Ceiling is one of the bright young metaphors that are now so fashionable, and are displacing the old fogeys. Ceiling's victims are maximum and limit. There is no great harm in that, so long as those who use the word remember to treat it as a metaphor.
The advisory Committee did not apply for a general increase in the ceilings.
Ceilings here means maximum prices. The writer forgot that if one wants more headroom one does not increase the ceiling ; one raises it. Similarly anyone who thinks that "within the monetary licensing ceiling" is the most effective way of expressing his meaning (though I cannot believe it really is) ought at least to remember that our normal relationship to a ceiling is under it, not within it.
In determining the floor-space, a ceiling of 15,000 square feet should normally be the limit.
This is indeed a complicated way of saying that floor-space should not normally exceed 15,000 square feet. Why drag down the ceiling ?
When this metaphor, not content with swallowing maximum, tries to absorb minimum too, we pass from the tolerable to the grotesque:
The effect of this announcement is that the total figure for 1950/51 Of £410 million can be regarded as a floor as well as a ceiling.