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Part 2 The evolution of London Local Government For more than two centuries the practicalities of making effective governance arrangements for London have challenged Government and Parliament because of both the scale of the metropolis and the distinctive character, history and interests of the communities that make up the capital city. From its origins in the middle ages, the City of London enjoyed effective local government arrangements based on the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London and the famous livery companies and guilds of London’s merchants. The essential problem was that these capable governance arrangements were limited to the boundaries of the City of London – the historic square mile. Outside the City, local government was based on the Justices of the Peace and local vestries, analogous to parish or church boundaries. While some of these vestries in what had become central London carried out extensive local authority functions, the framework was not capable of governing a large city facing huge transport, housing and social challenges. The City accounted for less than a sixth of the total population of London in 1801 and less than a twentieth in 1851. The Corporation of London was adamant that it neither wanted to widen its boundaries to include the growing communities created by London’s expansion nor allow itself to be subsumed into a London-wide local authority created by an Act of Parliament. This, in many respects, is the heart of London’s governance challenge. The metropolis is too big to be managed by one authority, and local communities are adamant that they want their own local government arrangements for their part of London. At the same time those individual communities cannot adequately deal with their own affairs without a great deal of London-wide – if not national – assistance. In the 19th century, Parliament passed several major pieces of legislation in attempts to improve London’s governance. Each was contentious and considered by powerful interests groups in the capital to be flawed. The 1835 Municipal Corporations Act excluded the City of London partly because it was perceived as well governed but mainly because it supported the new Whig administration. The Corporation of the City of London, however, was increasingly regarded as archaic and ineffective. William Carpenter published a damming polemic The Corporation of London As It Is and As It Should Be in 1847, and Charles Dickens referred derisively to the Corporation in the famous opening passage of Bleak House as the “leaden–headed old corporation”. 12 The evolution of London Local Government Sidney and Beatrice Webb regarded the City Corporation as inferior to the municipal corporations that governed British provincial cities in the early 19th century. Whether or not these indictments were fair is less clear. The Corporation carried out major infrastructure programmes, including building new markets at Billingsgate and Smithfield, and between 1833 and 1848 more than 4,000 homes were connected to 23 miles of new main sewers built by the Commission on Sewers. In the 1850s, in fact, the City was the only part of London with a complete sewerage system. These public works were reflected in a fall in the mortality rate, and when the Metropolitan Board of Works was created in 1855, the City retained its own autonomous Commission of Sewers. Metropolitan Management Act of 1855 The Metropolitan Management Act of 1855 ended the involvement of the Church of England in London’s local government. Until then the parish had been the organ of local government, a situation that had created problems in London for some time. Parishes levied property taxes, called rates, and in some expanding parishes, such as St Pancras, the vestries, as they were called, levied rates to pay for the erection of new Anglican Churches. This was naturally unpopular with Non-conformists and Roman Catholics. When legislation democratised vestries in 1831, a majority agreed to change, including five prosperous parishes, amongst them St Marylebone and St Pancras. London was a hotchpotch of archaic administrative arrangement of varying levels of democracy and efficiency, while life in London was regulated by more than 250 local Acts of Parliament and more than 10,000 commissioners were entrusted with various tasks in the metropolis. London enjoyed the benefit of government by ‘quango’ long before the reign of Mrs. Thatcher, who was elected on a mandate of tackling a similar problem in the second half of the 20th century. The Metropolitan Management Act created a unitary authority for Greater London called the Metropolitan Board of Works. This followed the discrediting of the Metropolitan Commission on Sewers, which had been made responsible for 100 square miles of sewers in London in 1848. The Commission was appointed by Government and had the power to tax local authorities, a situation that exposed it to political assault. This new authority, the Metropolitan Board of Works, had responsibility for metropolitan problems, including the urgent issue of the condition of, and the mess in, the River Thames. Although directly-elected, it was appointed by indirect election from the parish vestries. Each parish, liberty or Inn of Court retained its identity in a bid to prevent the emergence of an unaccountable centralised monster, reflecting the general revulsion against Sir Edwin Chadwick’s nominated commission. The evolution of London Local Government 13 The Metropolitan Board had greater powers and a much larger budget than the vestries and district boards. It achieved a great deal; construction of the Thames Embankment and a drainage system in new streets such as Shaftesbury Avenue, Northumberland Avenue and Charing Cross Road. It lacked proper democratic accountability, though, and indirect election resulted in a slow turnover of board members. The members of the outgoing board in the 1880s were a generation older than the members initially elected to the London County Council. The Metropolitan Board developed a culture of mutual admiration among members that diluted political differences. This culture encouraged cooperation among members and enhanced efficiency, but made the board indifferent to justified criticism. The result was maladministration and serious corruption, a situation that became so bad that a Royal Commission was set up to investigate it. The Commission found that improper speculation had taken place in land bought to make street improvements. The Board was unable to tackle its internal problems and it took external intervention from the press and Parliament to end the corruption by outright abolition. London County Council 1888 The Metropolitan Board of Works was abolished in 1888 as a part of the setting up of county councils in England and Wales. The London County Council inherited the powers of the Board together with powers transferred from the former county justices of the peace as the result of a measure passed by Lord Salisbury’s Conservative and Unionist Coalition Government. It was essentially a conservative measure. Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister, opposed centralisation of the sort practised in France, preferring “the inconveniences of being governed by squabbling juntas of shopkeepers and tenant farmers” to the dangers to liberty of a strong central administration. The challenge to Conservatives like Lord Salisbury, when they recognised in the 1860s that “pure squire Conservatism was played out”, was what to put in place of the system based on the Justices of the Peace that would not result in the numerical majority in an area being able to tax the rich minority heavily through local authority rates. Salisbury resolved this by removing authority over the Poor Law – a rudimentary form of social security – and control over the police from the powers of the new county councils. At the insistence of George Goshen, the Liberal Unionist Chancellor of the Exchequer, London was included in this local government reform, resulting in the creation of the London County Council. The Corporation of the City of London was left untouched. While some towns were given ‘county borough’ status, no attempt was made to redraw urban boundaries to reflect rapid urbanisation. The 14 The evolution of London Local Government measure neatly reflected the national political position. The Whig and Liberal Unionists had joined with Lord Salisbury’s Conservatives to form a Government in 1886, having abandoned Gladstone’s Liberal party over the Irish Home Rule Bill. They wanted a local government reform measure as part of the coalition agreement, while the Conservatives recognised the need for change but preferred a more limited measure than Gladstone’s Liberals would have passed. It also meant that the bill would get through the House of Lords, where a more radical measure may have foundered. In London, the new county authority covered the boundaries of the old Metropolitan Board and therefore fell well short of the built up area around London. This meant that from its start in 1889 the LCC was not in a position to play the part of a strategic authority for London’s hinterland. London, radical from the start In the county council elections of 1889, the Justices of the Peace won more than half the seats contested. As local Aldermen were also co-opted and made up one third of the members, Salisbury realised that county councils were not going to be revolutionary bodies. English County Councils became bastions of Conservatism, and to some degree they are still perceived as being so. In London, the position was different. The Liberals, standing as Progressives, defeated the Conservatives who styled themselves as Moderates, and the London County Council became an irritant to Lord Salisbury. After the elections he told his daughter Gwendoline: “I rather look to the new London County Council to play the drunken helot for our benefit. Such a body at the outset must make some portentous blunders.” It was, however, Lord Salisbury who ended up making a blazing indiscretion when he launched the Moderates’ election campaign for the LCC in November in 1894.

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