Reviewed by R. H. Jones University of Birmingham
These two volumes are indispensable in researching the foundations of governmental accounting. Their main purpose is to reproduce archival material about local government account-ing and auditing in the United Kingdom. The period covered was well-chosen because it represents what historians recognize to be the formative period of continuous progress in developing the UK system of local government. An understanding of the present system requires an understanding of this period. More¬over, since many countries were influenced by the UK system (notably in the Commonwealth, but also in the United Sates where the UK system tended to be used as an example of how not to organize local government), there should be significant interest outside the UK.
As is usual in governmental accounting, there is an under-pinning of statutory and other regulations that are not easy to keep track of contemporarily, much less over a period such as 1831-1935. This is the value of these two volumes. The authors reproduce accounting and audit extracts from a selected list of the Acts of Parliament passed during this period. In addition, other materials are included. A set of published financial state-ments of a local authority, dated 1907, is reproduced. Extracts are included from the evidence collected and reports prepared by selected government committees during the period. In addi-tion to this archival material, a number of reference lists are provided, most notably a summary of the audit and accounting regulations in force for the years 1873, 1907 and 1937; and fuller lists of Acts of Parliament, committee reports and other government reports, including those that could not be repro¬duced because of space constraints.
Inevitably in a work of this kind, there will be material left out that a reviewer, who does not feel the constraints of publish¬ing quite so directly as the editors, would wish had been in¬cluded. A cross-check with Jones [1986] reveals that all refer-ences made there to the law, regulations and government reports have been included in these volumes, albeit with a small group of exceptions. This group relates to references to local government finance, which have not been reproduced. It is easy to see the rationale: if these had been included there would have been pressure to include many more references to finance and at least three volumes would have been required! However, the price of excluding this small group is high. Local government accounting is, and always has been, fundamentally different from commercial accounting precisely because loan repayments or loan redemptions have by law had to be debited to the oper¬ating statement; in complete contrast to commercial account¬ing, matters of finance are inextricably bound up with matters of accounting.
In this reviewer’s opinion, examination by researchers of s234 of the Public Health Act 1875 and the 1902 Select Commit¬tee on Repayment of Loans by Local Authorities (HOC 239) will more than repay the additional effort. Two other selections are included in these volumes, although in contrast to the rest of the material, neither is particularly satisfactory. An introduction provides a brief overview of the history of local government accounting. Given its length, it could not do justice to such a significant and long history, but it also appears to this reviewer to give a somewhat peculiar view. There is also a short select bibliography, which inevitably cannot do justice to the available literature, but does omit very important work such as Cannan [1912] and Page [1985], perhaps on the ground that these pri¬marily relate to finance.
These two volumes make a unique contribution to local government accounting research and should stimulate much more work in this important, much-neglected area.
REFERENCES
Cannan, E., The History of Local Rates in England. 2nd edition. London: P.S.
King & Son (1912). Jones, R.H., The Financial Control Function of Local Government Accounting,
unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Lancster, England (1986). Page, SirH., Local Authority Borrowing: Past, Present and Future, London: Allen and Unwin (1985).
