THE

ABOLITION OF
OF POOR LAW

GUARDIANS.

The Report of the Committee of the Society appointed to consider the Reform of the Poor Law, presented to the Society on 8th December, 1905, by EDWARD R. PEASE, the Secretary of the Committee, and subsequently adopted.

The Anarchy of Local Government.

THE growth of English Local Government, like that of the Parliament and the Cabinet, has been controlled by chance or the necessities of the moment, and the result has been an absence of system which at times has led to intolerable confusion.

Of late this ancient chaos has yielded to the need for order, and within the past two decades a series of reconstructive measures have reformed many old abuses and have placed the greater part of our local government on a comparatively sound basis.

The first of these steps towards reorganization was made by the Local Government Act of 1888, which established county councils. Since that date the rest of the local authorities of England have been overhauled and reconstituted, except the municipal boroughs, which had been reformed at a much earlier period (1835); the City of London, which remains a venerable relic of medieval methods combined, in fact, with a certain measure of modern efficiency; and the boards of guardians.

It is true that their electoral machinery was brought up to date in 1894, but in other respects their constitution was practically unaltered.

The chief peculiarities of the guardians are two. They are, with insignificant exceptions, the only remaining ad hoc elected bodies, that is, elected to perform one function of government. And secondly, the areas they control are the only ones which bear no fixed organic relation to the other areas of local government.

This irregularity, like the other anomalies of our system of government, is due to historical causes, and to the necessity in English politics for reform instead of revolution. Our political architects are bound to build upon the old foundations and to readapt designs drafted in remote ages.

The unit of local government is generally the parish, which varies in size according to the density of population in the days of the Saxons, modified by occasional piecemeal alterations in later centuries. By the Poor Law Act of 43rd Elizabeth each parish was made responsible for its own poor. During the eighteenth century certain parishes were incorporated for poor law purposes, and about 924 other parishes were united into 67 incorporations under Gilbert's Act of 1782. By the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, unions of the remaining parishes, 13,536 in number, were constituted throughout the whole of England and Wales; but as the Gilbert incorporations were unions of parishes often not contiguous, the task of uniting the remainder into other unions of convenient area was difficult, and sometimes impossible. Thus it came about that a union of parishes, formed originally for poor law purposes only, bore no necessary relation to the other existing local boundaries. Corporate towns with a keen sense of civic solidarity were split up between two or three unions, and the fragments were cemented to adjoining rural parishes otherwise in no respect organically or naturally connected with them. Even the ancient boundaries of the counties were not respected, and unions still exist composed of parishes in two and even three administrative counties.

A certain rearrangement has since been made, but the confusion to a great extent remains; and the results of it are in many respects more unfortunate, since other important duties besides the care of the poor have in later years been laid on the guardians.

The Relation of Unions to other Local Government

Areas.

At present the whole of England and Wales is divided into unions of parishes for poor law purposes. In a few cases, chiefly in London, the guardians control but a single parish. This is not strictly a "union," but the distinction is only technical, and we shall use the word union as meaning the area of a board of guardians, whether covering many parishes or only one.

The following table, kindly supplied to us by the Local Government Board, shows how these unions were distributed in July, 1905, in relation to other local government areas :—

POOR LAW UNIONS* IN ENGLAND and Wales (INCLUDING LONDON).†

* Poor law unions include separate parishes under the jurisdiction of boards of guardians.

Excluding the Isles of Scilly.

Including thirteen unions, each of which forms part only of the borough in which it is situated.

§ Including Dudley Union, which contains a small area not technically urban. || Including fourteen unions which comprise wholly urban areas.

Each of these unions comprises the whole of two or more boroughs or other urban districts.

From this table it will be seen that in about seventeen per cent. of the cases the area managed by the board of guardians precisely coincides with that managed by the rural district council. In these cases, it will be recollected, the guardians and the rural district councillors are the same persons, elected both to manage local government and to take care of the poor.

In another category of unions, forming nearly nine per cent. of the whole, the area of the guardians coincides with or is included in that of a local sanitary authority, whether metropolitan or other borough, or an urban district council.

In the remaining cases, forming nearly seventy-five per cent. of the whole in number, the problem of reconstruction is more complicated, because it involves a readjustment of areas.

Until 1944 the guardians had many duties in addition to the care of the poor. At present they are the authority for administering the Vaccination Acts and (except in London) the Infant Life Protection Act (against baby farming); they appoint the local registrars for births and deaths, and provide (often at the workhouse!) the local offices for civil marriage; and they are responsible for the poor rate assessment upon which practically all local rates are based.

The assessment is made by the overseers, but on the assessment committee of the guardians falls the duty of revising the list, and of hearing and determining appeals by objectors. Municipal boroughs can make their own assessment for their own rate, but in practice the power is not often exercised.

This complex system leads actually to waste. Each parish (e.g. in Hull, where there are ten parishes) has its separate establishment for rate collection.

It is, however, needless to labor the point. It is obvious that the guardians, elected as they are for the care of the poor, should not have left to them other small but important duties of a totally different character. Whether the care of the poor should or should not be transferred to another local authority, it will scarcely be denied that the remnant of other local governing duties still retained by the guardians should be handed over to the authority elected for the general purposes of local government.

During the session of 1904 the Government introduced an excellent Bill transferring the duties of valuation for the purposes of the rates from the guardians to the county authorities, but owing to want of time it was not passed.* The proposals of this Bill will no doubt in due time become law, and it is not necessary to argue that the Vaccination and Infant Life Protection Acts, which belong to the domain of public health, should be transferred to the local sanitary authority in each area.

The remaining duties of the guardians are the care of the poor.

The Four Stages of Poor Law Philosophy.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the machinery of the poor law, and not the principles of poor law administration. But the urgency of the proposed reform depends to a great extent on the inability of existing boards of guardians to keep abreast of modern social science, and to explain this a brief sketch of the four periods of poor law philosophy is necessary. Other stages of thought there were of great historic, but of little present political importance, which for our purposes may be disregarded.

* A Bill to amend the Law with respect to Valuation Authorities, etc. No. 166. 26 April, 1904.

For the latter see Fabian Tract No. 54, "The Humanizing of the Poor Law.”

1. THE PROFITABLE WORKHOUSE PLAN.

The idea of the Elizabethan poor law was that the community, besides giving relief to the old and the impotent, should provide an opportunity for the unemployed to work, and at an early date workhouses were built expressly for the purpose their name implies. During the next two hundred years the genuine "workhouse emerges at intervals always with high hopes, which were always doomed to disappointment. Then, as, indeed, often now, it was widely believed that the community could and should provide material and opportunity to work for those who could not find it for themselves, and that labor so organized would be profitable not merely to the character of the worker, but also in the commercial sense of the word. The expected profit was never permanently realized, and towards the end of the eighteenth century this idea was replaced by another.

2. THE "RATE IN AID OF WAGES."

This second dominant idea, originated in the eighteenth century, was systematized by the "Speenhamland Act of Parliament" of 1795, and prevailed up to 1834, not indeed universally, but very widely, especially in the southern counties. It gave rise to the principle that the community should guarantee to the poor a minimum income, and by the Speenhamland Act (a plan drawn up by the justices of Berkshire, and widely adopted elsewhere) this was graduated by a sliding scale according to the price of wheat and the size of the recipient's family. The wages paid by the farmers were supplemented out of the rates to produce the total family income adjudged necessary according to this scale.

The abuses to which this system gave rise were extraordinary. The services of paupers, that is, laborers, were sold by auction to the farmers; unemployed men were maintained doing useless work, not in times of exceptional distress, but habitually and constantly. The premium put on idleness and incapacity by the arrangements of society was preposterous. Reform was urgent, and it came with a rush.

3. THE SELF-SUFFICIENCY OF INDIVIDUALISM.

The reaction against the premature and inexpert collectivism of the old poor law led inevitably to the extreme individualism of the Amendment Act of 1834. Its principle was that each individual ought to be made to undertake the whole responsibility for his own maintenance and that of his family. In order to enforce this principle, the "workhouse test" was introduced, that is, the guardians were empowered to refuse outdoor relief and thus to compel the destitute to come into the workhouse. In the case of the ablebodied they were generally required to enforce this rule. Further, it was provided that life in a workhouse must be made less "eligible" than that of the worst-paid class of labor outside.

The reform had even greater results than its advocates anticipated. At the time and in the circumstances this stern and even