ABSTRACT
Local government is a well-established feature of political life in Britain.The same can be said of local government in the United States. How-ever, where Britain differs from the United States is in terms of the history and status of local government as well as in changes made to the structures of local councils. Those changes have sometimes been motivated by the need to achieve greater administrative efficiency. Others have been motivated by a political impetus to limit the powers or actions of local government. Such changes demonstrate the extent to which local government in Britain is very much subordinate to Parliament. Though there is a fairly pervasive commitment to the principle of local governance, the form that such governance takes is determined by acts of Parliament. Recent decades have been notable for the number of acts passed that are changing the shape of local government in the United Kingdom.
