Origins of the Welfare State V5

Nicholas Deakin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000558128
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2004. Consisting of both shorter pieces and reprints of entire books, this set restores to circulation a number of key texts from the debate about the future of welfare that took place in Britain following the depression. The collection covers the following areas: The period during which the country felt the full impact of the world depression. A number of solutions were put forward during this time to address the arising issues - in particular the consequences of mass unemployment. The approaches ranged from orthodox Marxism to modified conservatism and "middle opinion" A key feature of the debate was the concept of planning as a device to enable governments to cope with economic and social problems. * A range of different ideas were widely canvassed during the war years. It was considered that successful conduct of war could then be applied to the problems of peace. This set resurrects certain proposals, influential in the climate of the times, which have subsequently dropped out of circulation Early assessments dealing with the implications of Welfare State legislation are also included. Although the implementation of the welfare programme was in effect a bipartisan process it did not take long for doubts to be expressed - some of which were directed at the principles on which the Welfare State was being constructed. Volume 5 includes Britain's way to social security; Full employment in a free society and The case for family allowances.

BRITAIN’S WAY TO SOCIAL SECURITY

by

Francois Lafitte

PILOT PRESS

45 GREAT RUSSEL STREET, W.C.1

1945

PART I. BUILDING THE SOCIAL SERVICES

VICTORIAN TIMES

DOI: 10.4324/9781003101611-1

Anyone over fifty can remember Queen Victoria’s funeral. Yet the forty years which separate the Boer War from the Nazi War have been so crowded with changes—scientific, industrial, social, intellectual, moral— that even elderly people find it difficult to recapture the mental atmosphere and social attitudes of the closing years of the Victorian age. The effort to think back is worth making.

Forty years ago another war—against the Boers—had just ended. From all sides came demands for social reform. But a public which knew nothing of vitamins scarcely recognised the existence of a malnutrition problem; and unemployment was still regarded almost wholly as a personal defect of individuals rather than as a problem of society. Apart from education, most of the social services which are so critically discussed today simply did not exist. An extremely limited workmen’s compensation scheme and a very defective Poor Law were the only “social insurance and allied services” then provided. There were no meals or milk or regular medical supervision for school children; no employment services; no legal minimum wages or statutory holidays with pay; no unemployment or sickness insurance; no pensions for widows, orphans, old people or the blind.

SELF HELP

In those days the worker was expected to fend for himself in all the contingencies of life—he could apply for charity or poor relief if all else failed. Thrift was his first line of defence; and, especially after 1850, the common man’s determination to stand on his own feet was shown by the great expansion of friendly, industrial and provident societies, by the growth of the trade union and co-operative movements, by the development of the burial insurance business, and by the swelling deposits in the Post Office and Trustee Savings Banks. In 1845 Disraeli had estimated that “the Benefit Societies have money in the banks that would maintain the whole working classes ... for six weeks.” By 1903 the accumulated savings of ordinary folk amounted to about £450,000,000—perhaps enough to maintain them for six months. A few trade unions provided out-of-work benefits and sick-pay for their members and sometimes superannuation allowances when funds permitted. Out of the eighteenth century network of fraternities and local benefit clubs, with their common funds for sick-pay, burial money and other purposes, had grown the modern friendly society movement, led by the nation-wide, financially more dependable “centralised” and “affiliated” societies Many societies, together with a variety of special medical clubs, made contracts with individual doctors to secure medical care for their members.

The genuine friendly societies had increasingly relinquished the provision of burial expenses and petty life insurance to agencies specialising in “industrial assurance” In place of mutual associations built up by the workers for themselves, large-scale “collecting societies” organised for the workers by sharp-witted agents had emerged. Already by 1870, say Wilson and Levy (Industrial Assurance, 1937), “a new class of intermediary strangers had come into existence, replacing the old bond of personal faith and friendship by commercial instincts scarcely hidden behind a veil of demonstrative humanity and friendliness.” These bodies, in turn, were being increasingly outstripped by commercial companies— among which the Prudential led the way—built up by business men for business reasons, to turn to their own advantage the workman’s dread of a “pauper’s funeral.”

CHARITY

The benefits, often precarious enough, of these laboriously built-up thrift institutions were reserved for a minority of relatively prosperous skilled workers who could afford to save. The majority of the common people throughout the Victorian age were too poor and insecure to hope of paying regular contributions to a union or a friendly society, or to pile up a dividend at the Co-op. They had only charity or the Poor Law to fall back upon. Nearly all Britain’s best hospitals were then charitable foundations, voluntary hospitals giving their services free of charge to all in need; and charity was responsible for starting dispensaries in many towns for the medical treatment of those without a friendly society or doctor’s club to help them. There were also many endowments to provide alms houses or pensions for respectable old people.

But the bulk of charitable endeavour took the form of countless funds and organisations to dole out cash, food and clothing to the “deserving poor.” This alms-giving was generally conducted by well-meaning sentimentalists, who badgered the rich for large sums of money which they distributed indiscriminately among all who applied for relief. The Poor Law authorities made matters worse by doling out relief without discrimination, and at rates which were invariably insufficient because it was taken for granted that charity would supplement the relief they gave. These methods were wasteful and ineffective; they fostered conscience-salving self-indulgence among the rich, while sapping the morale of a section of the poor by the encouragement of scrounging and dishonesty. The Charity Organisation Society, founded in 1869, did much to improve the quality of charity work by insisting on careful and constructive casework so that each individual could be helped in the way best calculated to restore him to independence. But so clearly did some of its leaders see the personal factor in poverty that for far too long they shut their eyes to the at least equally important social factors which were beyond the individual’s control.

THE POOR LAW

Finally, there was the Poor Law, the grandmother of all our modern social services. The Victorian Poor Law was essentially an instrument designed during the Industrial Revolution to coerce a people still clinging to the habits of village life into accepting the discipline of the master’s machine and his clock, and work away from home on another man’s material and instruments and on his terms. It was fashioned by a Royal Commission in 1832–34, which laid down two basic principles for the treatment of “able-bodied paupers”: (1) if relief were granted at all, it should be granted in such a way as to place the “able-bodied pauper” in “a condition less eligible than that of the independent labourer of the poorest class”; and (2) wherever possible no “able-bodied pauper” should be granted relief, “except as to medical attendance,” unless he agreed to enter “a well-regulated workhouse.” In “some rare cases” this would cause hardship, but no exceptions should be made. “Where cases of real hardship occur, the remedy must be applied by individual charity, a virtue for which no system of compulsory relief can be or ought to be a substitute”

The history of the Victorian Poor Law is a story of repeated, but repeatedly less successful, attempts to carry out “the principles of 1834.” The Poor Law was an “omnibus” service, dealing with every type of want and distress The Guardians had no staffs to investigate individual cases properly, so they usually worked on the principle of penalising all “paupers” alike for fear of wasting money on liars and loafers They were not obliged to provide anything more than workhouse relief, though they were permitted, without being encouraged, to give outdoor relief to “paupers” who were aged or “impotent.” The unemployed were usually offered the “House.” If they received outdoor relief, it was subject to “labour test,” in which tramps, loafers and decent men were all lumped together on work that was neither satisfying nor useful. A system which, as Lord Samuel remarked, was “elaborately framed for the punishment of the idle and the vicious,” was applied equally to men of good character who had the misfortune to be without work Widows, unless they had several children, were usually offered the workhouse or nothing. A widow with several children might be offered the workhouse for her children and told to go and work for her living; or, if she were “respectable” and able to supplement her relief by other means, she might get a meagre outdoor pittance, sometimes only in kind. Seventy per cent of the widows on outdoor relief in 1910 were earning, but their earnings were largely wasted because they had to neglect their children in order to work.

The aged were somewhat better treated, though without much consistency. Some Guardians relieved the aged only when they were infirm as well; others had a fixed age at which a “pauper” ceased to be able-bodied and would be treated more generously as an old person. Outdoor relief of the aged was common, but the threat of the “House” was widely used to induce relatives to support old people. Nearly one-third of all people over 65 in 1894 were receiving poor relief.

By the death of Queen Victoria the development of separate Poor Law infirmaries was bringing into being a system of public hospitals whose services in many areas were so much in demand that it was becoming increasingly difficult to reserve them exclusively for those who were technically “paupers.” But “medical relief” outside the infirmaries was very inadequately provided by over-worked, underpaid and usually part-time district medical officers. In most areas they had to supply drugs out of their own salaries! Their services were reserved for the “destitute,” who in one district might be defined as all below a certain income level, while in another district the only people eligible might be those actually on relief or those who could only afford a doctor if they ceased to buy food. “Medical relief” was often granted only as a loan, or only for a few days. Sickness was a major cause of “pauperism.” Persons receiving medical treatment constituted one-third of all “paupers” in 1907 and absorbed at least one-half of all Poor Law expenditure.

Finally the “general mixed workhouse” in which the able-bodied and the sick, the very old and the very young, the immoral, the half-witted and the respectable all rubbed shoulders, was as late as 1909 still the typical Poor Law institution. Very little had been done to give effect to the recommendat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Britain's Way to Social Security
• Full Employment in a Free Society
• The Case for Family Allowances