The Act dissolved 178 closed, self-perpetuating borough corporations and replaced them with councils elected by ratepayers, with published accounts, audited finances and a statutory power to levy rates. It set a procedure by which unincorporated industrial towns could obtain charters, which Manchester and Birmingham both did in 1838. Boroughs could also absorb the watching, paving, lighting and market powers previously scattered among improvement commissioners and parish vestries, consolidating urban government into one accountable body. Later statutes then loaded public health, sanitation, housing and planning duties onto that body rather than inventing new ones.
It created the legal person that built the Victorian city: an accountable, borrowing, rate-levying municipality capable of water, gas, drainage, trams, parks, libraries and eventually housing. 'Municipal socialism' from Chamberlain's Birmingham onwards, and the incorporation and home-rule statutes copied across the anglophone world, all rest on this Act.
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