ABSTRACT
The commission under Lord Redcliffe-Maud, which reported in 1969, with recommendations for sweeping changes in the whole structure of local government, was not asked to raise fundamental questions about their relations with the central government. Thus Parliament, giving effect to policies worked out by the central government, made provision by legislation for the whole pattern of local government and administration. The Local Government Act of 1888 gave county borough status to towns with at least 50,000 inhabitants. The 1972 Local Government Act preserved the ancient counties as the basis for its new scheme, though it modified them, for administrative purposes, in two main ways, firstly by creating six new metropolitan counties, secondly by various boundary adjustments and amalgamations. The Act of 1972 may have produced reforms less fundamental than those proposed by the Redcliffe-Maud Commission, but the commission's report assumed, and the Act confirmed, Parliament's complete power to alter the structure of local government, free from any constraint.
