It enabled the Board of Trade to authorise the supply of electricity in any area by a local authority, company or person.

Its provisions allowed suppliers to avoid the effort and expense of promoting private parliamentary bills to regularise their legal powers to supply electricity.

[3] Liverpool Corporation promoted a local act to provide it with legal powers to light streets by electricity.

[2] The terms of reference were ‘to consider whether it is desirable to authorize Municipal Corporations or other local authorities to adopt schemes for Lighting by Electricity: and to consider how far, and under what conditions, if at all, Gas or other Public Companies should be authorised to supply Light by Electricity’.

[2] The Playfair committee reported on 13 June 1878[4] and concluded that local authorities should be allowed to break-up streets to lay cables or to consent to private companies to do this.

The committee also considered allowing local authorities to purchase the companies providing a supply in their area after a number of years.

Chamberlain had been Mayor of Birmingham and had experienced difficulties with the monopoly control of the gas industry in the city.

[3] To further protect the public against the power of private monopoly the bill also provided for maximum prices.

[6] As the first public general electricity act its provisions were wide-ranging, specifying the powers of the Board of Trade, local authorities and companies; the acquisition of land; construction of works; the running of cables; theft and damage; the protection of canals and mines; and financial matters.

It was seen at the time, and has been argued since, that the Section 27 buy-out provision after 21 years stifled private enterprise by deterring potential investors from committing their capital.

[7][2][8] However, the business historian Leslie Hannah has argued that 21 years would have been ‘an eternity to most investors’ and therefore was no disincentive to investment.

[3] For early undertakings it was rather a question of making electricity schemes financially viable by having sufficient customers and deploying the appropriate technology.

[11][12] For details of individual acts and locations see Timeline of the UK electricity supply industry.

The inquiry report[13] established the general principals which were adopted as the basis of provisional orders granted to undertakings in the London area.

[2] By 1914 the London County Council noted[14] that the usual method of obtaining statutory powers to supply electricity within a defined area was by the grant of a provisional order made by the Board of Trade and confirmed by Parliament.

Licenses were of secondary importance because of the limitation of the grant to a term of seven years and they required local authority consent.

Special acts were limited to cases where compulsory powers for the purchase of land were required because such provisions could not be included on provisional orders.

Under the Electric Lighting Act 1909 the Board of Trade could authorise by provisional order the compulsory purchase of land to build power stations.

[2] The 1909 act addressed these and other issues, recognising the need to reorganise the industry to account for technical developments in the generation and supply of electricity.

Section 26 of the act introduced a fourth means of obtaining statutory powers, the Special order.

This was made by the Commissioners and confirmed by the Minister, or by an order establishing a joint electricity authority.