Daunton M. The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, Volume 3: 1840-1950
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justify making them liable for any insurance committee costs attributable to san-
itary default).
64
So was the creation of a new, centralised, health establishment
in Scotland in the form of the separate Scottish Insurance Commission under
the act.
65
National insurance, like most of the other Liberal welfare reforms of –,
virtually by-passed local government: as in – a major expansion of the
state’s welfare role was achieved without the aid of local authorities.
66
The reason
was clear enough: the education burden coming on top of the explosion of local
debt in the late nineteenth century had left local authorities wary of new duties.
From , when The Times launched an influential assault on municipal social-
ism, ratepayer politics began to concern itself more with reducing the rate
burden than with improving local services. Several ‘profligate’ authorities paid
the price in the borough elections of November , as did, most conspicu-
ously, the Progressive (i.e. radical Liberal) London County Council in March
. In these years urban authorities became increasingly anxious to secure a
reform of the local tax system that would ease their fiscal problems. Witnesses
before the Royal Commission on Local Taxation and the departmental
Kempe Committee which reported on the same subject in called for a wide
definition of services which could be considered ‘national’ rather than ‘local’ in
nature, with the implication that such services should be funded, totally or par-
tially, by the centre.
67
The only major change, however, in the midst of this the-
orising was a negative one: the conversion of the assigned revenues into a
Treasury grant, frozen at its – level, in . This was nothing less, as
Bernard Mallet claimed, than ‘a complete abandonment of the theory and prac-
tice of assigned revenues’.
68
Lloyd George, of course, envisaged a local tax on
site values in the budget, though with a national site valuation still far from
completion he was forced to fall back upon a conventional central subsidy, which
was then defeated by his own backbenchers.
69
John Davis
64
Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, Fifth Series (Commons) , cols. –. For the local author-
ity response see ‘The chancellor answered’, Municipal Journal, Nov. , and, for the aggrieved
reaction in one of the towns named, Harrogate Advertiser, Nov., Nov. .
65
I. Levitt, Poverty and Welfare in Scotland, – (Edinburgh, ), pp. –.
66
J. Harris, ‘The transition to high politics in English social policy, –’, in M. Bentley and
J. Stevenson, eds., High and Low Politics in Modern Britain (Oxford, ), pp. –, .
67
The Royal Commission’s Final Report (PP , pp. –) distinguished between ‘services
which are preponderantly National in character and generally onerous to the ratepayers and ser-
vices which are preponderantly Local in character and confer upon the ratepayers a direct and
peculiar benefit more or less commensurate with the burden’. The Kempe Committee consid-
ered that these words had ‘given rise to considerable confusion of thought in regard to the proper
amount of assistance to be given by the State to local authorities’: PP , Final Report of
the Departmental Committee on Local Taxation, England and Wales, p. .
68
B. Mallet, British Budgets, – to – (London, ), p. ; Baugh, ‘Government grants
in aid of the rates’, –.
69
For this fiasco see A. Offer, Property and Politics, – (Cambridge, ), pp. –.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
In the absence of any progress in this direction the local authority lobby
became notably more resistant to new duties which they considered intrinsically
‘national’. The case of national insurance is instructive. Both parts of the
National Insurance Act, covering health and unemployment insurance, had
some bearing on existing local authority services. The quangos devised in
would later become the thin end of a wedge which would prise the poor law
from local control in and . The response of the Association of
Municipal Corporations (AMC), representing urban authorities south of the
border, was, however, to distance local government from ‘a scheme which is
admittedly and indeed necessarily a national scheme’ and to attack those sections
of the bill which did entail local liability.
70
The issue of principle raised by the
innovation of a centralised and unelected bureaucracy in the welfare sphere went
unraised. In effect the AMC was renouncing the sort of social municipalism pio-
neered by the LCC Progressives in the s. As central government found itself
being pushed into social politics by electoral pressure and party competition,
local goverment distanced itself from the early welfare state.
(iv)
The First World War enhanced the problems faced by local authorities. In the
first place the destruction of the Liberals as a party of government removed the
only party seriously interested in reforming the rating system. At the same time
wartime politics intensified the national efficiency ethos of the pre-war years,
which evolved into the reconstruction drive of –. Local government was
expected to play its part in building a land fit for heroes to live in but, inevita-
bly, it was given little say in its tasks. Where pre-war legislation had generally
been permissive, post-war measures were more likely to be mandatory.
Christopher Addison’s Housing Act caught the mood. Counties and
county boroughs were, in contrast to earlier housing legislation, obliged to submit
rehousing schemes to the LGB – or to the new Ministry of Health, which
replaced the LGB during – in return for per cent funding above the
yield of a penny rate. Another innovation was the proposal for a set of regional
commissioners charged with implementing the act. They would, Addison
explained, ‘have real powers, and every effort would be made to get the scheme
through as quickly as possible’;
71
their duties were likely to include castigating
Central government and the towns
70
Most notably the provision that sanitary authorities share liability for shortfalls in the funds of local
insurance committees where these could be attributed to above-average sickness rates, and con-
tribute to the cost of investigations into higher than normal incidence of sickness. See the report
of the AMC’s Law Committee on the bill and related material in AMC minutes, , PRO
//.
71
Report of conference between the LGB and local government associations, Municipal Journal,
Feb. .
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local authority laggards. Less ostentatiously, these years saw a number of fresh
health powers conferred upon the counties and county boroughs.
72
As with
housing, new duties were sweetened by new subsidies, in these cases grants of
per cent or per cent of expenditure incurred.
The response of urban authorities to these new burdens was to intensify
attempts to improve their position within the system. Towns which were
not county boroughs sought county borough status, while the county boroughs
themselves sought to extend their boundaries, to absorb suburban areas beyond
their original limits. Between and , when the Royal Commission on
Local Government was established, twenty-three new county boroughs were
created,
73
while existing county boroughs drew up proposals for boundary
extension. These proposals laid bare the tension between town and country
which had always been inherent in the system. Rapidly growing towns
which had not gained county borough status in resented becoming the
milch cows of their counties. County boroughs believed that their suburbs had
become free riders, making use of borough services without paying the borough
rate.
74
County councils resisted the loss of their most lucrative rateable property.
Ritchie’s deference to historic shire areas in had indeed left many of the
smaller counties highly vulnerable to urban secession: the applications from
Luton, Bedford and Cambridge for county borough status, for example, would
virtually have obliterated Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire.
75
The defeat of these proposals indicated an increasingly determined county
resistance to borough aggrandisement before the First World War, which also
succeeded in containing the extent (though not the number) of borough exten-
sions.
76
The most conspicuous extension, the addition of , acres to
Birmingham in , proved to be easily the largest scheme to win approval
after the turn of the century.
77
After the war the stakes were raised by heavier
John Davis
72
Under the Maternity and Child Welfare Act, the Blind Persons Act and the Public
Health Act. The last two were mandatory, as was the legislation requiring counties and
county boroughs to provide treatment for venereal disease: J. P. Bradbury, ‘The Local
Government Act, the formulation and implementation of the poor law (health care) and exche-
quer grant reforms for England and Wales (outside London)’ (PhD thesis, University of Bristol,
), pp. –.
73
The mergers of Hanley with Stoke-on-Trent and Plymouth with Devonport reduced the net
increase to twenty-one: Lipman, Local Government Areas, p. .
74
E.g. in Bradford, where the local inquiry into the extension proposal heard that ‘the inhab-
itants of the surrounding districts use the Museums and Art Gallery, Public Parks and Recreation
Grounds, Public Libraries, Markets and Baths, established by the Corporation’, but could not be
taxed by it, Corporation of Bradford, Representation to the Minister of Health as to the Proposed
Alteration of the Boundary of the City, , PRO HLG /, p. .
75
Lipman, Local Government Areas, pp. –.
76
Ibid., pp. ff.
77
The Swansea extension of was the only other extension above , acres: ibid., p. .
For the Birmingham scheme see A. Briggs, History of Birmingham, vol. : Borough and City,
– (Oxford, ), pp. –, and ‘Valeat Quantum’, ‘The Birmingham city extension
scheme’, Local Government Review, (), –.
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statutory duties, by greater ratepayer militancy and, after , by the slump.
Borough authorities concerned themselves not only with the adequacy of their
tax base but also with the broader relationship between local government and
the local economy. In the crowded West Riding of Yorkshire the proposal of
Sheffield in to ‘swallow’ Rotherham in adding , acres to its area
caused Leeds to fear that its neighbour would become ‘the metropolis of the
West Riding . . . by reason of its greater unity’ unless Leeds also sought to
expand.
78
The simultaneous extension proposals from Leeds and Bradford in
, involving a thinly veiled carve-up by the two cities of the urban author-
ities lying between them in what was essentially a conurbation, discredited the
whole anarchic process.
79
County opinion became steadily more splenetic in its opposition to borough
extension,
80
with the vocal support of shire backbenchers in the Commons.
County insecurity was increased by the fear that central government, in the form
of the Local Government Board and its successor, the Ministry of Health, really
sided with the towns. This was technically true in that virtually all the proposals
for new county boroughs and more than half those for borough extensions were
promoted by provisional order under the aegis of the central department.
81
The
Ministry of Health came under particular fire for sending helpful instructions on
extension procedure ‘like Christmas cards’ to each county borough towards the
end of the calendar year, without telling county councils ‘how to defend their
hearths and homes’.
82
Whatever its sympathies, the Ministry found itself
deprived of its already limited power to direct the process when the Royal
Commission on Local Government was appointed in .
The main purpose of the Commission, whose lengthy deliberations were oth-
erwise ignored by the Baldwin government,
83
was to put the lid on this freelance
revision of the map. This it did quite effectively. Legislation of , based
upon the Commission’s first report, stipulated that new county borough propo-
sals could no longer be promoted by provisional order but only by the more
expensive and vulnerable process of local act, and only Doncaster gained county
borough status between and the Second World War.
84
Borough extension
was not halted – indeed, the aggregate area transferred each year from counties
to boroughs was larger after than before – but the changes were largely mar-
ginal readjustments, ‘essentially local and even opportunist’,
85
rather than major
Central government and the towns
78
Alderman C. H. Wilson, Leeds city council, quoted in Municipal Journal, Aug. . Sheffield
was eventually granted only a , acre extension: Lipman, Local Government Areas, p. .
79
‘Disruption of local government’, Municipal Journal, Oct. .
80
The aged Lord Rosebery, for example, attributed Edinburgh’s proposal to absorb Leith and
Musselburgh to an ‘unbridled and Prussian desire for domination’, Municipal Journal, Jan. .
81
Lipman, Local Government Areas, p. .
82
Royal Commission on Local Government, minutes of evidence, part , Apr. , Qq. ,
(from Pritchard and Adkins).
83
Bradbury, ‘ Local Government Act’, p. .
84
Lipman, Local Government Areas, pp. –.
85
Ibid., p. .
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schemes for urban expansion. The other substantial initiative emanating from the
Commission, the county review, allowed county councils to overhaul second-
tier areas, without jeopardy to the county boroughs. These cumbersome inves-
tigations had revised the boundaries of some non-county boroughs and
urban and rural district councils by ,
86
but like the limited borough exten-
sions of the s they could not address the fundamental problem of the
urban–rural divide. There was, therefore, very little to show for the towns’ efforts
to improve their position within the system, but the unedifying scrummage
after would have a lasting effect in Whitehall, implanting the view of local
authorities as jealous fiefdoms more concerned with their boundaries and rate
bases than with the public good.
(v)
‒
The Ministry of Health recognised that to broach boundary revision was to open
a can of worms. It therefore moved cautiously with respect to the two related
local government questions which it had, in large part, been created to solve: the
reform of the poor law and the overhaul of public medical services. Both were
assumed to be best handled at the county/county borough level because the
extreme fragmentation of poor law and sanitary areas was seen as part of the
problem; indeed, the county councils had been given new public health powers
after even though they were not sanitary authorities.
87
Observing the local
authority civil war in the early s, the Ministry decided at an early stage that
reorganisation of the first tier was not an option.
88
With boundary revision
impossible and local taxation reform off the agenda, it was clear that adequate
local performance would depend upon continuing high levels of central subsidy.
The choice between percentage grants and block grants for this purpose was a
technical one, but one which encapsulated important questions of principle.
Percentage grants provided an incentive to local action and even, in some
circumstances, a precondition of it – Sir Ernest Simon, in his account of
Manchester City Council ‘from within’, pointed out that the six major exten-
sions of municipal activity adopted since he joined the Council’s service in
had all been lubricated by grants-in-aid: ‘no other new work of importance has
John Davis
86
Ibid., p. . The Kent county review, which ‘extended over days, was attended by most of
the leaders of the Parliamentary Bar and must have cost the ratepayers many thousands of pounds.
The printed volumes of evidence covered over , pages’: memorandum by the Minister of
Health on local government reform, July , in the papers of the War Cabinet’s Committee
on Reconstruction Problems, PRO CAB /.
87
Evidence of I. G. Gibbon, assistant secretary to the Ministry of Health, before the Royal
Commission on Local Government, minutes of evidence, part , Apr. , memorandum,
para. , p. .
88
Bradbury, ‘ Local Government Act’, p. .
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been taken up’.
89
The Ministry believed that percentage grants had produced a
high level of service where they had been applied in recent public health legis-
lation, but they tended, unless the percentage was very high, to favour wealth-
ier authorities which could afford their share of the expenditure.
90
Above all they
left central government at the mercy of local decisions. The Geddes Committee
saw the percentage grant system as a ‘money-spinning device’, and Lord
Salisbury considered it ‘death to economy’.
91
Block grants had the advantage of
putting a ceiling on central liabilities, with the added benefit that an overall block
grant could be distributed in a redistributionary way to aid poorer authorities.
The impact of the slump after tilted the balance in favour of the block
grant. Severe and highly localised unemployment accentuated the problems
faced by poor authorities, while central government became more eager to cap
its rate support.
Thus Neville Chamberlain’s Local Government Act of transferred poor
law powers from the Boards of Guardians, which were abolished, to the county
councils and county boroughs, and introduced a block grant in place of the
cluster of central grants which had grown up since the s. On the surface,
therefore, it followed the earlier Conservative measures of and in
treating the counties as the principal multi-purpose local government units, but
it would prove to be the last major attempt to do so. Deterred by the difficulties
of local finance and the ineluctable problem of local authority areas, central
government found itself nationalising services or devolving them to quangos.
The London Passenger Transport Board, created in , assumed responsibil-
ity for the LCC’s tramways. In the creation of the Unemployment
Assistance Board relieved local authorities of responsibility for maintaining the
able-bodied unemployed. The Trunk Roads Act of transferred power over
main roads not to a quango but directly to the Minister of Transport.
One advantage of these ad hoc arrangements rapidly became clear: once
nationalised a service could be organised without reference to the local author-
ity map. This usually implied the creation of large regional units with a view to
economies of scale. This had first become evident in the s. Seven regional
electricity boards followed the creation of the Central Electricity Board in ,
while in the Board of Education established the first of five regional coun-
cils for technical education.
92
The Ministry of Health reorganised its medical
staff in regional groups in the s, and just before the outbreak of war its
Central government and the towns
89
E. D. Simon, A City Council from Within (London, ), pp. , .
90
Memorandum of Jan. in the file ‘Control of Local Authorities by Government
Departments’, PRO T///S..
91
Quoted by Bradbury, ‘ Local Government Act’, pp. , .
92
H. Finer, English Local Government (London, ), pp. –; ‘Regionalism, digest of evidence
given at an enquiry held by the solicitor general, Part II – reorganization of local government
areas’ ( June ), p. , PRO CAB/.
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housing advisory committee was contemplating the creation of regional housing
authorities to deal with the problem of out-county estates.
93
Management of
trunk roads was regionalised after . The special areas legislation designed to
relieve unemployment blackspots might be seen as a form of selective regional-
ism, as might John Gilmour’s reorganisation of central government in Scotland
in .
94
‘The history of local government over the last years’, Brian Smith
wrote in , ‘is characterised by not only the loss of municipal enterprises but
also by a corresponding regionalisation of those enterprises on an ad hoc basis’.
95
The pattern would be repeated after the war with the creation of the National
Health Service.
The idea of reorganising the whole local government system on a regional basis
became modish in public administration circles in the s. In the Special
Investigator for Tyneside drew attention to the fragmented nature of the region’s
local government, which he considered a deterrent to investment. The govern-
ment’s apparently disproportionate response of a Royal Commission might
suggest some interest in encouraging amalgamations, and the Commission’s
Majority Report duly proposed a regional authority which would swallow up
Northumberland County Council and leave the area’s county boroughs, includ-
ing Newcastle itself, with ‘the small change of local government’.
96
Having alien-
ated both city and county authorities, the Ministry distanced itself rapidly from
the majority proposals. Its public preference was for the Minority Report of
Charles Roberts, recommending what amounted to the expansion of Newcastle,
though the minister, Kingsley Wood, insisted upon the unlikely consent of its
neighbours.
97
Regionalism tended likewise to be translated into borough exten-
sion by the larger provincial cities. The setting up of the Tyneside Commission
led to proposals for regional authorities in Manchester, Merseyside and the
Potteries.
98
In Liverpool it was urged that fear of the city’s aggrandisement had
diminished ‘because the economic slump has taught us that as a community our
interests are identical’, and the response of Birkenhead and Wallasey suggested
that a degree of local coordination, at least, was feasible.
99
Wood indicated that
John Davis
93
‘Regionalism, digest of evidence given at an enquiry held by the solicitor general, Part I – dev-
olution of functions’ (Apr. ), p. ; ibid., ‘Part II – reorganization of local government areas’,
p. .
94
J. Mitchell, ‘The Gilmour Report on Scottish central administration’, Juridical Review (Edinburgh,
), –, though the reorganisation did not involve any change to service areas.
95
B. C. Smith, Regionalism in England. . Its Nature and Purpose, – (London, ), p. .
96
George Chrystal, of the Ministry of Health, quoted by J. R. Owen, ‘Defending the county? The
reorganisation of local government in England and Wales, –’ (PhD thesis, University of
Bristol, ), p. . The second chapter of this thesis, pp. –, provides an excellent account
of the Tyneside Commission.
97
Owen, ‘Defending the county?’, p. . ‘At present there is not the faintest sign of agreement
among the numerous councils concerned’ – Newcastle Journal, Dec..
98
J. Cliff in Municipal Journal and Public Works Engineer, Sept. .
99
Liverpool Post and Mercury, Apr. (editorial), May .
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local government reorganisation for the distressed areas alone would be consid-
ered when the special areas legislation came up for review in ,
100
but the
Newcastle precedent was hardly promising, and government had not ventured
any further down the thorny path of boundary review before war broke out.
Without any structural change, central government became more cautious
about imposing further duties upon local authorities in the s. After the flurry
of social measures which had followed the First World War, there were only two
significant extensions of local health responsibility in the thirties
101
and no major
education act. Local authorities found their previously ambitious role in public
housing largely confined to slum clearance – ‘the most difficult, least prestigious
and least profitable part of the market’ – by the legislation of and .
102
There is little evidence, though, that local authorities were anxious to return to
centre-stage. The local dignitaries who comprised the Ray Committee on local
expenditure, set up after the financial crisis, showed an indecent enthusiasm
for the task of retrenchment, anxious only that their efforts should not be negated
by new statutory duties. ‘It is indeed a wonderful experience – or, rather, it would
be – to find that those departments which by percentage grants and other
“inducements”, have been increasing local expenditure and State grants, must
now slumber, and refrain from the pursuit of the ideal’, wrote the AMC’s house
journal.
103
Representing the whole range of municipal authorities – non-county
as well as county boroughs – the AMC was bound to seek to preserve the
Victorian tradition of voluntarism, by which ambitious authorities were left free
to construct their aerodromes and abbatoirs and open municipal savings banks,
104
or seek powers to trade in milk, coal and bread,
105
as long as no further manda-
tory duties were imposed upon authorities unwilling to bear them.
This was in itself defensible, but two of its consequences were harder to justify.
In the first place the AMC worked strenuously – and successfully – to water
down the redistributive effects of the block grant arrangements, frustrating
one of the act’s purposes in the interests of the wealthier authorities.
106
Secondly,
Central government and the towns
100
Newcastle Journal, Oct. .
101
The Midwives Act and the Cancer Act: Bradbury, ‘ Local Government Act’,
p. .
102
J. A. Yelling, Slums and Redevelopment (London, ), pp. –, –.
103
‘Local government finance. Report of the Committee on Local Expenditure’, Municipal Review,
Dec. .
104
‘Municipal aerodromes’, Municipal Review, July (Bristol, Ipswich, Nottingham, Portsmouth
and Doncaster); Liverpool opened England’s largest municipal abbatoir in Sept. , ibid., Oct.
; Sir Percival Bower, ‘Birmingham Municipal Bank’, ibid., Mar. . Five other authorities
put proposals for municipal banks to parliament between and , though all were rejected
or withdrawn. The LCC and the city councils of Manchester, Liverpool, Nottingham, Dundee
and Aberdeen also considered the question before a parliamentary committee recommended that
no further applications be approved: PP . Report of the Committee on Municipal Savings
Banks, pp. , –.
105
As proposed by a bill of : Finer, Municipal Trading, pp. –.
106
Until only per cent of the block grant was available for redistribution: Bradbury, ‘
Local Government Act’, p. .
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it appears that, as the Ministry of Health had feared, the replacement of percent-
age health grants by the block grant in removed the incentive built into the
old system and encouraged some authorities to skimp on public health provi-
sion. The Ministry’s health surveys in the early s found almost a third of
county boroughs to be seriously deficient.
107
Recent quantitative research sug-
gests that expenditure levels owed more to the political complexion of the
council than to its rate base.
108
(vi)
By , then, the image presented by local government was unedifying. Local
authorities were resistant to any significant boundary reform, wary of new
powers unless they were optional and often negligent in their use of the powers
that they did possess. It is unsurprising, then, that when the austerity atmos-
phere of the s gave way to the reformist climate of wartime, with its calls
for innovation in post-war social policy, ministers were tempted to by-pass local
government altogether rather than find themselves drawn into more futile dis-
putes over areas and rate support. The Churchill coalition government
approached the question of local government reform without enthusiasm, and
largely because commitments to health and welfare reform made the issue
impossible to ignore. The Ministry of Health still hoped that five or ten years’
experience of the new services would point to regionalism as ‘the logical
outcome’, but the ten regional commissioners appointed to coordinate emer-
gency services during the war had a difficult relationship with the local author-
ities. The Ministry eventually acknowledged that a regional reorganisation had
‘apparently no supporters in local government circles’.
109
What the local author-
ities did want was unclear. The AMC’s proposal effectively to cover the
country with county boroughs was particularly speculative, and Henry
Willinck, the Minister of Health, may have been right to conclude two years
later that it had been conceived ‘somewhat lightheartedly and partly . . . as a
protest at the reopening of the subject’.
110
The Association’s later and more plau-
sible demand for another Royal Commission had little appeal, however.
Interwar experience had convinced Whitehall that local authorities would in
practice prove completely intractable in the face of structural reform: ‘if they are
to be shifted they must either be taken by surprise, or a powerful assault is
John Davis
107
Ibid., pp. , ; in Scotland attention was focused upon the inadequacy of hospital provision:
Levitt, Poverty and Welfare in Scotland, pp. –.
108
M. Powell, ‘Did politics matter? Municipal public health expenditure in the s’, UH,
(), –.
109
Reconstruction Committee: ‘Memorandum on local government reform by the Minister of
Health’, July , in PRO PREM///.
110
Ibid. For the AMC’s proposal see AMC minutes, July , and Municipal Review, Aug. ,
–.
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needed to dislodge them from their positions’.
111
Ministers were sceptical of the
suggestion that structural reform must precede any change in local authority
powers, particularly in view of local authorities’ previous resistance to such
reform. Willinck’s predecessor Ernest Brown had seen this suggestion as a block-
ing manoeuvre, akin to the argument that the implementation of the Beveridge
Report should await the achievement of full employment.
112
In the event the
Ministry of Health produced the White Paper on ‘Local Government in
England and Wales during the Period of Reconstruction’ in order to deflect
demands for a Royal Commission.
113
There would be no Royal Commission,
only a Boundary Commission, whose ultimately fruitless sessions would stretch
almost to the end of the decade, while the simultaneous reconstruction of
Britain’s welfare services made their deliberations otiose. When the Commission
was wound up in , having changed not one boundary,
114
local authorities
had already seen their public utility services, their hospitals and what remained
of their poor law powers nationalised.
(vii) :
The reaction against utilitarianism in the s cast a long shadow. The defeat
of Benthamism in the public health debates of mid-century established princi-
ples which would soon become axiomatic. Without paid agents in the localities,
it had always been clear that Britain’s central government would depend upon
local authorities to implement any extension of governmental power: ‘so com-
pletely is self-government the habit and quality of Englishmen that the country
would resent any Central Authority undertaking the duties of the local execu-
tive’.
115
It had always been clear that government growth could only be effected
through constitutionally independent local bodies; the question was how far
those bodies could be directed or coerced. The poor law system, the greatest
triumph of the utilitarians, remained highly prescriptive, but the defeat of
Benthamism over public health would prove more significant because the sani-
tary authorities evolved into multi-purpose authorities while the poor law
authorities remained ad hoc bodies. The two cardinal principles held by the
opponents of utilitarianism – that executive power should be devolved as far as
possible and that local authority areas should be defined by historical tradition
Central government and the towns
111
‘Regional devolution by the central government and relationship with local authorities’
(Sheepshanks memorandum), Apr. , Scottish Record Office, HH//.
112
War Cabinet, Committee on Reconstruction Problems, ‘Memorandum by the Minister of
Health on local government reform, July ’, PRO CAB//.
113
Owen, ‘Defending the county?’, p. .
114
C. J. Pearce, The Machinery of Change in Local Government, – (London, ), p. . For
the recommendations in the Commission’s first two reports see Lipman, Local Government Areas,
pp. –.
115
PP , Second Report of the Sanitary Commission, pp. –.
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