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Central/local government relations in England: an outline 1800–1950

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

E. P. Hennock
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Extract

In April 1980 a group of urban historians and political scientists met at the University of York under the auspices of the Social Science Research Council to pool what they knew about the changing relations between central and local government and to identify areas for future research. The initiative had come from the political scientists whose interest in the subject had been stimulated by recent government policy. Those who attended from among the historians had to confess that this was not a subject that had recently been much discussed among them. When I was invited by the editor of this Yearbook to contribute an article on a neglected aspect of urban history, it seemed a good opportunity to draw the attention of the urban history group to the subject. What follows is an amended version of the paper that had originally been written for the SSRC seminar.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History Yearbook , Volume 9 , May 1982 , pp. 38 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

1 This has since been published as ‘Some myths in central-local relations’, Town Planning Rev., LI, 3 (1980), 270–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 S., and Webb, B., English Local Government, IV (1922)Google Scholar: Statutory Associations for Special Purposes.

3 Roseveare, H., The Treasury 1610–1870. The Foundation of Control (1973).Google Scholar

4 Lambert, R. J., Sir John Simon and the English Social Administration (1963).Google Scholar

5 Mill, J. S., Representative Government (1861), ch. 15.Google Scholar

6 Quoted in Hennock, E. P., Fit and Proper Persons (1973), 208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 See Lambert, R. J., ‘Central-local relations in mid-Victorian England. The Local Government Act Office 1853–71’, Victorian Studies, VI (1962–1963).Google Scholar

8 See Hennock, E. P., ‘Finance and politics in urban local government 1835–1900’, Historical J., VI, 2 (1962).Google Scholar on this aspect.

9 Parris, H., ‘The Home Office and the provincial police 1856–1870’, Public Law (1961)Google Scholar; Lambert, R. J., ‘A Victorian National Health Service. State vaccination 1855–1871’, Historical J., v (1962).Google Scholar

10 See Jennings, W. I. in A Century of Municipal Progress, Laski, H. J. et al. (1935), 417–25.Google Scholar

11 Williams, O. C., The Historical Development of Private Bill Procedure, I (1948), 211–21.Google Scholar

12 The Natural History of Local Boards, or Local Government as it is (1888), 140.Google Scholar

13 See Hennock, , Fit and Proper Persons, 109ff, 213.Google Scholar

14 Simon, J.. English Sanitary Institutions (1897 edn), 300.Google Scholar

15 Wohl, A. S., The Eternal Slum (1977), 110.Google Scholar The 1872 Act did in this respect for the country as a whole what an Act of 1855 had already laid down for the London vestries.

16 I owe this point to a paper by Christine Bellamy (Trent Polytechnic), which was presented to the Social Science Research Council seminar and reported on her research (supported by an SSRC grant) into the Local Government Board 1871–1919. For details of this conflict see also Lambert, Sir John Simon, ch.22.

17 Quoted in Hart, J., ‘The County and Borough Police Act, 1856’, Public Administration, XXXIV (1956), 411.Google Scholar

18 Figures from Local Taxation Return 1892–3 reproduced in The Growth and Reform of English Local Government, Thornhill, W. (ed.) (1971), 160–3.Google Scholar

19 Schulz, M., ‘The development of the grant system’, in Essays in Local Government, Wilson, C. H. (ed.) (1948).Google Scholar Since this paper was written, the publication of Avner Offer's Property and Politics 1870–1914 (1981) has transformed our knowledge of the politics of local government taxation and placed central grants and assigned revenues into a new and wider context.

20 The other person of any significance was the Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths. Otherwise there would have been the troops in the local barracks, the odd excise officer and a few inland revenue clerks. For the period after 1870, when the Home Office assumed responsibility for prisons, prison officers would have had to be added to this list.

21 Booth, C., The Aged Poor (1894), pt 1.Google Scholar

22 For the Old Age Pension Act, see Gilbert, B. B., The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain (1966), ch.4.Google Scholar For its administration through the Customs and Excise, Williams, P. W. (now Thane, P. W.), ‘The development of old age pensions policy in Great Britain 1878–1925’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1970), 212–13, 351–2.Google Scholar For unemployment policy, Harris, J., Unemployment and Politics 1880–1914 (1972).Google Scholar

23 Gilbert, op. cit., chs. 6 and 7.

24 This process had begun in 1937 with the assumption of full responsibility by the central government for the unemployment relief outside the insurance system, was extended piece-meal during the war and completed by the Act of 1948. de Schweinitz, K., England's Road to Social Security (New York, 1943), chs. 19 and 20Google Scholar for the earlier stages.

25 An interesting paper by Rowett, J. S. (Aberystwyth), ‘The local government policies of the Labour governments of 1924 and 1929–31’, based on his Oxford D. Phil. thesisGoogle Scholar, was the only paper at the seminar to present detailed work on the inter-war period.