Impact of indoor relief on pauperism (3.3)

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Workhouses

  • impotent poor - sick, old and mentally ill, were to be looked after in poorhouses
  • able-bodied poor who wanted relief were set to work in a workhouse
  • pauper children were to be apprenticed to a trade so that they could support themselves when they grew up
  • not cost effective to provide for paupers in this way
  • 1780 - 2000 workhouses in England and Wales providing 90,000 places for paupers
  • transfer of authority away from parish overseers to elected and appointed guardians of the poor
  • overseers tended to be local farmers and tradesmen
  • guardians were drawn from the ranks of magistrates, gentyr and upper ranks of tenant farmers
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Gilbert's Act 1782

  • the ending of the American war of Indepence in 1782 resulted in demobilised soldiers and sailors flooding the labour market where not all could find employment
  • industrialisation attracted people to the towns
  • there were very real fears that there would be a considerable increase in people seeking relief and that parishes would find it diificult to cope
  • parishes could combine in PL unions for the purpose of building and maintaining a workhouse
  • in Gilbert unions, overseers were to be replaced by paid guardians, appointed by local magistrates chosen from a list supplied by ratepayers
  • Gilbert union workhouses solely for the aged, sick and children
  • permissive act
  • overseers required to submit annual returns of poor law expenditure
  • parishes slow to adopt the act
  • 1834 - 924 parishes had combined into 67 Gilbert Unions
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The Sturges-Bourne Acts, 1818 and 1819

  •  permissive and only applied to those parishes whose vestries voted to adopt the new provisions
  • to tie the landowners, gentry and well-to-do more firmly intot he administration of the poor laws
  • the first act did this by laying down how voting was to be managed when electing men to the parish select vestries that were responsible for the local administartion of the poor laws
  • a second act added a resident clergyman to the members of the vestry
  • this act instructed vestries to take account of an applicant's character and circumstances, distinguishing between the deserving and the underserving poor when considering who should receive relief
  • 1825 - 46 select vestries had been formed, and many experienced a remarkable drop in the cost of relief
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Less eligibility and the workhouse test

  • 1823 - Nottinghamshire established large Gilbert Union of some 49 parishes
  • Rev Robert Lowe is credited with introducing the policy of less eligibility
  • less eligibility - conditions inside the workhouse had to be less desirable than conditions outside
  • workhouse test - a self-selecting test of destitution. Only the genuinely needy would accept relief on these terms
  • children, the sick, disabled and the elderly were exempt from the policy of less eligibility and the workhouse test because they were deemed worthy of relief
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