Poor Law

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POOR LAW

In Britain, the term poor law was commonly applied to various laws that provided for the sick, disabled, and unemployed. A body of legislation from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was known collectively as the Poor Law or, after 1834, the Old Poor Law. In that year the old legislation was superseded by the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), which became known as the New Poor Law.

Under the Old Poor Law, poor relief was managed at the parochial level by an annually appointed overseer of the poor. In the main, provisions consisted of what was called outdoor relief: supplemental payments made to individuals or families living in their homes, rather than in workhouses or debtors' prisons. The Old Poor Law also included a series of acts of settlement designed to prevent vagrants and other outsiders from receiving the aid of the parish. The most significant of these was the Settlement Act of 1662, which facilitated the eviction of paupers, who were to be returned to the parishes of their birth.

The Old Poor Law was clearly designed to accommodate a society of small villages and limited mobility. Its provisions were by and large successful in such an environment, and the poor in England were generally regarded as being better off than their counterparts in the rest of Europe. But with demographic and other change in England, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, this increasingly failed to match reality.

In the face of inadequate wages and high food prices (exacerbated by the Napoleonic Wars), Speenhamland Parish in Berkshire experimented with a modified project of poor relief in 1795. The plan instituted a sliding-scale of outdoor relief, based on wages, number of dependents, and the current price of food. The scheme's intent was charitable, but an unfortunate (if hardly unforeseeable) consequence was that unscrupulous wage-payers could become even more ruthless, on the grounds that if wages were not adjusted to reflect living costs, the parish authorities would meet the difference. In spite of its shortcomings, some variant of the Speenhamland system, as it was called, quickly spread to most of the southern counties of England, and the amount English parishes paid for poor relief skyrocketed. In 1785, English parishes paid out about £2 million on poor relief. At its height, in 1818, English parishes provided £7,871,000 in poor relief, and in the last decade of the Old Poor Law, outdoor relief averaged around £7 million per year.

The abuses of the Speenhamland system, together with changing liberal attitudes regarding poverty and self-help, produced an environment that demanded reform. In 1832, the Whig government of Earl Grey (Charles Grey, 1764–1845) established a royal commission to investigate the workings of the Old Poor Law. Twenty-six commissioners visited about three thousand parishes, and filed their report in 1834. The government accepted its proposals and pushed through the Poor Law Amendment Act the same year. More commonly known simply as the New Poor Law, its major provisions included widespread establishment of workhouses and the curbing of outdoor relief. A workhouse was built for every parish or, in the case of small parishes, for a union of parishes. Outdoor relief was discontinued, so the able-bodied poor no longer received aid unless they agreed to live in the workhouses. To further discourage recourse to poor relief, workhouse inmates lived under extremely harsh conditions. (In the language of the Poor Law Amendment Act, conditions offered in a workhouse were to be "less desirable" than the poorest private dwelling.) A poor law commission was set up in London to supervise and support the work of parish poor law guardians, previously the sole responsibility of elected local officials.

In some respects, the New Poor Law was highly effective. From the point of view of expenditure, the poor rate dropped from about £7 million per year from 1830 to 1834 to between £4 and £5 million annually thereafter. Ratepayers and others who were convinced the poor were simply lazy and had brought their troubles on themselves could rest assured that the "less desirable" clause of the act guaranteed in most cases that only those truly in need would apply for aid. Moreover, meager and unappealing though it was, the diet provided in the workhouse was probably more nourishing than what many low-paid workers could have afforded.

Nonetheless, there was widespread opposition to the implementation of the New Poor Law. Under the Old Poor Law, the "deserving" poor—the aged, sick, handicapped, or widowed—and their dependents had come to expect relief in the comfort and dignity of their own homes. Similarly, the families of the "able-bodied" poor had come to rely on the Speenhamland system or other projects. But with the termination of outdoor relief, a pauper had to enter a workhouse to be eligible for aid, and many poor families suffered. Furthermore, workhouse inmates were housed by sex and age, so husbands, wives, and children were separated. As well as a stark and unappealing diet, other "less desirable" conditions in a workhouse included harsh, menial, and monotonous tasks. The aloof oversight of the workhouses by the London-based Board of Guardians was another source of resentment.

Anger with the New Poor Law occasionally led to riots, abuse of poor law officials, and attacks on the workhouses, which were popularly derided as Bastilles, after the hated prison of pre-Revolutionary Paris. Probably the most famous contemporary critic of the provisions of the New Poor Law was the novelist Charles Dickens who, in Oliver Twist (1838), aimed to arouse middle-class consciences. Indeed, it is chiefly through Dickens that the work-house and the plight of the poor in nineteenth-century England remains part of current vocabulary and imagination.

Although amended repeatedly throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, vestiges of the New Poor Law persisted until 1929, when Public Assistance Committees (PACs) replaced the Board of Guardians.

See alsoGreat Britain; Poverty; Welfare.