English Poor Law Policy

by Sidney Webb; Beatrice Webb

There is an additional reason for not thrusting the able-bodied unemployed person into the hands of a new Poor Law Authority restricted to the function of relieving destitution. Up to the present, the Scottish Poor Law has not included any provision whatsoever for the able-bodied, the only lawful method of relief from public funds being that afforded by the Distress Committee under the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905. Hence the famous principle of the English Poor Law reform of 1834—that the condition of the able-bodied pauper should always be less eligible than that of the lowest grade of independent labourer—has never been adopted by the administrators of the Scottish Poor Law. To transfer, as is proposed by our colleagues in the Majority Report, the whole responsibility for the able-bodied unemployed from the Distress Committees to a new Poor Law, or, as they say, Public Assistance Authority, would, we think, inevitably tend to introduce into Scotland a principle which has, in England, proved a complete failure. We now see that the condition of the lowest grade of independent labourer—whether he is chronically "under-employed" like the whole class of dock and other casual labourers, or "sweated" like the home-working chair-maker or slipper-maker—is so deplorably below the level of adequate subsistence that to make the lot of the pauper "less eligible" means to reduce him below any acceptable standard of civilised existence. It has been found, in fact, impossible to give the pauper less food, less clothing, less rest and sleep, or less eligible housing accommodation than that of the lowest grade of independent labourer without actually and obviously impairing his physical health. Hence the alternative has been to concentrate the "less eligibility" on the conditions of the pauper's mental life. However worthy and innocent have been the able-bodied applicants for Poor Law relief, the policy of the English Poor Law has been to degrade them in their own eyes and in the eyes of the public, to exclude them from citizenship by depriving them (though not the convicted criminals) of the right to be placed on the electoral register; to subject them to hard labour of the most monotonous and useless character, such as stone-breaking or corn-grinding, or even oakum-picking; to subject them to the shameful promiscuity of the General Mixed Workhouse or the gaol-like severities of the Able-bodied Test Workhouse; and this "deterrent" treatment has, by the very principles of the Poor Law, had to be meted out to all comers, whether or not they have been found, as a matter of fact, to have any moral defect at all. This "principle of less eligibility" has been, in fact, in the English Poor Law, a mere device for mechanically diminishing, "by expectation and example," able-bodied pauperism—meaning help from the Poor Rate. It has been found wholly ineffective (and has, indeed, stood in the way of the adoption of anything effective) for diminishing the able-bodied destitution which leads presently to pauperism, as well as for striking at the causes which bring men to this destitution. This policy of "less eligibility," into which any Poor Law Authority is only too apt to be driven in dealing with the able-bodied, seems to us so futile and so barbarous in its inhumanity, and leads to such demoralising forms of parasitism on the labour of women and children, on begging and vagrancy, and even on a career of crime, that we should regard its introduction into Scotland, by the new Public Assistance Authorities that our colleagues propose, as nothing less than a national disaster.

We think that the time has come for the nation definitely to repudiate the policy of "deterring" persons who are destitute from coming under the care and control of the State; and this equally when the destitute persons are able-bodied and when they are sick or mentally defective. We urge the deliberate adoption of the opposite principle of searching out those who are in any respect destitute, with a view to taking hold of their cases at the earliest possible moment, when they may still be curable, and of enforcing on all able-bodied persons the obligation to maintain themselves and their dependants in health and efficiency. We consider that it is now possible to proceed with regard to unemployment on the same general lines as we proceed with regard to illiteracy in children and with regard to infectious disease. We recommend that, by the systematic enforcement of parental responsibility for the condition of all dependants by the Local Education Authority and the Local Health Authority, and by the systematic suppression of mendicity and vagrancy by the Local Police Authority, every person who is not in a position to provide for his wife and children, or who wilfully or negligently abstains from doing so, should—whether or not he applies for assistance—stand revealed to the new Authority that we propose for dealing with the able-bodied. By an organised use of the National Labour Exchange this Authority will be able to ascertain whether there are possibilities of employment for such men, and where such openings are, and what is the kind of training that they require. If resort to the National Labour Exchange becomes general among employers, and if it is made compulsory on those who take on hands for casual jobs, it will be possible for the Authority so to "dovetail" jobs and seasonal occupations as to go far towards ensuring continuous employment for those who are taken on at all. There will remain the persons who by this very "decasualisation" of labour and suppression of chronic "under-employment" are squeezed out of their present miserable partial earnings. For these it must be the duty of the National Authority to provide, and, as soon as possible, absorb them in productive industry. Fortunately there is at hand in the diminution of boy labour by the increasing absorption of the boy's time in technical education, in the reduction of excessive hours of labour on railways, tramways, and omnibuses, and in the withdrawal of the mothers of young children from the labour market when they are required, as a condition of their aliment, to devote themselves to their family, together with the possibilities of development opened up by afforestation, etc., which we have elsewhere sufficiently described, more than enough opportunities for the absorption of this temporary surplus. But the cyclical fluctuations of trade, with the consequent waxing and waning of the aggregate demand of productive industry, must always be counted on; and these cyclical fluctuations in demand for labour, as we have shown, can be counteracted, and the volume of wage-earning employment in the country as a whole maintained at something like a constant level, by a mere rearrangement over each decade, of the Government works and orders that must in any case be executed within the decade, though not necessarily, as at present, in equal instalments year by year. All this organised attempt to prevent unemployment, which we regard as the primary duty of the National Authority, though we have reason to believe that it can obviate the greater part of the involuntary lack of work from which so many of the wage-earners now suffer, will not, of course, completely secure every individual workman in permanent employment. To provide for such cases we look, in the main, to a great extension of Trade Union insurance, rendered possible to many more industries than can yet organise "out of work benefit" by adequate subventions from public funds on the lines of the well-known Ghent system. Finally, when all this is done, the National Authority for the able-bodied will still have on its hands those who are for one reason or another uninsured, and for whom, whether from their own faults or defects or not, the Labour Exchange fails to find a situation. But even these must not be deterred from coming under care and control, and must, in the public interest, not be kept at arm's length to degenerate or become demoralised. For them the National Authority must provide maintenance, with adequate Home Aliment for their dependants, in the way that we have described, and under the course of physical and industrial training best calculated to make them more fit than they now are for the work which the Labour Exchange will, sooner or later, be able to find for them. We see no reason for penal conditions, such as have prevailed in the English Able-bodied Test Workhouses, for any honest and willing man. Only when a man has been definitely proved to be unwilling to work for the maintenance of himself and his dependants, or persists in recalcitrancy and refusal to co-operate in his own cure, need he be committed by the magistrates to a Detention Colony, there to be treated in whatever way is found best adapted to remedy the moral defect which he will then have been actually convicted of possessing.

To sum up, we hold it untrue and unwarranted to suggest that all those whom the State finds on its hands as destitute—the infants and children, the sick and the mentally defective, the aged and the unemployed able-bodied—have necessarily any moral taint or defect in common, for which they need all to be treated by a single Authority, or can properly all be treated by such an authority, specialising on this presumed common attribute. We hold, on the contrary, that experience has demonstrated that, although individuals in all sections of the destitute may be morally defective, and this in all sorts of different ways, the great mass of destitution is the direct and (given human nature as it is) almost inevitable result of the social environment in which the several sections have found themselves; and that it can, to a large and as yet undefined extent, be obviated if the cases are taken in time, and the environment appropriately changed. We suggest that the failure of the existing Poor Law Authorities is due mainly to the fact that, as Poor Law Authorities, they are inherently incapable of getting hold of the cases in time before destitution has set in, and that they are necessarily prevented, by their very nature as "Destitution Authorities," from changing the social environment which is bringing about the destitution, or from providing the new environment that is necessary, whether by way of treatment or by way of disciplinary supervision after actual treatment, either for the infants or for the children, for the sick or for the mentally defective, for the aged and infirm or for the unemployed able-bodied. We consider that it is proved, by the experience of the several specialised and preventive Authorities that have been established for this purpose, that the arrest of the causes of destitution, and the necessary changes in the social environment, can be effected only by making each such Authority responsible for its own special part of the work of prevention, and for providing the appropriate treatment for the particular section of persons in whom it may have failed to prevent destitution. We fully admit the importance of the "moral factor" in contributing to the production of some of the destitution in all the sections; but the moral defect is not always in the destitute person himself, and we hold that this "moral factor" can never be effectually dealt with, and can never be subjected to the disciplinary and reformatory treatment that it requires, until we give up assuming its existence where we have no actual proof, and until we are prepared to base such treatment solely upon the definite conviction, by judicial process, of particular individuals for particular offences. In no case, whether individually innocent or morally guilty, do we think that the destitute person should be refused treatment, or "deterred" from applying for it. On the contrary, we hold that every destitute person not under treatment is a menace to the commonweal; and the public authorities should therefore search out all such cases, as if they were cases of typhus, and endeavour to get hold of them at the most incipient stage of the disease. And if we are asked what we would substitute for the "deterrent" treatment of the Poor Law, in order to protect the State from being eaten up by a multitude of applicants for its aid, we reply that in no case do we suggest the provision of maintenance, or of any form of public assistance, otherwise than in the guise of the most appropriate treatment for the actual disease or infirmity or lack that the individual is demonstrated to be suffering from; that this treatment is not necessarily gratuitous, efficient provision being made for recovery of cost wherever there is ability to pay; that such treatment is never unconditional, and is from the very nature of the case disciplinary; that it necessarily includes long-continued supervision, even after treatment; and that co-operation in one's own cure, together with willingness to fulfil all parental, marital, and personal obligations, opportunity to doing so being provided, will for the first time be really enforced, and if necessary enforced, when other means have failed, by commitment to a Detention Colony.

Summary of Conclusions

It is on all these grounds that we feel compelled to dissent from the recommendations of the Majority Report in favour of setting up a new Destitution Authority, which should administer relief only at the period of destitution, and which should have under its charge indiscriminately men, women, and children, the sick and the healthy, the infant and the aged, the unemployed workman and the incorrigible vagrant. We believe that the establishment of any such general Destitution Authority, under whatever designation, and however selected or appointed, would inevitably lead to the perpetuation of the General Mixed Poorhouse, and the customary dole of Aliment or Outdoor Relief. We cannot but fear that such a proposal means the abandonment of any hope of preventing the occurrence of Unemployment and the gradual sinking into destitution that we see going on; that it implies practically a despairing acquiescence in the daily manufacture of "unemployables," and in the daily creation of new pauperism, which is the disquieting feature of the time. We, on the contrary, believe that destitution can be prevented, and that it is the business of the State, in its national and local organisation, to take the steps necessary to prevent it. In this dissent we have confined ourselves to argument as to the general principle. We have not attempted to make definite and detailed recommendations as to how the principle of breaking up the Poor Law, and transferring its several services to the specialised preventive Authorities, should be applied to the present machinery of administration in Scotland. We do not feel qualified, for instance, to decide whether the care of the children can be best entrusted wholly to the School Boards, or whether, with a view to an equalisation of the rates, this work might advantageously be shared in by the County Committees of districts under the Education (Scotland) Act of 1908. We do not pretend to advise whether the District Boards of Lunacy, with the new duties with regard to the feeble-minded, and the complete disconnection of all their work from the Poor Law recommended by the Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble-minded, as well as by ourselves, should or should not be modified in constitution; or whether it might not be more advantageous for Scotland, and more calculated to relieve its local administration from an onerous and unequally distributed burden, if the whole work of providing for the mentally defective were made a national service and a national charge. With regard to the Local Health organisation, which has in some parts of Scotland to cope with great geographical difficulties, we do not feel warranted in making any definite recommendation as to the constitutions, areas, and powers of the present Health Authority in Burghs and Counties respectively. Nor do we think it necessary to pronounce upon the question of whether the National Department for the Able-bodied—with its Labour Exchanges, its help towards Insurance against Unemployment, its duty in regularising the seasonal trades and "decasualising" casual labour, its work in promoting the absorption of the surplus labourers who may be thus squeezed out, its attempts to regularise the aggregate national demand for labour, and its training establishments and Detention Colonies—should be separate and self-contained for Scotland, or whether it might not, like the Board of Trade and the Factory Inspection Department, more advantageously form part of the wider organisation for the United Kingdom as a whole. All these are administrative details to be determined by those personally acquainted with Scottish Local Government, and in accordance with Scottish public opinion. We must content ourselves with suggesting that, if it is thought that the time has come when we need no longer rest satisfied with merely relieving destitution, but can start an effective campaign for its prevention; if it is felt that the children ought to be rescued from demoralisation and the sick from preventable disease and preventable suffering; if it is desired to put an end to the demoralisation and destruction of character now caused by Unemployment, and especially by Under-employment, then we must proceed generally upon the lines herein laid down.

We therefore recommend:—

1. That the Scottish Poor Law be abolished, and in its stead an entirely different method of provision for those needing public aid be inaugurated, so as to get rid of pauperism, both the name and the thing.

2. That a systematic Crusade against Destitution in all its forms be set on foot; against the destitution caused by Unemployment, the destitution caused by Old Age, the destitution caused by Feeble-mindedness and Lunacy, the destitution caused by Ill-health and Disease, and the destitution caused by Neglected Infancy and Neglected Childhood.

3. That the Local Education Authority be empowered and required to search out all children of school age within its district who are destitute of proper nurture, and to secure to them a fitting upbringing.

4. That the Local Health Authority be empowered and required to search out all sick persons within its district who are destitute of medical attendance, all infants destitute of proper nurture, and all infirm persons needing medical attendance and nursing, and to apply the appropriate treatment, either in the homes or in suitable institutions.