Note (Back) — Chapter VIII

190. Local Government Act of 1888 and District and Parish Councils Act of 1894.—Soon after the passage of the Elementary Education Act of 1870 reform began to be attempted in the direction both of concentration of local governing authority and the readjustment and simplification of local governing areas. In 1871 the Poor Law Board (which succeeded the Poor Law Commission in 1847) was converted into the Local Government Board, with the purpose of concentrating in a single department the supervision of the laws relating to public health, the relief of the poor, and local government; and when, in 1872, the entire country was divided into urban and rural sanitary districts, the work was done deliberately in such a fashion as to involve the least possible addition to the existing complexities of the administrative system.[258] The two measures, however, by which, in the main, order was brought out of confusion were the Local Government Act of 1888 and the District and Parish Councils Act of 1894. The first of these, referred to commonly as the County Councils Act, was the sequel of the Representation of the People Act of 1884 and was definitely intended to invest the newly enfranchised rural population with a larger control of county affairs. The act created sixty-two administrative counties (some coterminous with pre-existing counties, others comprising subdivisions of them) and some three score "county boroughs," comprising towns of more than 50,000 inhabitants.[259] In each county and county borough there was set up a council, at least two-thirds of whose members were elective, and to this council was transferred the administrative functions of the justices of the peace, leaving to those dignitaries of the old régime little authority save of a judicial character. The democratization of rural government accomplished by the Conservative ministry of Lord Salisbury in 1888 was supplemented by the provisions of the District and Parish Councils Act, carried by a Liberal ministry in 1894.[260] This measure provided (1) that every county should be divided into districts, urban and rural, and every district into parishes, and (2) that in every district and in every rural parish with more than three hundred inhabitants there should be an elected council, while in the smallest parishes there should be a primary assembly of all persons whose names appear on the local government and parliamentary register. To the parish councils and assemblies were transferred all of the civil functions of the vestries, leaving to those bodies the control of ecclesiastical matters only, while to the district councils, whether rural or urban, were committed control of sanitary affairs and highways.