The Development of Local Government

Abstract

To understand contemporary local government it is essential to grasp the basics of its historical development and evolution. The present system has its roots in the last 150 years and beyond but, as Keith-Lucas and Richards emphasise (1978, p. 35), local government ‘was not evolved to provide a co-ordinated system of administration for a logically defined range of services; it emerged, piecemeal, in answer to a succession of separate needs and demands’. There was no blueprint; contemporary local government is very much the product of pragmatism. The modern local government system evolved in response to pressures produced by urbanisation and problems generated by the Industrial Revolution. This chapter takes the story up to the end of the 1980s while Chapter 5 introduces the contemporary structures of local authorities — both external and internal.