English Poor Law Policy

by Sidney Webb; Beatrice Webb

The other alternative seems to us to be, not to reverse but to continue the evolution that has been going on in Local Government, in Scotland as in England. Instead of seeking to curtail the work with regard to children, the sick, the mentally defective, the aged and the able-bodied unemployed, which is now being undertaken by the Local Education Authorities, the Local Health Authorities, the Local Lunacy Authorities, the Local Pension Authorities, and the Local Unemployment Authorities, what we recommend is that the remainder of each of these sections of the poor who are still being looked after by the Poor Law Authorities should be transferred to the newer specialised Authorities that have been created.

Just as it is proposed, by the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded, with the concurrence of practically all acquainted with the problem, to take the persons of unsound mind, including the epileptic and the feeble-minded, quite "out of the Poor Law," and place them entirely in the hands of the Local Lunacy Authority, so it is suggested that all public care of the children of school age should be "taken out of the Poor Law" and transferred to the Local Education Authority; that all public care of the sick and infirm (including the maternity cases, the infants under school age, and the aged requiring institutional care) should be "taken out of the Poor Law," and transferred to the Local Health Authority; and that all the aged who can and will live decently on their pensions should be "taken out of the Poor Law," and dealt with by the Pension Committee—the whole under the control and direction of the Parish School Board or the District Committee, or the County or Town Council as the case may be. There would then remain, out of all the pauper host, only the vagrants and the odds and ends of genuinely able-bodied men who find their way to the Poorhouse. For these who need help to find a situation if they are merely stranded by temporary unemployment, detention colonies if they are idle or vicious, and physical and industrial training if they have to be maintained whilst waiting for a place, we recommend that there should be a new authority of national scope—the government department which is already being set up under the Labour Exchanges Act of 1909, and which should also take over the work of the Distress Committees under the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905. We recommend, therefore, as the only practicable means of preventing a wasteful and demoralising duplication of services, the complete abolition, not only of the Poorhouse, but also of the Poor Law itself.

The Expediency of Preventing the Occurrence of Destitution, rather than merely Relieving it after it has Occurred.

What we propose is no mere change of names or of official machinery. We think the time has come when the nation should definitely adopt the principle of using all its powers to prevent the occurrence of destitution, instead of the principle of merely relieving it after it has occurred. Destitution, as we know, is a social disease, as destructive to the health of the community as phthisis is; quite as dangerous to the individual attacked, once it has gained a firm hold, but fortunately as gradual as phthisis in its attack. The Poor Law Authorities of Scotland have failed to prevent the occurrence of destitution, or even to prevent pauperism, and have been unable to provide what is required for the several sections of persons under their charge, not because the Parish Councillors are incompetent or dishonest, careless or corrupt, but because they have been set, not to this task at all, but merely to that of "relieving destitution." They do relieve destitution much more efficiently on the whole than ever before; but we are not satisfied, nor do we think that public opinion is now satisfied, with the spending in Scotland, year after year, more than a million sterling in the relief of a destitution which never gets either prevented or cured. What the nation now asks is that men, women, and children should, by appropriate measures, be prevented from sinking to a condition of destitution; and that such as unavoidably fall into that state should be taken in hand with a view, not merely to their relief, but to their effectual cure. This is work which a Poor Law authority, by the very nature of its being, can never perform effectively. Any Poor Law authority, call it by what name you may, is necessarily confined to dealing with persons who are actually "destitute" or actually "in distress"; it cannot reach out to anticipate, at the incipient stage, what will, if not arrested in its growth, eventually become destitution or distress. Similarly, a Poor Law authority must necessarily find its operations restricted to the period during which persons are "destitute" or "in distress," though it is precisely some disciplinary "after care" which may be needed to prevent a relapse. In short, except for the purpose of alleviating momentary suffering (for which alone it was originally intended), the money spent in the relief of the destitute, begun only when they are destitute, and discontinued as soon as they cease to be destitute, is simply wasted. If a hospital for the sick could, by the law of its being, only admit cases when "gangrene" had already set in, and had to discharge them the very moment that the "fever" had been reduced, it would effect as few cures of the sick as the Poorhouse does of the destitute. Yet no Poor Law authority, whatever its name, can, in its treatment of the disease of destitution, transcend the corresponding limits.

If we wish to prevent the very occurrence of destitution, and effectively cure it when it occurs, we must look to its causes. Now, deferring for the moment any question of human fallibility, or the "double dose of original sin," which most of us are apt to ascribe to those who succumb in the struggle, the investigations of this Royal Commission reveal three broad roads along one or other of which practically all paupers come, namely: (a) sickness, howsoever caused, (b) neglected infancy and neglected childhood, whosoever may be in fault, and (c) unemployment (including "under-employment"), by whatsoever occasioned. If we could prevent sickness, however caused, or effectually treat it when it occurs; if we could ensure that no child, whatever its parentage, went without what we may call the National Minimum of Nurture and Training; and if we could provide that no able-bodied person was left to suffer from long-continued or chronic unemployment, we should prevent at least nine-tenths of the destitution that now costs the Poor Law Authorities of Scotland more than a million per annum. To break up the Poor Law, and to transfer its several services to the Local Education, Health, Lunacy, and Pension Authorities, and to a national authority for the able-bodied, is to hand over the task of treating curatively the several sections of the destitute to authorities charged with the prevention of the several causes of destitution from which those sections are suffering. This means a systematic attempt to arrest each of the principal causes of eventual destitution at the very outset, in the most incipient stage of its attack, which is always an attack of an individual human being, not of the family as a whole. It is one person, at the outset, who has the cough of incipient phthisis, not a whole family; though if no preventive force is brought to bear, destitution will eventually set in and the whole family will be on our hands. There may be in the family neglected infants, neglected children, or feeble-minded persons lacking proper care or control, who may not be technically destitute, who may even be dependents of able-bodied men in work, but who, if left uncared for, will inevitably become the destitute of subsequent years. Hence it is vital that the Local Health Authority should be empowered and required to search out and ensure proper treatment for the incipient stages of all diseases. It is vital that the Lunacy Authority should be empowered and required to search out and ensure proper care and control for all persons certifiable as mentally defective, long before the family to which they belong is reduced to destitution. It is vital that the Local Education Authority should be empowered and required to search out and ensure, quite irrespective of the family's destitution, whatever Parliament may prescribe as the National Minimum of nurture and training for all children, the neglect of which will otherwise bring these children, when they grow up, themselves to a state of destitution. It is becoming no less clear that some Authority—we say a National Authority—must register and deal with the man who is unemployed, long before extended unemployment has demoralised him and reduced his family to destitution. We wish to put the issue quite clearly before the public. The systematic campaign for the prevention of the occurrence of destitution that we propose—that the community should undertake by grappling with its principal causes at the incipient stages, when they are just beginning to affect one or other members of a family only, long before the family as a whole has sunk into the morass of destitution—involves treating the individual member who is affected in respect of the cause of his complaint, even before he is "disabled" or in pecuniary distress. It means a systematic searching out of incipient cases, just as the Medical Officer of Health searches out infectious disease, or the School Attendance Officer searches out children who are not on the school roll, even before application is made.

At present, the Local Education Authorities, the Local Health Authorities, and the Local Lunacy Authorities only feebly and imperfectly grapple with their task of arresting the causes of destitution in the child, the sick person, or the person of unsound mind, partly because they have only lately begun this part of their work, but principally because they have not been legally empowered and legally required to do it. Moreover, they do not yet have forced on their attention, as they would if they had to maintain those who needed to be cured, the extent to which they fail to prevent. If the Health Committee knew that it would have eventually to maintain the sick men whom it allowed to sink gradually into phthisis, as it has now practically to maintain persons who contract smallpox, it would look with a different eye upon the Medical Officer of Health's desire to "search out" every case of incipient phthisis whilst it is yet curable, to press upon the ignorant sufferer the best hygienic advice, and to do what is necessary in order to enable the insidious progress of the disease to be arrested. This does not entail that all diseases shall be treated free, any more than the Public Health supervision of sanitation entails that bad landlords shall have their house drainage provided at the public cost. All the increased activity of the Public Health authorities in searching out and treating sickness may coincide with a systematic enforcement of personal responsibility in respect to personal hygiene and with regard to the maintenance in health of dependents, which we, in fact, recommend. The break-up of the Poor Law implies, in short, not only the adoption of a systematic crusade against the several preventable causes of destitution, but also a far more effective enforcement of parental responsibility than is at present practicable.

It may, however, be objected that there are, at any rate, the families to be dealt with which are now in a state of destitution; and that, moreover, it must be anticipated, even with uniformly good administration of the preventive services, there will not be a few families who, as "missed cases," will have slipped into destitution, without having had their descent arrested by the preventive action above described. We think that each member of even such a family requires, for restoration, specialised treatment according to his or her need. The infant, the child of school age, the mentally defective, the sick, the infirm or incapacitated, the boy or girl above school age, and finally the able-bodied and able-minded adult, each requires that something different should be done for him or her, if that individual is to be properly dealt with. The alternative, namely, to treat the family as a whole, means to place it in the General Mixed Poorhouse, or merely to give it a dole of Outdoor Relief. This, indeed, is to-day the dominant practice; and as such, has been condemned by Majority and Minority alike. It must, we think, be admitted that the several members of the family, with their very different needs, cannot be wisely treated without calling in the public authorities specialising on those heads, such as the Education, Health, Lunacy, Pension, and Unemployment Authorities. This does not mean that the needs of the other members of the family will escape consideration. Assuming that the cause of the destitution in which the family is plunged is the sickness of the breadwinner, and that the other members of the family are all normal, the Health Authority will, if he thinks domiciliary treatment desirable, not only give the necessary medical attendance, and look after the whole family environment by its Health Visitor, but, if there is no income, will grant (subject to the statutory rules and the Council's own Bye-laws) the home aliment that is requisite for the family maintenance. Would any one suggest that the Health Committee, with its Medical Officer and its Health Visitor, should be excluded from this case, or that it should be precluded from treating the case at home when the doctor reports that it can properly be so treated? If there is a mentally defective person in such a family, ought the Lunacy Authority to be kept out? If there are children of school age in it, is it wise to prevent the intervention of the Education Authority and its School Attendance Officer? We suggest that it is the business of the officers of the County or Town Council—in particular the Registrar of Public Assistance whom we have proposed—to see (a) that these Authorities do not overlap, and (b) that they are all consulted as regards such members of the family as come within their respective spheres of treatment. We see no need for any general Poor Law or "Public Assistance Committee" at all.

Thus there are two main reasons for the Scheme of Reform that we propose. By breaking up the Poor Law into its component services, and transferring each of these to the organ of government which is already performing the same service for the population at large, we (a) stop the present overlapping and confusion, (b) continue the evolution which has been silently going on in Scotland for a whole generation, and (c) introduce a logical order into both Central and Local Government. But the scheme has a far larger and deeper significance than any increase in administrative efficiency or any promotion of economy and simplicity in Local Government. The reform that we advocate, by emphasising everywhere the Principle of Prevention, and especially by systematically searching out neglected infancy and childhood, preventable sickness, uncontrolled feeble-mindedness and uncared-for epilepsy, unwarded vagrancy and that hopeless worklessness that is so demoralising to mind and body, brings with it the sure and certain hope that we may, at no distant date, by patient and persistent effort on these lines, remove from our midst the intolerable infamy to a Christian and civilised State of the persistence of a mass of chronic destitution, spreading like a cancerous growth from one generation to another of our fellow-citizens.

The "Moral Factor" in Destitution

Such being the grounds for our proposals, we have sought to weigh and appreciate the various arguments that can be urged against them. The most radical objection, and we infer the most deeply felt, against the Supersession of the Poor Law Authority by the various specialised and preventive Authorities that are already at work, seems to be a conviction that, in proposing to treat the problem of destitution as one of Sickness or Mental Defect, of Infirmity or Old Age, of Unemployment or Neglected Childhood, we are ignoring the "moral factor." It is alleged that, among all paupers, notwithstanding the different roads by which they may have come to destitution, there is a certain moral taint; and that, in view of the importance of properly treating this defect of character, all paupers, whatever their age or sex or physical or mental condition ought to be dealt with by an authority specialising on this defect; and this, it is assumed, is what the Poor Law Authority is, or should be made to become. In order that we may be quite sure that we are stating this objection fairly, we quote the exact words of the most accomplished opponent of our proposals, Professor Bernard Bosanquet:—