About government.london

What government.london is

government.london is a public-information portal. Its job is to signpost — to take a task you need to do and send you to the official service that actually does it. It gathers the public services of the whole of Greater London in one calm place, organised by topic and by borough, so you do not have to know in advance which of the many public bodies is responsible before you can get started.

It is important to be clear about what this site is not. government.london is not the Greater London Authority, a borough council, Transport for London or a government department. It is an independent signposting service. It does not take payments, receive applications or store your personal records. Every time you need to pay, apply or submit something, this site links you out to the real official service — run by the body legally responsible for it — and that service handles the transaction under its own rules and its own privacy notice.

How London is governed

London's government works on two main levels, with national services layered on top. Understanding the split is the quickest way to find the right service, because each body is responsible for different things.

The Greater London Authority

The Greater London Authority (GLA) is the strategic, city-wide tier. It has two parts that work together and check each other. The Mayor of London is directly elected by Londoners and sets the strategy and budget for the whole city — transport, the London Plan for development, air quality, policing and crime, the fire service, housing and the environment. The London Assembly is a separate group of 25 elected members whose role is to scrutinise the Mayor: to question decisions, examine the budget and investigate issues that matter to Londoners. Both are based at City Hall in the Royal Docks. You can read exactly what the Mayor and the Assembly do at london.gov.uk.

The 33 local authorities

Most services that touch daily life are run locally, not by City Hall. London is divided into 32 boroughs plus the City of London Corporation — 33 authorities in total. Your borough council collects the bins, sets and collects Council Tax, runs parking and licensing, handles planning applications, manages schools admissions and delivers adult and children's social care. The City of London Corporation governs the historic financial district — the "Square Mile" — and is not a borough, though in law it is treated as an Inner London authority. If a task is about your street, your home or your neighbourhood, it almost always belongs to your local council.

London-wide bodies

Some services are too big for a single borough and are run across the whole city, usually by or through the GLA. Transport for London (TfL) runs the Tube, buses, the DLR, trams, most river services and the road-charging schemes — the Ultra Low Emission Zone, the Congestion Charge, Oyster and contactless. Policing across most of London is delivered by the Metropolitan Police, and fire and rescue by the London Fire Brigade, both overseen at the strategic level by the Mayor. National services — registering to vote, the overarching rules for Council Tax, business rates and Blue Badges — sit on GOV.UK, while health services run through the NHS.

How to find the right service

You do not need to know which body is responsible to get going. There are three simple routes, and any of them will land you in the right place:

1. Browse by topic — ten areas cover the whole of London public life, from transport to voting.
2. Search from the box on the home page for a task in plain words, like "pay ULEZ" or "school places".
3. Use the council finder to reach your borough by postcode for anything local.

As a rule of thumb: local tasks — bins, Council Tax payments, parking, planning, schools — belong to your borough; city-wide travel and driving charges belong to TfL; and national services such as registering to vote sit on GOV.UK. When you are unsure, follow the topic that fits best and this site will route you onward. Every outbound link on the portal goes to a genuine official domain — gov.uk london.gov.uk tfl.gov.uk nhs.uk met.police.uk or a borough's own .gov.uk site.

Accessibility statement

We want every Londoner to be able to use this site, whatever their device, browser or need. The portal is built to be usable by as many people as possible and is designed with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 at level AA in mind.

• You can navigate the whole site with a keyboard alone; the focus ring is always visible and never removed.
• A "skip to content" link is the first thing on every page, so keyboard and screen-reader users can jump past the navigation.
• Navigation, menus and the FAQ accordions carry ARIA roles and states, and the active page is marked for assistive technology.
• The site works with JavaScript switched off: menus, search and every FAQ still open and read.
• We honour your prefers-reduced-motion setting — if you have asked your device to reduce motion, animations are switched off, not merely slowed.
• Colour is never the only way we signal meaning, text reflows down to a 320-pixel screen, and touch targets are at least 44 pixels.

If something on this site is hard to use, or you need information in a different format, please tell us on the contact page and we will do our best to put it right. A fuller technical statement lives on the dedicated accessibility page.

Note: The accessibility of the official services we link to is the responsibility of the bodies that run them. Each publishes its own accessibility statement.

Common questions