Throughout England and Wales there were numerous liberties which were for historic reasons, to varying degrees, independent of the administration of the authorities of the county in which they lay. By the nineteenth century it had become clear that their continued existence was causing inefficiencies in local government and frustrating the effective administration of justice. Liberties generally had a commission of the peace and gaol distinct from those of the county, and the Inspectors of Prisons, in their annual report of 1850 noted:
The inconvenience of these separate jurisdictions is most obvious, and particularly where they extend into more counties than one, which is not unfrequently the case. The prisons retained in them for the confinement of prisoners under criminal and civil process are of the most inferior description, and in civil cases the prison of a Liberty is not unfrequently selected either by the debtor or the creditor; by the former, as leaving him under less restraint than the county gaol; by the latter, as likely to punish respectability by its uncleanliness and discomfort.
The Act applied to any liberty that possessed a separate commission of the peace, be they divisions of a county, counties of a town or city or sokes. The justices of the peace of any liberty, or of any county in which a liberty lay, were given the right to prepare a petition seeking the union of the liberty with the county. Notice of the resolution to prepare the petition was to be published for three successive weeks in both a London newspaper and one circulating in the county involved. The petition was to lay out the reasons for the proposed union, and to set out in detail the arrangements for taking over the property of the liberty, and the payments to be made, or continued employment by the county of those holding franchise or office in the liberty. If the petition was approved by the Privy Council, a notice to that effect was to be published in the London Gazette. The notice would detail the areas involved, and the parishes formerly in the liberty would be annexed to existing hundreds and petty sessional divisions of the county. Following the union:
The inhabitants of the liberty were to become liable for jury service in the county
The goal of the liberty was to become a county institution
