The Foundations of the Welfare State by Thane Pat

Author:Thane, Pat
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317889069
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

The ‘break-up’ of the Poor Law

Unemployment dominated the history of the Poor Law in this period as it dominated all else. It led at last to its abolition. The recommendations in 1922 of a civil service committee, the Betterton Committee, for closer coordination of local authority social services were ignored amid the crisis forced on the Poor Law by unemployment. The flood of uninsured unemployed men and women on to poor relief after 1920 presented problems. Too numerous to be placed in the workhouses, most received outdoor relief, sometimes in kind only, sometimes on performance of test labour. Guardians received little guidance from the Ministry of Health as to how to provide for them. As a result, as the Webbs put it: ‘The complicated and disordered dispensation of outdoor relief… is hard to describe in a way that will leave on the reader’s mind any other impression than a senseless confusion of methods and aims.’33 The Ministry of Health reminded local guardians in 1921 that even in the exceptional circumstances of mass unemployment, relief ‘should of necessity be calculated on a lower scale than the earnings of the independent labourer who is maintaining himself by his labour’.

The problem of the able-bodied unemployed was increased by the strikes of 1918–21 and the General Strike of 1926. Conflict as to whether strikers should be supported from public funds did not begin or end in the 1920s. A Court of Appeal judgement of 1900 (the Merthyr Tydfil judgement) had established that relief might not be paid to able-bodied men who refrained from work when employment was available to them. Relief might be paid to their families and to the men (and, though it was not considered, women) when destitution reduced them to a physical state which could no longer be deemed able-bodied. As always, the judgement was observed with varying degrees of punctiliousness. Guardians sympathetic to strikers evaded it by paying sufficient sums to wives to cover the entire family. It was widely evaded during the coal strike of 1921 and the 1923 dock strike. The Ministry of Health greeted the General Strike by reminding guardians to observe the strict letter of the law and laying down scales of relief lower than those currently paid in many Poor Law unions. The miners‘ trade unions had largely exhausted their strike funds before the General Strike. The total number of paupers in England and Wales rose from 1.2 million before the strike began to 2.1 million at its peak; in the month after the strike the total reached 2.4 million owing to the cumulative effects of the coal dispute which had precipitated the General Strike and outlasted it by many months. In most unions in which mining was a significant industry, more than 50 per cent of mining families were on relief. Again guardians responded variously, influenced less by the political inclinations of their members than by local conditions. In general, guardians in areas of high unemployment, whatever their political views, treated strikers more generously

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