Local Government: The Customer in the Community

Abstract

Local government has been the key institution in the delivery of public services since the 1601 Poor Law made it incumbent on parishes to provide for the destitute, a division of powers institutionalised by the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act (Birch, 1974, p. 12). The story of UK local government is usually told as one of decline in autonomy and status since a Victorian ‘hey day’ (Gyford, 1991, p. 28). The Beveridge-inspired reforms of the immediate postwar period saw local authorities stripped of much of their autonomy (Birch, 1974, p. 59), becoming ‘very much the local arm of a national welfare state’ (Gyford, 1991, p. 28). The erosion of local government powers during the 1980s limited the financial autonomy of councils, and restricted their discretion in key areas of service delivery including education and housing (Whitty et al, 1993; Cairncross et al, 1997).