Question : Password history and length: Group Policy

I have set the following policy...
Computer configuration > Windows Settings > Security Settings > Account Policies/Password Policy
Enforce password history = 8
Maximum password age = 45
Minimum password age = 30
Minimum password length = 8

However, I have just tried to change a password on a user account to what was the old password, it allowed me to do so. I also tried changing the user's password to less than 8 characters, this also succeeded.

I've ran rsop under the users account and the group policy settings appear to be in place.

We are running a 2003 forest. The client machine I attempted this on was a Windows 7 machine, the user account has domain administrator access (it's actually my own personal account)

Why have these restrictions not taken affect?

Answer : Password history and length: Group Policy

did you set this policy to the domain?

If not those settings are ignored.
By default password settings are set within the default domain policy