Somerset Council is the unitary local authority responsible for the county of Somerset in South West England. It came into being on 1 April 2023, when the former two-tier system of Somerset County Council and the four district councils (Mendip, Sedgemoor, Somerset West and Taunton, and South Somerset) was replaced by a single organisation. That reorganisation folded education, social care, highways, waste, planning, environmental health, leisure and revenue collection into one body, and the council now works on behalf of roughly 580,000 residents across an area of around 1,600 square miles. For anyone using a business directory to understand who actually runs public services in the county, this is the starting point.

The headquarters sit at County Hall, The Crescent, in Taunton, the county town. Customer services can be reached on 0300 123 2224, Monday to Friday between 8:30am and 5pm, and most routine tasks can also be handled through the council's online account system. A text relay number is published for residents who are deaf, hard of hearing or who have speech difficulties, and registration services (births, deaths, marriages and civil partnerships) keep a separate line on 01823 282251. The council also operates from offices and customer access points in Bridgwater, Yeovil and Wells, a reflection of the geographic spread it has to cover.

Day to day, the range of work is wide. Adult social care and children's services together account for the largest share of spending, covering everything from safeguarding and fostering to support for older people and adults with disabilities. The council is also the local education authority, which means it has duties around school admissions, special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), home-to-school transport and the maintenance of community schools, even though many schools have since converted to academy status. Highways and transport form another heavy workload, with the authority maintaining thousands of miles of road, managing gritting in winter and dealing with the steady flow of pothole and drainage reports that come with rural roads and a wet climate.

Planning is one of the services residents and businesses interact with most often. The council determines planning applications, sets local planning policy and runs building control, and its planning portal lets people search live and historic applications by address or reference number. Waste and recycling is handled in partnership through the Somerset Waste Partnership, with the familiar weekly recycling collection, fortnightly rubbish collection and a network of recycling centres around the county. Council tax billing, business rates, housing benefit and council tax support are all administered centrally now, which removed the previous overlap between county and district functions.

The shift to a unitary model was driven partly by money. Like many English councils, Somerset has faced sustained financial pressure, and in November 2023 it declared a financial emergency, warning that the cost of adult and children's social care was outpacing income. That led to difficult decisions on budgets, asset sales and service reductions, and the picture has remained tight in the period since. This is an honest caveat for anyone reading about the authority through a business directory: the breadth of statutory duties it carries, combined with constrained funding, means service levels in non-statutory areas such as some discretionary grants, certain leisure provision and a number of community assets have been under review. Residents have at times reported longer response times on lower-priority matters as a result.

Governance follows the standard English local authority pattern. Councillors are elected to represent wards across Somerset, and they set policy and approve the budget through full council and a cabinet of lead members holding specific portfolios such as adult services, children and families, transport, and resources. A network of scrutiny committees and a planning committee provide challenge and decision-making, and the council publishes agendas, reports and webcasts of meetings so the public can follow how decisions are reached. The chief executive and senior officers handle the operational running of the organisation and the implementation of councillor decisions. Local Community Networks, introduced as part of the unitary design, are meant to give towns and parishes a more direct route into council planning at a local level.

A number of services that residents value sit slightly outside the headline functions but still fall to the council. It runs the county's library network, with branches in the larger towns and a mobile service that reaches smaller communities, alongside online access to e-books, reference resources and study space. Registration of births, deaths, marriages and civil partnerships is handled by the registration service, which also conducts citizenship ceremonies and approves venues for weddings. The council supports the coroner service for the area, manages trading standards and food safety inspections, issues a range of licences from taxis to alcohol and entertainment, and looks after country parks, rights of way and a number of nature reserves. Public rights of way alone run to a substantial network of footpaths and bridleways that the authority has a duty to keep available, which is significant work in a county with so much open countryside and a strong walking and cycling following.

The council's website is the practical front door for most of this. It is organised around tasks rather than departments, so a resident can pay council tax, report a missed bin, apply for a school place, request a blue badge, register to vote or look up a planning application without needing to know which team handles it. Businesses use it to pay business rates, check licensing requirements for premises and street trading, and find procurement and tender opportunities. For families, the Somerset Local Offer pages set out SEND support, and the council's pages on fostering and adoption are a recruitment route as well as an information source. A business directory entry can point people to the homepage, but the site's internal search is generally the quickest way to reach a specific service.

Somerset's character shapes a lot of what the council does. This is a largely rural county of market towns, farmland, the Somerset Levels and Moors, the Mendip, Quantock and Blackdown Hills, and a long coastline on the Bristol Channel. Flooding is a recurring concern, particularly on the Levels, where the winter floods of 2013 to 2014 drew national attention and prompted long-term work on dredging, pumping and flood resilience that the council remains involved in alongside the Environment Agency and internal drainage boards. Rural transport, broadband, the viability of high streets in towns such as Taunton, Bridgwater, Yeovil, Wells, Frome, Glastonbury and Minehead, and the economic effects of major projects like Hinkley Point C all sit within the council's strategic remit.

Tourism and the local economy get attention too, though the council works with partners rather than running attractions directly. It supports business growth, skills and inward investment, and coordinates with bodies covering the wider South West. Public health functions, transferred to local authorities some years ago, mean the council also has a role in matters such as smoking cessation, drug and alcohol services, sexual health commissioning and public health campaigns, working closely with the NHS in the county.

For the purposes of a business directory serving Somerset, the council functions as the anchor public institution: the body that issues licences, grants planning permission, collects local taxes, runs social care and education, and maintains much of the public infrastructure and open spaces. Its contact details are stable and its information is authoritative, which makes it a sensible reference point for residents, new arrivals and businesses trying to work out who to approach. The standing caveat remains the financial backdrop, which continues to influence what the authority can offer beyond its core statutory obligations, and prospective users should expect some services to be prioritised over others while that pressure persists.

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