, 39 libraries, 15 leisure centres, six swimming pools, 15 family hubs, 78,000 street lights and 262 schools.

Management structure

Our senior management team is:

  • John Hewitt - Chief Executive
    • Michael Laing - Corporate Director of Adult and Health Services
    • John Pearce - Corporate Director of Children and Young People's Services
    • Alan Patrickson - Corporate Director of Neighbourhoods and Climate Change
    • Amy Harhoff - Corporate Director of Regeneration, Economy and Growth
    • Paul Darby - Corporate Director of Resources
    • Helen Bradley, Director of Legal and Democratic Services


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