Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree

• Seebohm Rowntree was a devout Quaker all of his life. Believing that healthy, contented workers were also efficient workers, he championed democracy in the workplace, a minimum wage, family allowances and old age pensions.
• Rowntree conducted 3 surveys of poverty in York which supported the work of Charles Booth. He made it clear his aim was to find out both the numbers of people living in poverty and the nature of that poverty. He hoped to build on Booth's work and give more precision to Booth's idea of a 'poverty line'. He completed 3 surveys of poverty in York in 1899, 1941 and 1951.
• His first general survey of York was carried out in 1899 and published in 1901. He used one full-time investigator who made house-to-house visits, and relief too, on information from clergymen, teachers and voluntary workers. He was focusing on the working classes in York, whom he defined as those families where the head of the household was a wage earner and no servants were employed. Altogether, over 11000 households were visited (almost all wage earning households in York) and information obtained from over 45000 people, exactly 2/3 of York's population.
• Rowntree found that about 28% of the population of York were in obvious need and living in squalor. Using this information, he worked out the minimum wage that would be necessary for a family to live in a state of physical efficiency was 21 shillings a week. From this, he drew his poverty line, demonstrating that 10% of York lived below the poverty line and were therefore in primary poverty, whereas the remaining 18% were living in secondary poverty.
• Rowntree also uncovered what he called the 'poverty cycle'. He found that childhood was a time of poverty, conditions improved when the children grew and became wage earners and continued into their early married years. As soon as children were born, couples slipped below the poverty line and remained there until their children began to earn. After a period of relative prosperity when their children were grown, couples fell below the poverty line again when they were old and could no longer work.
• Helen Bosanquet (COS) attacked Rowntree's findings, claiming he had overestimated the level of poverty by setting the poverty line too high. Rowntree himself was aware of the shortcomings of his survey, recognising it was based mainly on observation. His work can be open to criticism for being to subjective.
• It must be remembered that the distinction between primary and secondary poverty was not designed to identify the poor. It was done to describe the nature of poverty. It must be noted that the criteria used by Rowntree didn't include income.
• Rowntree's criteria was similar to those used by Booth. They both found that around 30% of a total urban population were living in poverty at the end of the 19th century. And both investigators suggested that poverty was a state that was beyond the control of the poor.