PLB 1847-75

• In 1847, the government replaced the PLC with the PLB. It was intended to rid of the administration of the Poor Law of arrogance, rigidity and cant, and link it more firmly to parliament.
• Within the PLB, the president and 2 secretaries undertook day-to-day work while several cabinet ministers sat on the Board ex officio. Furthermore, the president himself was an MP. In this way, those responsible for the administration of the Poor Law were answerable to parliament and responsive to public opinion.
• However, as part of the PLB, George Nicholls (one of the three original commissioners) was appointed permanent secretary to the Board and the assistant commissioners were renamed 'Poor Law Inspectors' and many stayed on, although their numbers were increased from 9 to 13.
• By 1847, it was clear it was impossible to abolish outdoor relief. Poor Law guardians regularly flouted orders prohibiting outdoor relief, applying pragmatic solutions to local difficulties. The irregular and infrequent visits of the assistant commissioners meant that local variations became the norm. In 1846, the PLC's last year of operation, there were over 1 million paupers in England and Wales but only just under 200000 received relief inside union workhouses.
• In 1852, the PLB attempted to incarcerate all the able-bodied paupers in workhouses by issuing a general order forbidding outdoor relief to the able-bodied. It failed. Many boards of guardians found loopholes, such as sickness in the family, to continue giving outdoor relief. This is because guardians preferred the cheaper alternative of outdoor relief.
• In East Anglia in 1860, it cost 3s 5 1/2d a week to keep a pauper in a workhouse and 1s 9d if the same pauper was on outdoor relief. Similarly, in London in 1862, it cost 4s 8d a week to keep a pauper in a workhouse but only 2s 3d if the same pauper was on outdoor relief.
• In the early 1860s, the American cotton crop failed, causing a crisis in the Lancashire cotton mills. Thousands of operatives needed short-term, outdoor relief. In order to ease the situation, the Public Works Act 1863 allowed local authorities to borrow money to set up work schemes to employ paupers. However, the crisis had passed before the scheme could come into play, meaning it failed.
• The special needs of pauper children were almost universally recognised. There was a growing belief that education was the way to ensure that pauper children didn't return to the workhouse as pauper adults. After 1834, children under 16 made up around 1/3 of all paupers in workhouses.
• The Poor Law (Schools) Act 1848 - allowed Poor Law unions to combine to provide district schools, where pauper children were educated in buildings often far away from the workhouse where they lived. Some progressive boards of guardians, such as in Leeds and Manchester, set up industrial schools, where pauper children lived and learned a trade.
• In the 1850s, some boards of guardians abandoned district schools in favour of smaller, on-site schools where boys were taught a trade and girls learned domestic skills.
• In the 1860s, some boards of guardians began to experiment with boarding paupers with working class families.
• The Foster's Education Act 1870 - set up board schools where there was no church provision and guardians were encouraged to send their pauper children to these, enabling them to mix with children outside the workhouse.
• Illness of the main breadwinner in a family was a major cause of poverty and eventually pauperism, yet Poor Law administrators paid little attention to the problem. Although the PLAA allowed for the employment and payment of medical officers, but these were poorly paid and seen as being part of the disciplinary structure of the workhouse.
• Boards of guardians frequently left their sick, injured and pregnant paupers to be treated in their own homes by Poor Law medical officers. This was one of the major forms out outdoor relief after 1834. In this way, cost were kept to a minimum - in 1840, only £150000 from a Poor Law expenditure of £34.5 million went on medical services.
• In the 1850s, Poor Law unions set up public dispensaries, which dispensed medicines to the general public as well as to paupers. From 1852, a poor person who couldn't pay for medical treatment or prescribed medicines automatically qualified for outdoor relief.
• However, Poor Law medical officers began complaining through the Poor Law Medical Officers' Association and through the Workhouse Visiting Society about the conditions in workhouse hospitals. Letters of complaints were published in The Lancet, which initiated its own enquiry into conditions in London workhouse hospitals. In 1866, The Times embarked on a campaign intent on demonstrating that sickness and poverty were different and should treated separately.
• 'Pauper hospitals' were often the only places where ordinary working people could get medical help. This was particularly the case in London, where the Metropolitan Poor Act 1867 had organised London into 'asylum' districts, which provided general, specialist, isolation and mental hospitals. The Poor Law thus began to provide a national, state funded system of medical care for paupers and the poor. This created a basic medical service for the poor for which they didn't have to pay.
• One of the driving forces of change in 1834 was this rising cost of the Poor Rate. The PLAA had grouped parishes into unions, but each parish had to pay for the maintenance of their own paupers. This meant parishes with the most paupers had to levy the highest poor rates and these were the parishes least able to afford them. In some areas, the burden of the Poor Rate was so heavy that parishes couldn't meet their commitments.
• The Union Chargeability Act in 1865 placed the financial burden of relief on the union as a whole. Each parish contributed to a common fund and its contribution was based on the rateable value of properties in the parish, not the number of paupers whom they were responsible for. Thus, richer parishes subsidised the poorer ones and those owning larger properties paid higher poor rates. However, there was no uniform rating system meaning that the owner of a property, for example, in Hertfordshire wouldn't pay the same Poor Rate as the owner of a similar property in Lancashire.
• Most boards of guardians were middle class and committed to keeping the rates low. This meant some Poor Law unions tried to claim they couldn't afford to build, for example, separate accommodation required by the PLAA for different classes of paupers. The Poor Law Loans Act 1869 attempted to ease the situation by allowing guardians to extend the repayments on loans for the Public Works commissioners to up to 30 years. Guardians could contemplate applying for the level of loan that would enable them to upgrade their facilities without adding too much to the Poor Rate they levied.