English Poor Law Policy

Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138392038
• eBook ISBN: 9780429748868
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First published in 1910, this volume is a dispassionate analysis of the changes in and the various aspects of official policy towards pauperism from the 'Revolution of 1834' to the Majority and Minority Reports of 1909. In their preface to this volume the Webbs wrote:

"What obscured the history was the manner in which masses of heterogeneous facts were heaped together. To read, one after another, these complicated Orders and lengthy Reports, each dealing with all kinds of paupers and various methods of relief, was but to accumulate confusion. They resembled a heap of geological conglomerates which could not be assayed until they had been broken up in such a way as to sort the different materials into separate homogeneous parcels".

This book succeeds in presenting a masterly survey of this sector of the British social services on the eve of the foundation of the Welfare State, and completes the corpus of the Webbs on the Poor Law.

Chapter I

The Revolution of 1834

It is unnecessary for us even to refer to the disastrous chaos into which the Poor Law and its local administration had in 1832 fallen, or to the events which led up to the celebrated Royal Commission appointed in that year. Their report, presented in 1834, and the Poor Law Amendment Act of the same year, together form the starting-point of all subsequent legislation and administration.

The 1834 Report

The proposals of the Commissioners of 1834 were either formal “recommendations,” exceptionally displayed in prominent type, or suggestions scattered among the pages which purport to summarise the evidence. For instance, the famous “principle” that the situation of the pauper should not be made “really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class” is not a “recommendation,” but occurs only as an assertion in the course of an argument.¹ We have therefore included, in the following statement of “the principles of 1834” all dogmatic assertions of this nature, as well as the formal recommendations.

A.—National Umformüy

The most revolutionary principle of the Report of 1834 —the fundamental basis alike of the Act of 1834 and of the policy of the Central Authority—was that of national uniformity in the treatment of each class of destitute persons. It was this principle that was in most marked contrast with the previous practice, under which each parish or union had pursued its own Poor Law policy. It was this principle that furnished the ground for the very existence of a Central Authority. The Commissioners recommended that there should be uniformity in the administration of relief in the different parts of the country, in order—

1. To reduce the “perpetual shifting” from parish to parish;
2. To prevent discontent among paupers; and
3. To bring the management more effectually under the control of Parliament.¹

For this among other reasons the recommendation seemed to the Commissioners to follow, “as a necessary consequence,” “that the Legislature should divest the local authorities of all discretionary power in the administration of relief.”² But they did not put this recommendation into large type. What they put into large type was the recommendation that there should be a Central Authority to control the administration, directed to frame and enforce regulations, “as far as may be practicable . . . Uniform throughout the country.”³

It is to be noted that the uniformity proposed by the Commissioners was a geographical uniformity in the treatment of particular classes of paupers, both indoor and outdoor, in different places, not an identical treatment of all paupers, or of all the paupers in any one place. We shall deal presently with their varying recommendations with regard to particular classes. But in two categories they proposed a further uniformity, a uniformity in the treatment of different individuals in a class. They emphatically pointed out that any attempt to discriminate according to merit, in the award of outdoor relief is dangerous and likely to lead to fraud.⁴ This proposed further uniformity of treatment among individuals in a class, it will be seen, is expressly limited to the amount to be given as outdoor relief. It is not repeated in that part of the Report which deals with classification in institutions, nor does it apply to the decision as to whether or not outdoor relief should be given at all. A further uniformity recommended by the Commissioners was that of identity of treatment of the able-bodied, whether deserving or undeserving. To this we shall refer in connection with the able-bodied. It is to be noted that the Commissioners do not explicitly apply it to any but the able-bodied.¹

B.—The Able-Bodied

Apart from a few stray suggestions, it might almost be said that the Report of 1834 was entirely directed to the treatment of the adult able-bodied labourer, with the family dependent on him. Let us take, for example, the famous principle, already referred to, that the situation of “the individual relieved shall not,” on the whole, “be made really or apparently so eligible as the situation of the independent labourer of the lowest class.” This proposal, characterised as “the first and most essential of all conditions,” occurs, as a dogmatic assertion, in the discussion of the remedial measures to be applied to the able-bodied.² It cannot be said to be clear from the Report whether the Commissioners wished this principle to be understood as applicable to the relief of any persons other than adult able-bodied wage-earners and their families. It is followed by forty-four pages of argument and illustration relating exclusively to the able-bodied wage-earner. These are summed up in a sentence at p. 279 (“If the vital evil of the system, relief to the able-bodied on terms more eligible than regular industry”), which points to the same limitation. The principle is not reasserted when the Commissioners, in quite other parts of their Report, make their few recommendations with regard to the aged, the sick, and the orphan poor. We have failed, indeed, even to satisfy ourselves from the context whether the Commissioners had in their minds the case of the adult able-bodied woman without a husband. Though there is no phrase or definition excluding the independent female wage-earner from the term “ablebodied,” the Commissioners frequently use this term as applicable to men only; and nowhere do they mention, in recommendation or by way of illustration, under the category of able-bodied, the independent woman worker.

When we pass to recommendations explicitly restricted to the able-bodied, we are left in the same uncertainty as to what the term includes. No definition of able-bodied occurs in the Report. From the course of the argument throughout and all the illustrations from the evidence, we infer that the Commissioners had exclusively in view the adult man capable of obtaining employment in the labour market at any wage whatsoever, together with his wife and children under sixteen dependent on him. It is important to notice this ambiguity in the Report of 1834, because it explains a similar ambiguity in the subsequent policy o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Chapter I The Revolution of 1834
• Chapter II The Poor Law Commissioners
• Chapter III The Poor Law Board
• Chapter IV The Local Government Board
• Chapter V The Principles of 1907
• Chapter VI The Majority Report of the Royal Commission of 1905–1909
• Chapter VII The Minority Report of the Royal Commission of 1905–1909
• Chapter VIII Summary and Conclusion
• Appendix A Memorandum by the Local Government Board as to the Local Authorities for Poor Law purposes and the. Out-relief Orders in force at the end of the years 1847, 1871, 1906.
• Appendix B Extract from the Minority Report for Scotland giving- the reasons in favour of the Complete Supersession of the Poor Law.
• Index of Unions and Other Places Mentioned
• Index of Subjects