Poor Law

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The Poor Law was the system for the provision of social security in operation in England and the rest of the United Kingdom from the 16th century until the establishment of the Welfare State in the 20th century. It was made up of several Acts of Parliament and subsequent Amendments. The extreme longevity of the Poor Law meant that some of the generalisations made about it refer to only a part of its history.

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The classification of the poor

During the time of the Poor Law system in Britain, the poor fell mainly into three categories:

  • The 'impotent' poor could not look after themselves or go to work. They included the ill, the infirm and the elderly. It was generally held that they should be looked after.
  • The 'able-bodied' poor normally referred to those who were unable to find work - either due to cyclical or long term unemployment in the area, or a lack of skills. Attempts to assist these people, and move them out of this category, varied over the centuries, but usually consisted of relief either in the form of work or money.
  • The 'vagrants' or 'beggars' were deemed those who could work but had refused to. They were normally seen as people needing punishment, and as such were often sent to so-called 'houses of correction'.
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The Act of 1601

Acts of 1536, 1572, 1576 and 1597 prescribed relief for the poor on a parish basis. The Act of 1572 made poor relief the subject of local taxation, while the 1576 Act made provision for "setting the poor on work and for avoidance of idleness", including the creation of "houses of correction" for persistent idlers.

The Poor Law Act 1601 formalised earlier practices. It created a national system, paid for by levying local rates (or property taxes). It made provision:

  • to provide work or apprenticeships for children who were orphaned or whose parents could not maintain them,
  • to provide materials to "set the poor on work"
  • to offer relief to people who were unable to work — mainly those who were "lame, impotent, old, blind", and
  • "the putting out of children to be apprentices".

Relief for those too ill or old to work, the so called 'impotent' poor, were normally cared for in parish alms houses. Meanwhile able-bodied beggars who had refused work were often placed in houses of correction. However, provision for the many able-bodied poor in the workhouse, which provided accommodation at the same time as work, was relatively unusual, and most workhouses developed later.

There was much variation in the application of the law and there was a tendency for the destitute to migrate towards the more generous parishes. This led to the Settlement Act 1662 which allowed relief only to established residents of a parish - mainly through birth, marriage and apprenticeship. The Act was criticised in later years for its effect in distorting the labour market, through the power given to parishes to let them remove 'undeserving' poor.

Some of the legislation was punitive. In 1697 an act was passed requiring the poor to wear a "badge" of red or blue cloth on the right shoulder with an embroidered letter "P" and the initial of their parish. However, this was often disregarded. Alcock complained, in 1752, that "these marks of distinction have had but little effect, and for that Reasons, I suppose, have been almost everywhere neglected."

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The eighteenth century

The eighteenth-century workhouse movement began at the end of the seventeenth century with the establishment of the Bristol Corporation of the Poor, founded by Act of Parliament in 1696. The corporation established a workhouse which combined housing and care of the poor with a house of correction for petty offenders. Following the example of Bristol some twelve further towns and cities established similar corporations in the next two decades. Because these corporations required a private Act, they were not suitable for smaller towns and individual parishes.

Starting with the parish of Olney, Buckinghamshire in 1714 several dozen small towns and individual parishes established their own institutions without any specific legal authorization. These were concentrated in the South Midlands and in the county of Essex. From the late 1710s the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge began to promote the idea of parochial workhouses. The Society published several pamphlets on the subject, and supported Sir Edward Knatchbull in his successful efforts to steer the Workhouse Test Act through parliament in 1723. The act gave legislative authority for the establishment of parochial workhouses, by both single parishes and as joint ventures between two or more parishes. More importantly, the Act helped to publicise the idea of establishing workhouses to a national audience. By 1776 some 1912 parish and corporation workhouses had been established in England and Wales, housing almost 100,000 paupers. Although many parishes and pamphlet writers expected to earn money from the labour of the poor in workhouses, the vast majority of people obliged to take up residence in workhouses were ill, elderly, or children whose labour proved largely unprofitable. The demands, needs and expectations of the poor also ensured that workhouses came to take on the character of general social policy institutions, combining the functions of creche, and night shelter, geriatric ward and orphanage.

In 1782, Thomas Gilbert finally succeeded in passing an act that established poor houses solely for the aged and infirm and introduced a system of outdoor relief for the able-bodied. This was the basis for the development of the Speenhamland system, which made financial provision for low-paid workers.

Dissatisfaction with the system grew at the beginning of the 19th century. The 1601 system was felt to be too costly and was widely perceived as encouraging the underlying problems - pushing more people into poverty even while it helped those who were already in poverty. Jeremy Bentham argued for a disciplinary, punitive approach to social problems, whilst the writings of Thomas Malthus focused attention on the problem of overpopulation, and the growth of illegitimacy. David Ricardo argued that there was an "iron law of wages". The effect of poor relief, in the view of the reformers, was to undermine the position of the "independent labourer".

In the period following the Napoleonic Wars, several reformers altered the function of the "poorhouse" into the model for a deterrent workhouse.

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The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834

In 1832, a royal commission was launched to review the operation of the system. It was strongly influenced by Nassau Senior who did much of the work involved with diagnosing the problems and proposing and implementing solutions. In the view of the reformers, two measures under the old Poor Law had particularly served to undermine the position of the independent labourer. One was the provision of out-relief, such as the "Speenhamland system", (named after the parish in which it was conceived) where the families of labourers were given money proportional to the price of bread. The system was seen as a support for low wages, and was believed to create an incentive to employers to reduce wages below subsistence. The other was the use of pauper labour - the labour rate system where rate payers took it in turn to employ the able-bodied poor, and the roundsman system, where rate payers chose whether to pay the poor rate or employ able-bodied poor for a set period of time. This was believed to undercut the labour market.

The Royal Commission's findings, which had most probably been predetermined, were that the old system was badly and expensively run. The Commission's recommendations were based on two core principles. The first was "less eligibility": that the position of the pauper should be less eligible (that is, less to be chosen) than that of the independent labourer. The other was the "workhouse test", that relief should only be available in the workhouse. The reformed workhouses were to be uninviting, so that anyone capable of coping outside them would choose not to be in one.

When the act was introduced however it had been partly watered down. The workhouse test and the idea of "less eligibility" were never mentioned themselves, and the core recommendation of the Royal Commission - that 'outdoor' relief (relief given outside of a workhouse) should be abolished - was never implemented.

The bill established a Poor Law Board to oversee the operation of the system on a national scale. This included the forming together of small parishes to form Poor Law Unions, or simply Unions, which were jointly responsible for the administration and funding of the Poor Law in their area. The areas of the Unions were based where convenient on existing local administrative units, such as the hundreds, but where these were not suitable, they were disregarded and new units established. (The areas of the Unions were later used for other functions, such as the districts for civil registration).[1] The Unions were run by Boards of Guardians, partly elected by ratepayers, but also including magistrates.

The shortcomings of the system and the abuses by its administrators are documented in the novels of Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope. The perceived injustices of the system were widely and vividly illustrated in fiction. The most notable contributions include:

Dickens made his opinion absolutely explicit in the Postscript to Our Mutual Friend (1865):

That my view of the Poor Law may not be mistaken or misrepresented, I will state it. I believe there has been in England, since the days of the STUARTS, no law so often infamously administered, no law so often openly violated, no law habitually so ill-supervised. In the majority of the shameful cases of disease and death from destitution, that shock the Public and disgrace the country, the illegality is quite equal to the inhumanity—and known language could say no more of their lawlessness.

Despite the aspirations of the reformers, the Poor Law was unable to make the workhouse as bad as life outside: one attempt to do so, at the Andover workhouse, led to a national scandal in 1845. The administrators of the Poor Law came increasingly to rely on the "stigma" or shame associated with the Poor Law. The "deserving poor" might be dealt with differently - the Charity Organisation Society, working primarily in London, advocated a firm distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor, and the Poor Law was directed at the "undeserving".

The Poor Law was for some decades the only local administration in much of the United Kingdom, and the powers of the Guardians were gradually expanded to include certain aspects of education, public health and hospitals. This system became the basis for local government in England and Wales. The Local Government Board took over some functions from the Poor Law in 1871, while other functions (such as education, hospitals and welfare provision) were transferred to local government in later periods.

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The end of the Poor Law

The reforms of the Liberal Government 1906-14 made several provisions to provide social services without the stigma of the Poor Law, including Old age pensions and National Insurance, and from that period fewer people were covered by the system. Means tests were developed during the inter-war period, not as part of the Poor Law, but as part of the attempt to offer relief that was not affected by the stigma of pauperism.

Workhouses were officially abolished by the Local Government Act 1929, which from 1 April 1930 abolished the Unions and transferred their responsibilities to the county councils and county boroughs. Some however persisted into the 1940s. The remaining responsibility for the Poor Law was given to local authorities before final abolition in 1948.

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See also

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External links

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