Memoranda presented to the Royal Commission.

  • Great Britain. Royal Commission on Population.
Date:
1950
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Memoranda presented to the Royal Commission. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    29/128 (page 23)
    households (restaurants, canteens, schools, etc.). The contribution of the subsidies in reducing the cost of school meals will be treated under that heading. Apart from this, the contribution of subsidies is about 2s. per head per child, and about 2s. 9d. per head for adults (the difference being largely due to the fact that most of the subsidy paid in respect of food eaten outside the home accrues to adults). The subsidies to agriculture present a more complicated problem. These are paid either direct to farmers or on the goods farmers buy, and they result either in raising the income of farmers or lowering the price of the product. There is no way of discovering how the gain is divided between farmers and consumers or of knowing which particular consumers gain. There is a further difficulty: to a large extent these subsidies are intended to enable British farmers to sell at the same price as foreign farmers who are producing under more favourable conditions; to this extent, there is no gain to the consumer from these subsidies if the alternative were to buy from foreign sources. Thus, these subsidies are the cost of the self-sufficiency policy which has been adopted to meet the British foreign trade deficit. In this they present quite a different problem from that of the food subsidies on goods of general consumption. It would seem, therefore, preferable to consider the effect of the food subsidies on the basis of the figures of the previous paragraph. To do so would, however, be to underestimate their contribution both to poorer families and to larger families. The following calculations considerably overestimate this contribution, and provide an outside limit. The subsidies to agriculture are(‘): (‘) The following are the details of the increase in agricultural subsidies from 1938 to 1948. SUBSIDIES TO AGRICULTURE, 1948-49 United Kingdom (Net of Appropriations in Aid) Ministry of Agriculture and Department of Agriculture for Scotland £ Purchase and storage of tractors oy: cr ts 2,667,500 Grants for ploughing grassland 33 Ee a 3,950,000 Subsidy to hill sheep and hill cattle ... et es 5,057,000 Rehabilitation of hill farming land ... ee ef 808,000 Contribution to cost of lime ... sae iz ist 4,000,900 Crop acreage payments—potatoes ae ate BS 14,380,000 Crop acreage payments—wheat ope is ee 2,868,000 Crop acreage payments—rye ... oe ae ie 212,000 Grants in respect of rearing calves... AS 6,499,500 Grants for the assistance of marginal agricultural production... re oe ae oe, ae 300,000 £40,742,000 Ministry of Food British Sugar Corporation : zt Pe tae 3,000,000 Animal feeding stuffs and fertilisers ... “ae te 74,800,000 77,800,000 Total all subsidies aie ay ahd _.. £118,542,000 — Less subsidies in 1938-39 Oats and barley «.. des ee me fs eh 203,000 Beet sugar ve a ie a oi thes 2,550,000 Livestock ~ a He bea he Heri eo 1,250,000 3,903,000 Increase of Agricultural Subsidies... Ne Je) el tA 39- 000 All doubtful cases (Women’s Land Army, the cost of the War eat canal Executive Committees) have been excluded. (Compiled from the Civil Estimates, 1948-49 and 1938-39.)