Volume 1

The Minority report of the Poor law commission.

  • Great Britain. Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: The Minority report of the Poor law commission. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    joint committee. In the Metropolis the Local Government Board had to take the drastic step of taking the infectious sick and the imbeciles out of the hands of the Boards of Guardians, and entrusting them to a separate body, the Metropolitan Asylums Board, which has become virtually a Public Health Authority. Only in the Metropolis and in a score or so of large provincial towns has the persistent pressure of the Local Government Board now succeeded in inducing the Boards of Guardians to place the sick in separate Poor Law infirmaries; and that only imperfectly. In a majority of the Unions the local Destitution Authority, in the teeth of medical advice, insists on retaining all sections of the sick—the tuberculous, the cancerous, the venereal, the maternity cases, the children, the senile, and even sometimes the infectious—in the General Mixed Workhouse. The next class which the Local Government Board strove to get out of the General Mixed Workhouse was that of the able-bodied. Again the Boards of Guardians resisted, seeing no advantage in paying for the establishment of specialised institutions, even as “Test Workhouses” for 'the able-bodied. Presently, at Poplar in 1871, and again at Kensington in 1882, the Local Government Board took the opportunity of there being vacant accommodation to persuade the Board of Guardians to set aside a special building for the able-bodied of their own and of adjacent Unions. Similar experiments were started at Birmingham and Manchester. We shall point out, when we come to deal in Part II. with the able-bodied, how all these experi- ments, though strikingly successful in their purpose of diminishing able-bodied pauperism, were one and all brought to untimely ends in consequence of being en- trusted to a Destitution Authority unable to resist the constant temptation of using the vacant places for other classes of paupers. A similar tendency to reversion is seen in the various experiments that have been tried by indi- vidual Unions in segregating their own able-bodied for specialised treatment. Our study of their records shows that these experiments are always breaking down because the Destitution Authority cannot resist the temptation,