3.6 Social and Welfare Reforms

• Topics


  • Poverty
  • Social and welfare re
  • action, 1880-1914
  • pressure for social reform in the years 1880-1914
  • Significance of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, 1905-09
  • Were the Liberal government reforms, 1906-14, effective in relieving poverty
• The late 18th century and most of the 19th century were characterised by large numbers of reports and surveys, commissions and enquiries
• There was a hunger for information about the poor and about poverty, and a need to answer the questions How many?" "Where?" and "What does relief cost?
• These were characterised by the use of anecdotal, qualitative material, usually to support previously held beliefs about poverty
• Emphasis was placed on the individual's character and lifestyle in bringing them to, and keeping them in, poverty
• The increasing attraction of the doctrine of utility in managing policy, particularly when applied to pauperism, meant that all forms of administrative activity tended to be evaluated by their tendency to enhance the lives of the greatest number of people
• By the early 20th century, poverty had come to be seen as a problem that could be solved, and solved by increasingly expensive intervention on the part of the state
• Investigators began using quantitative measurements and analysis, and redefined poverty as a failure to reach an accepted minimum standard of living
• Evaluation of all forms of administrative activity was measured by the tendency it had to attack the causes of poverty, not reform the paupers
• The doctrine of utility was challenged and eventually died as a philosophy underpinning the treatment of the poor
• Minister Arthur Balfour


  Helps develop a government policy on pensions
• Charles Booth was a wealthy serious-minded entrepreneur, whose social conscience drove him to investigate the nature of poverty in London
• Booth employed a team of up to 35 co-workers over a period of some 17 years to undertake a detailed study of the poor in London
• Their findings moved the debate forward in that Booth was convinced that most of the poor were in distress through circumstances beyond their own control
• Charles Booth's involvement in the intellectual and socially aware radical circles in London led him to reject the hard line of the COS (see Chapter 5) that poverty was the fault of the poor
• Booth was not, as a successful entrepreneur, prepared to go as far as some thinkers and blame the capitalist system itself for creating poverty
• After some involvement with the 1885 Mansion House Enquiry into Unemployment, Booth was ready
• Booth was not content, as Mayhew had been, simply to describe the conditions in which the poor lived, but wanted to explore why they lived as they did
• Booth wanted to explore the idea that there might be structural explanations for poverty, not just moral ones
• Booth's findings


  Detailed and carefully analysed in 17 volumes, based on observation only
• Booth did not take into account income when defining poverty
• Booth's measure of poverty was subjective and unreliable
• Helen Bosanquet of the COS criticised Booth's social survey method as having no underpinning philosophy or principle
• Bosanquet disputed the 'facts' on which Booth's 'poverty line' was based as they were produced by the dubious survey method
• Bosanquet condemned the false impression of definiteness Booth's findings conveyed
• Bosanquet attacked the statistical basis of Booth's findings, claiming it underestimated the income level of poor families
• Bosanquet championed the family case-work approach of the COS and criticised Booth's workers for relying on primary research findings of school board members and teachers
• Booth's findings were further doubted by historians in the last decades of the 20th century
• The later interpretation of Booth's findings
• Publishes Poverty and the Welfare State, his third study of poverty in York


  1951
• Rowntree's enquiries


  Seebohm Rowntree conducted three surveys of poverty in York that provided a wealth of statistical data and which supported the findings of Charles Booth in London
• Rowntree's aim


  To find out both the numbers of people living in poverty and the nature of that poverty
• Rowntree's first general survey of York


  1. Carried out in 1899

  2. Findings published in 1901

  3. Used one full-time investigator who made house-to-house visits

  4. Relied on information from clergymen, teachers and voluntary workers

  5. Focused on the working classes in York, defined as those families where the head of the household was a wage earner and no servants were employed

  6. Visited 11,560 households (almost all the wage-earning households in York)

  7. Obtained information from about 46,754 people, exactly two-thirds of the total population of the city
• Helen Bosanquet of the COS immediately attacked Rowntree's findings in much the same way as she attacked those of Charles Booth
• As with Booth, she claimed 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 that it was based mainly on observation
• He does, too, describe how he arrived at the number of people who were living in primary and secondary poverty, and this can be open to criticism as being too subjective
• Poverty, public health and the state in Britain, c1780-1939

  • Historical and economic
  • Advocates that the means of production should be owned and democratically controlled by the community as a whole
• The Fabian Society


  A think tank
• The 1880s saw an upsurge of socialist activity in Britain and the Fabian Society


  1. Was both part of the huge and one of its leaders

  2. Founded in London in January 1884

  3. Had as its object advancing the principles of socialism in a gradual, non-confrontational way

  4. Grew out of an older society, the Fellowship of the New Life

  5. Increasing pressure from some members to politicise their approach led to the formation of a separate society, the Fabian Society, which absorbed The Fellowship of the New Life in 1898