The welfare state in Britain takes its roots in the 18th-19th centuries when the first reforms were introduced by the state officials. The Poor Law of 1834 reformed the relief system of Great Britain and established a Poor Law Commission. Since that time, the state’s role in proving welfare and assistance increased greatly as the Commission controlled the performance of the poverty relief system. This Law established the system of workhouses for each union responsible for poverty relief. Unlike some state and local relief efforts, the benefits came in the form of food and did not allow workers to spend them any way they wished. In addition, the benefits were not portable and depended on remaining in the employ of one company or living in one location (Baggot, 2004).
The key features of the 1834 law were that: (1) a healthy person did not receive money or other help from the state, (2) conditions in workhouses were intentionally terrible and awful to support only people in need and discourage other workers to receive them; (3) every parish had a workhouse, (4) the elected Board of Guardians managed and controlled these workhouses; (5) Central Poor Law Commission members were appointed by the government. The main disadvantage of this Law was that it established unfavorable conditions for workers to enter the Workhouse and stipulated very strict and unreasonable norms of behavior inside the Workhouse.
For instance, people had to wear uniforms and were divided into yards. Only starving and extremely poor were accepted by the Workhouses (Martin 1989). Despite these limitations, the state established control over the poor population and supported people in need. Thus, adequate state pensions were not paid to all who qualified as poor. During the first half of the 19th century, support of all in need would be a costly endeavor for both the state and unions. The applicable standard of comparison continued to be the plan, which still attracted a great deal of state attention. Its main proponent contrasted its kindness with the inadequacy of the administration’s bill. The discipline that a contributory old-age support plan required clashed with the needs of the economy during the 19th century (Bernard 2004).
The next stage of development and transformations took place in 1911, influenced by labor unions and the ideas of William Beveridge, Britain adopted an unemployment compensation program. In contrast to public assistance plans, social insurance made the receipt of support a matter of entitlement and did away with the public welfare worker who scrutinized each candidate. Since that time, an employee carried protection with him from job to job (Hay, 2002). Even with these opportunities over poor relief, no upsurge developed for social insurance, in part because it was not a perfect substitute for the old poor law. Particularly, the poor laws, despite their often cruel treatment of the worker, had as much flexibility as local societies cared to give them. In an emergency, the local society could improvise relief standards such as vouchers good for groceries. The new social support programs followed rigid rules that did nothing for someone who had never worked. The Act both improved upon existing state welfare proposals and plans for the elderly and started a new social insurance program
The reasons for the change were the increased population of Britain, urbanization processes, and changes in production and manufacturing. The old system did not fit the well new structure of production and labor relations. In 1905, William Beveridge announced ‘the danger of weakening the motivation to work, supplied by the unions and the state, forms the greatest difficulty in the way of all plans and activities of industrial reform’. Beveridge was critical of attempts to improve public relief without first changing industrial conditions. He supposed that this state of matters would make relief excessively attractive to the lowest class (Hay, 2002).
Also, Beveridge added that reorganization of resources was useless if employees were induced to withdraw their labor from the industrial market; and on this issue, Beveridge was in complete agreement with the Poor Law Act of 1834. Despite the many limitations and weaknesses of his approach, Beveridge proposed an effective system for the state which helped it to support workers and permitted greater involvement of the state in public affairs. For instance, in his lecture at All Souls in 1905 Beveridge announced the doctrine of “absurd apotheosis of useful toil”, and of “labor for its own sake” (Hay, 2002, p. 76), which Beveridge supposed was dominant in all industrial relations. This principle was “a conscious device of the upper classes for stimulating industry in the lower classes’ and was ‘both base and false” (Hay, 2002, p. 74). During that time, many political leaders and economists saw unemployment as a function of inelastic wages; and it was a main factor of the post-1834 Poor Law that authentic unemployment did not really exist (Jones, 2000).
The political leaders and economists of the social relief system regarded it as a means of keeping state expenditures within acceptable limits. Many of them promised followers to accept the limits that restricted funds placed upon the social relief system. This accountable financing system required the accumulation of large reserves in the early years of the program (Fraser 2003). The presence of these large reserves, in turn, presented political leaders with a constant temptation to expand the program, creating large, unfunded burdens on the social relief system that would arise in the future. In this manner, careful financing could lead to reckless spending and undermine all of the planning that had gone into the program. The answer was to make the social relief system more available and more plentiful. With surpluses forming, the answer also proved to be the expedient reply. In a fortunate manner, a state could raise benefits, reduce future taxes, and lower the surplus. The social relief system needed to decide just how far to go, and in making that decision, politicians would inevitably have to make important political and social judgments (Jones, 2000).
In general, from 1834 through 1911 the state increased its control and management over the social relief system in Britain. The effective policy introduced in 1911 was in blending scientific, impartial program management and the imperatives of political management. Within broad boundaries, leaders wanted the right employees to get benefits, and they wanted to keep political options open, so that citizens, get to choose social relief programs. Social relief restricted the flow of information about the program and obscured the nature of the possible choices that needed to be made. Without the proper planning and because it was easy to expand the proposal in the beginning, political leaders not always acted in the public’s interest. They overexpanded the social relief and promised more to future workers than the program could reasonably deliver. Therefore, political leaders argued, there was a crisis in the Poor Law that demanded redress. The potential for conflict satiation existed in abundance. If, for instance, workers got benefits under social relief, then it was inevitable that some workers who did not need the benefits would nonetheless receive them. During this period, then was a shift toward a system that recognized certain social problems as more pressing than others and took steps to solve them. A new program created at the beginning of the 20th century needed to be modified for a time of prosperity.
Bibliography
Baggot, R. 2004, Health and Health Care in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan; 3rd Revised edition edition.
Bernard, H. 2004, The Origins of the British Welfare State. Palgrave Macmillan.
Jones, K. 2000, The making of social policy in Britain: from the poor law to new labor.. Continuum International Publishing Group – Athlone; 3rd Revised edition edition.
Fraser, D. 2003, The evolution of the British welfare state. Palgrave Macmillan; 3rd Revised edition edition.
Hay, J. R. 2002, The Development of the Welfare State in Britain, 1880-1975. Palgrave Macmillan.
Martin, H. 1989, History in the Making: The Welfare State Britain Since 1800. Nelson Thornes.