1894 Local Government of England and Wales Act
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| Long title | An Act to make further provision for Local Government in England and Wales. |
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| Citation | 56 & 57 Vict. c. 73 |
| Introduced by | Henry Fowler |
| Territorial extent | England and Wales |
| Dates | |
| Royal assent | 5 March 1894 |
| Commencement | December 1894 / January 1895 |
| Other legislation | |
| Repealed by | Local Government Act 1933 |
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Status: Repealed
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The Local Government Act 1894 (56 & 57 Vict. c. 73) was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that reformed local government in England and Wales outside the County of London. The Act followed the reforms carried out at county level under the Local Government Act 1888. The 1894 legislation introduced elected councils at district and parish level.
The principal effects of the act were:
The new district councils were based on the existing urban and rural sanitary districts. Many of the latter had lain in more than one ancient county, whereas the new rural districts were to be in a single administrative county.
The act also reorganised civil parishes, so that none of them lay in more than one district and hence didn't cross administrative boundaries.
Although the Act made no provision to abolish the Hundreds, which had previously been the only widely used administrative unit between the parish and the county in size, the reorganisation displaced their remaining functions. Several ancient hundred names lived on in the names of the districts that superseded them.
The Local Government Act 1888 had introduced elected county councils. The passing of the act had been part of the price for Liberal Unionist support for Lord Salisbury's minority Conservative administration. An innovation in the act was the fact that all electors had a single vote, and thus county councillors were popularly elected. The members of other local bodies were elected by a system of weighted voting, with those owning more property having multiple votes. The original Local Government Bill of 1888 had included provisions for creating district as well as county councils. However the President of the Local Government Board, Charles Ritchie, had some difficulty in having the legislation passed by parliament, and dropped the district council clauses for fear that the entire bill might be lost due to opposition from the government's own backbenchers.
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