Over the rest of summer and the autumn, I’ll be doing a series on local government (a revisit to a topic covered on the old Oggy Bloggy Ogwr in 2013) – both in a devolved context and in the context of an independent Wales.
To kick things off, here’s how local government has developed and evolved in Wales.
The system of quarter sessions remained in place for a lengthy period of time, but the fervour for reform during the 1830s – such as the Reform Act 1832 for UK elections – didn’t ignore local government.
A commission of inquiry investigated the state of local government and drew several significant conclusions. They found that some boroughs deliberately kept their electorate small and essentially consisted of the same people for life (similar to the “rotten boroughs” eliminated in the Reform Act). Additionally, key duties were often neglected and members were often out for themselves with no real connection to the communities they were supposed to represent.
Although many laws reforming local government were passed during the 19th century, three were of particular importance.
Municipal Corporations Act 1835
This Act got rid of a lot of the previous system. It standardised the set-up of local councils and allowed them to become corporations (known as reformed municipal boroughs), enabling them to levy taxes.
The members (aldermen) of each of the reformed municipal boroughs were to be elected by male ratepayers, while a requirement was placed on the boroughs to run a local police force. In a move that’s still relevant today – particularly at the community council level – the reformed boroughs were expected to have a clerk and treasurer with properly audited accounts.
Despite being a step in the right direction, several issues remained unresolved. Large numbers of people were excluded from municipal elections because they weren’t ratepayers, while some key responsibilities – such as in public health – were mainly undertaken on a voluntary basis.
From what I can tell there were 22 (ironically) reformed municipal boroughs in Wales – largely focused on the biggest towns. Many of them would later go on to become modern town and community councils. I presume for the rest of Wales the functions continued to be carried out at county level by the quarter sessions.
Local Government Act 1888
This law abolished the quarter sessions and replaced them with elected county councils (based on the 13 counties created under the Law in Wales Acts). This meant that all of Wales had an elected form of local government.
Some of the more populous municipal boroughs – Cardiff, Newport, Swansea, Merthyr Tydfil – operated independently from the counties as county boroughs.
The new local authorities started to take on a far greater role in the provision of local services.
As well as the legacy powers from the quarter sessions over “lunatic asylums”, policing, highways and so on, the new councils took on extra responsibility for education/schools, licensing, disease control in animals and plants, certain financial powers (such as public borrowing) and the appointment of coroners.
Local Government Act 1894
The map changed again less than a decade later with the introduction of a new tier of local government below the county level (except in the independently-run county boroughs) to cover localities that didn’t have a reformed municipal borough. These areas were, at the time, controlled by a sanitary district – which was mainly responsible for providing the basics of public health.
These new councils were either called urban or rural districts depending on the characteristics of their local area (the map below). The districts were corporate bodies – meaning they made decisions collectively – and in some cases were a further basis for modern day town and community councils.
The responsibilities of the new district councils were limited and inherited from the predecessor sanitary districts. They gained some discretionary powers over highways, rights-of-way and aspects of licensing.
The Act introduced some important electoral reforms too. Women were allowed to serve as a councillor in an urban or rural district (or as school board members) and women who owned property were allowed to vote in local elections.
Although other local government acts followed (1929, 1933, 1958), this system remained largely intact until the 1970s.
