English Poor Law Policy

by Sidney Webb; Beatrice Webb

(ii.) The Principle of Compulsion and a Destitution Authority

It has usually been considered impracticable to combine any powers of compulsion with a Poor Law system. The Majority Report proposes, however, to endow its new Public Assistance Authority with extensive powers of compulsory treatment; that is to say, to enable the administrators of the Poor Law to dispense with its limitation to those who are actually destitute and unable to maintain themselves, whenever such administrators choose to consider it expedient to compel particular persons, who claim not to be destitute, to become or to continue paupers, with the object of segregating them from their fellows. Such an extension of the powers of the Public Assistance Authority would be inconsistent with one of the cardinal principles of the Majority Report, namely, that the area of the operations of the Poor Law should not be extended.[858] What is more important is that it does not seem at all probable that any House of Commons would consent to give to any Destitution Authority, maintaining the stigma of pauperism, the power to make a man a pauper against his will.

So far as compelling persons who are ill, and who need treatment, to come in and be treated for their own good, or for the health of the neighbourhood, this is a power which Parliament has already, in certain cases, conceded to the Local Health Authority, which has no stigma of pauperism, and which has, moreover, the machinery for searching out the cases, irrespective of their affluence. These powers could easily be extended. It would seem both futile and unnecessary, with regard to persons whose need is nursing and medical attendance, and who may not be pecuniarily destitute, to confer a similar power also on the Destitution Authority, which has no such machinery for searching out cases, and no particular responsibility for the Public Health.

With regard to the second great class of those whom it is desired to segregate compulsorily against their will, namely, the feeble-minded, the whole weight of expert opinion is against conferring this power upon either the existing Board of Guardians or any Poor Law Authority, and in favour of entrusting it to the Lunacy Authority, an Authority which—in contrast with any Destitution Authority—will treat these unfortunate persons in respect of their ascertained defect, and not in respect of their destitution, or in respect of any moral defect assumed to be connected therewith.

When we come to the children, the case is even clearer. If power is to be given to any Authority to separate a child from its parents, and to deprive the latter of its custody and care, public opinion emphatically demands that this power should be conferred and exercised solely for the good of the child, and with a view to its best possible nurture and training.

It is plain that this is best secured by freeing the child from all association with pauperism and entrusting its care to the Authority which deals, apart from any stigma of pauperism, with other children in a normal way, and which specialises on their proper training.

Finally, in the case of able-bodied and able-minded men and women in health, whose distress arises merely from their being without wage-earning employment—whatever may be the cause of such unemployment—it will, we think, be wholly impracticable to obtain, for a Destitution Authority, any powers of compulsory segregation. To compel, by law, able-bodied men and women to become paupers against their will; to force upon them a degrading status with the stigma of pauperism, when they do not even apply for public assistance; to compel them to come into an institution of the Destitution Authority, when they ask only to be let alone, must, we think, in the absence of any judicial conviction of a specific offence against the law, be dismissed as politically out of the question. It may be that some such restriction of personal liberty is essential to the effective curative treatment of particular individuals, whose unemployment proceeds from their own personal defects. But no power of compulsory segregation can be justified except in respect of individuals in which this personal defectiveness has been definitely ascertained and judicially certified. The Destitution Authority, having no means of ascertaining whether or not situations are available, and no opportunity of experimenting upon the personal willingness of its patients to accept and retain wage-earning employment, can never sift out the voluntary from the involuntary unemployed. Moreover, even if the Destitution Authority possessed the machinery for searching out the men who really needed reformatory treatment, but who did not apply for relief, and if it had some infallible method of recognising which of them were involuntarily idle, and which of them were unemployed through their own defects of character, it would still be impossible to justify the grant of compulsory powers of segregation, except to an Authority which was both authorised and qualified to improve—not to pauperise and degrade—the persons, unconvicted of any crime, whom it thus forcibly deprived of their freedom.

We come to quite a different kind of compulsion when no one is forced to become a pauper against his will, but those who have voluntarily entered a Poor Law Institution may be, under certain circumstances, detained against their will, either for their own advantage, or as a disciplinary measure. In such a case Parliament has already shown itself willing to grant certain minor powers of detention. But there is, as all Poor Law administrators know, a practical difficulty in enforcing any such detention at any time or in any way that is unpleasant to the common run of patients, even when it is sought only to exercise the power for the patient's own good. Experience shows that, if those who need the shelter of the institution, or the care which it affords, believe that they will be liable to be detained against their will, many of them simply will not come in to be treated; and, least of all, if the liability to compulsory detention is combined with the stigma and the degradation of pauperism. Thus, compulsory detention is a natural and defective adjunct of a "deterrent" Poor Law, because it scares people off; but it is a fatal obstacle to the operations of a Poor Law which is intended to be curative and restorative. The very patients to whom the "order for continuous treatment" would be most appropriate and most useful will refuse to come in. Without the will, the power, or the machinery for "searching out" cases (other than those who apply for relief), which no Poor Law Authority can ever have, or the power to compel them to come in, irrespective of their pecuniary resources or their own consent, which no Poor Law Authority is ever likely to be granted, any policy of compulsory detention of those already in the Poor Law Institutions becomes, on any policy of curative and restorative treatment, simply suicidal. Those for whom the curative and restorative treatment is especially designed do not present themselves.