The Local Government Act of 1894 dealt with the remaining areas within the county. The smallest unit was the parish, sometimes with the same boundaries as in ancient times, but by this Act becoming an administrative or 'civil' parish, with a parish meeting for the smaller parishes and elected councils for the larger ones. Parishes were combined for some special services into Rural Districts, often corresponding to the Poor Law Unions, or Urban Districts if there was a town to form a centre for separate administration in the area. Each of these had their own elected councils, so the whole county came within the range of local government at various levels. The larger councils, as their work developed, employed paid officials to advise the council on their own speciality and to carry out, through direct labour or by contract, the detailed work decided upon by the council. Policy and overall expenditure of money is controlled by the majority vote of the council, but the central government is the ultimate authority.

The problem of the preservation of law and order, especially in large towns, during the eighteenth century had shown the need for some kind of paid professional police force. To meet this need, Henry Fielding, a Somerset man who won fame as a novelist, while serving as a London magistrate had formed an unofficial but very effective body of policemen later to be known as the Bow Street Runners. In 1829 Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police Force and in 1835 the Municipal Corporations Act extended this system to the reformed boroughs which were required to elect Watch Committees to establish and administer their own local police. The success of these measures emphasised the lack of adequate policing in the considerable areas remaining under the old parochial system, especially in rural counties like Somerset. The County Police Act of 1839 permitted, but did not enforce, the establishment of a paid constabulary. Somerset, ignoring the example of Gloucestershire and Wiltshire, waited until just before an Act of 1856 compelled all counties to provide their own police force, under Home Office supervision but in the control of the county magistrates. After the Act of 1888, the Somerset force was administered by a Standing Joint Committee of Magistrates and County Councillors. The borough police forces in Somerset were amalgamated with the County Constabulary and have since been formed into a combined Somerset and Bath Constabulary administered by a Police Committee.

When it was first established, the work of the County Council was rather limited. It took over the work of many of the numerous Boards and became responsible for Health, Highways and Bridges and Technical Instruction. In the present century this work has been considerably extended and includes a vast range of responsibilities from Education in all its stages, with the exception only of the university, to Town Planning, and from Motor Vehicle registration to Weights and Measures inspection. The offices were at first at Weston-super-Mare, but in 1935 they were transferred to new buildings in Taunton which have recently been more than doubled in extent.

For a long time it has been felt that local government services have become too complex for present arrangements, and a Bill for reorganisation is now passing through Parliament. As it stands it would have the effect of reducing the size of the County of Somerset by the loss of a substantial part of its northern area to a new county called Avon, and the replacement of the boroughs and urban and rural district councils by far tewer district councils. The new arrangements are intended to take effect from 1st April 1974.