So, let me enlighten you, because the Victorian poor are, quite literally, my specialist subject.
The 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor was designed to echo Protestant culture of taking care of the less fortunate that spread across Europe in the 16th century. Essentially, the people who could afford it gave money to the church, who kept it in a giant chest in the church (the 'community chest', see also: Monopoly) and handed it out to the deserving poor. This meant the church got to decide who was deserving - vagrants (meaning anyone who wasn't normally resident in the parish) got short shrift. Most places also later built a workhouse to house people who needed it. They were usually quite small. To give a couple of local examples: Werrington workhouse was one of the thatched cottages near the village post office, and the one in Empingham was the house called The Wilderness. Cities had correspondingly larger workhouses. People could only claim relief from their home parish, under something called 'settlement'. You could acquire settlement by being born in a parish, marrying a man born in another parish and then moving there, or by working for more than a full year in the same parish before applying. This is part of the reason people didn't move around much in ye olden times - they risked losing their settlement, and thus any right to relief.
By the 1800s, parish relief rates, a local tax payable by landowners and freemen, were getting out of hand. The data showed massive regional variation in how much people paid, to support a massively variable poor population. Something needed to be done, and the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was introduced. This law was harsh, make no mistake. It was supposed to offer immediate incarceration in the workhouse to any able-bodied person approaching the parish for relief. It was meant to be a deterrent. New workhouses were built to consolidate all the small ones in the area: huge, prison-like edifices popped up in every registration district. They usually included an infirmary, and separated inmates into men and women. The new workhouses were run by the Board of Guardians, which replaced the parish as the administrative unit. They usually comprised local government figures, a few doctors and perhaps some of the local clergy. The settlement rules remained in force, and the Board were quite happy to pay to send petitioners back to their home workhouse if they could not prove settlement.
Theoretically, the Board were only supposed to offer the workhouse (or in-relief) to poor people, but they were never so rigid in practice. How could they have been? Following a poor harvest, entire agricultural communities would require workhouse beds. Even the largest workhouses couldn't accommodate everyone. So, they bent the rules and gave people out-relief, depending on need. This wasn't necessarily money - they could give out fuel, flour, potatoes. A great many old people remained in their homes until death thanks to out-relief. Should you engage in family history and discover someone living on 'parish relief', that is what it refers to. Sometimes, this relief was given in exchange for maintaining the roads. Widows were also commonly given out-relief, to prevent their children being taken into the workhouse. If a whole family sought help, it was not uncommon for the Guardians to admit the husband, and give the wife and children out-relief to keep them at home (and therefore, together).
The humanity of the Guardians depended very much on the area and its needs, but I have found many more examples of benevolence than of cruelty.
If you wanted relief, you had to go before the Guardians - the worst kind of job interview format you can think of. You had to demonstrate your right to settlement, your reasons for asking for help, and do so with enough humility to make them want to help you.
If you ended up in the workhouse, it was dehumanising. You were issued with a uniform, separated from your spouse and children (if they came in with you), and expected to work. The idea was to make the workhouse so horrible that nobody would choose to go there, thus saving money. But the very SIZE of the new workhouses demonstrated that the government were under no illusions about how this was going to work.
There were several food scandals in the early days of the workhouse, with people being fed starvation diets. These scandals were incredibly damaging to the reputation of the new Poor Law, mainly because the rich didn't want the blood of the poor on their hands. The Poor Law Board was implemented after the above scandal, to act as a sort of Care Quality Commission for workhouse safety.
The Board of Guardians, and workhouses, also served several other functions that rarely get referenced in general discourse. They provided residential care for the disabled, saving them from life in an asylum. They provided maternity services for unmarried women and those too poor to afford even basic private maternity cover. They issued medical orders to allow the poor to get medicine for free from the dispensary, and hospital admissions. They took the fathers of illegitimate children to court for maintenance on behalf of the mothers. They designed and built the first children's homes, and developed formal foster care. Now, none of this was done for solely benevolent reasons (child maintenance, for example, stopped them having to fund illegitimate children) or to anything approaching a modern standard of good practice, but in an era before the welfare state, the Poor Law WAS the welfare state.
In 1909, pensions were brought in for the first time for those who hadn't needed relief within the last five years. This was extended to universal provision in 1911, and marked the beginning of the slow end of workhouses. They still offered beds to tramps (read The Spike by George Orwell for a brilliant account of what being a tramp meant in those days), still offered maternity services for the unmarried (which was a source of immense shame in most areas), still offered inpatient care to disabled people, but essentially became hospitals. Peterborough workhouse morphed into Peterborough District Hospital over a number of years. Bourne workhouse became St Peter's Hospital, a residential home for disabled children and adults. The majority of remaining workhouses became Public Assistance Institutions in the 1930s, being subsumed into the NHS on inception, and most workhouse sites remain NHS-owned - one of Stamford's, for example, is an ambulance centre and residential service. Yes, affluent Stamford had two workhouses, housing 450 people, with a separate children's home.
So why did they stop? Who decided workhouses were a bad idea, and why? For the same reason the government decide anything: cost. It is not cheap to maintain buildings designed to house hundreds of people. It is not cheap to hire the staff - all workhouses had a master, a matron (usually the master's wife) and various medical staff. Cleaning etc. was done by the inmates, but these inmates needed to be fed. After the workhouse scandals of the early Poor Law reform, they needed to be fed so they wouldn't die. It is much cheaper to keep people in their own shitty homes than to pay for them to be housed in government-run buildings, with accompanying government standards, however appalling those standards are from the modern perspective.
And that remains the reason why reinstating workhouses would be a fucking terrible idea, morally, fiscally, practically. If you use people who are currently in receipt of not-in-work benefits as your basic admission criteria, you have a minimum inmate population of eight hundred and ninety THOUSAND, not including spouses/children. So now you have to build workhouses to house those 890000 people, their partners and children, including adequate heating, electrics, food, water, medical care, ensuring the housing complies with individual access needs for the myriad disabled people. You have to pay for staff, and their training, and a Workhouse Quality Commission. Workhouses are not prisons - the inmates have done nothing wrong aside from not being in work - so you better have adequate facilities. The compensation market for wrongful practice would make an absolute fortune.
Would that cost the government less than £70 per person per week? Would it fuck. Paying people their benefits directly absolves the government of responsibility if that person ends up in shit housing, with no electric, no medicine and no help. Put them in the workhouse, and the government better fucking deliver.
Here endeth the lesson.
Further reading:
The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948, Lynn Hollen Lees
The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution, Derek Fraser
The website www.workhouses.org offers a comprehensive catalogue of workhouses, children's homes and other institutions in England, often with pictures and maps.
