Poor law union

Last updated
Poor law union
  • Also known as:
  • Poor law district
CategoryAd hoc board
Location England and Wales
Created by Poor Law Amendment Act 1834
Created
  • 1834
Abolished by
Abolished
  • 1930
Additional status
Government
Subdivisions

A poor law union was a geographical territory, and early local government unit, in Great Britain and Ireland.

Contents

Poor law unions existed in England and Wales from 1834 to 1930 for the administration of poor relief. Prior to the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 the administration of the English Poor Laws was the responsibility of the vestries of individual parishes, which varied widely in their size, populations, financial resources, rateable values and requirements. From 1834 the parishes were grouped into unions, jointly responsible for the administration of poor relief in their areas and each governed by a board of guardians. A parish large enough to operate independently of a union was known as a poor law parish. Collectively, poor law unions and poor law parishes were known as poor law districts. The grouping of the parishes into unions caused larger centralised workhouses to be built to replace smaller facilities in each parish. Poor law unions were later used as a basis for the delivery of registration from 1837, and sanitation outside urban areas from 1875. Poor law unions were abolished by the Local Government Act 1929, which transferred responsibility for public assistance to county and county borough councils.

England and Wales

The English Poor Laws [1] laid out the system of poor relief that existed in England and Wales [2] from the reign of Elizabeth I [1] until the emergence of the modern welfare state after the Second World War. [3] Historian Mark Blaug has argued that the Poor Law system provided "a welfare state in miniature, relieving the elderly, widows, children, the sick, the disabled, and the unemployed and underemployed". [4]

The functions of poor law unions were exercised by boards of guardians, partly elected by ratepayers, but also including magistrates.

Some parishes, many in the metropolitan area of London, were able to avoid amalgamation into unions because of earlier local acts that regulated their poor law administration. The Metropolitan Poor Act 1867 (30 & 31 Vict. c. 6) allowed the Poor Law Board to include these parishes in unions. [5]

Until 1894 the guardians consisted of justices of the peace along with other members elected by rate-payers, with higher rate-payers having more votes. JPs were removed and plural voting stopped in 1894, but nobody actually receiving poor relief was allowed to vote.

Their areas were espoused for other functional districts, such as civil registration of all births, marriages and deaths which became law from 1837 and rural sanitary districts established in 1875. [6]

In 1894 rural districts and urban districts were set up based on the sanitary districts (and therefore indirectly on the unions). In 1930, under the Local Government Act 1929, the poor law unions were finally abolished and their responsibilities transferred to the county councils and county boroughs.

Ireland

Under the Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1838, three Poor Law Commissioners divided Ireland into poor law unions, in which paupers would receive poor relief paid for by a poor rate extracted by local poor law valuations (ratings of rate payers). [7] [8] The name "union" was adopted from the English model although boundaries were unrelated to civil parishes. A union was named after the town on which it was centred, usually where its workhouse stood. Unions were defined as groups of poor law electoral divisions, in turn groups of townlands. Electoral divisions returned members (guardians) to the board of guardians, to which ratepayers who paid higher rates had more votes. [9] [10] During and after the Great Famine, the impoverished west was redrawn to create more unions for easier administration and for computation of where suffering was most endemic. When the Irish General Register Office was established in 1864, each union became a superintendent registrar's district, thus electoral divisions together formed a dispensary or registrar's district. [11] [12] The Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898 divided administrative counties into urban and rural districts, with each rural district corresponding to the non-urban portion of a poor law union within the county. In the Irish Free State, poor law unions and rural districts were abolished in 1925 and the powers of boards of guardians transferred to the county councils' Board of Health. [13] In Northern Ireland, poor law unions survived until the Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Service in 1948. [11]

Scotland

The Poor Law in Scotland was reformed by the Poor Law (Scotland) Act 1845. Poorhouses (as workhouses were generally known in Scotland) were organised at parish level. [14] The Act permitted, but did not require, parishes to join to build and operate poorhouses. A union of parishes operating a single poorhouse was known as a Combination. [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">English Poor Laws</span> Laws regarding poverty in England, 16th–19th century

The English Poor Laws were a system of poor relief in England and Wales that developed out of the codification of late-medieval and Tudor-era laws in 1587–1598. The system continued until the modern welfare state emerged after the Second World War.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Workhouse</span> Institution for those unable to support themselves

In Britain and Ireland, a workhouse was an institution where those unable to support themselves financially were offered accommodation and employment. In Scotland, they were usually known as poorhouses. The earliest known use of the term workhouse is from 1631, in an account by the mayor of Abingdon reporting that "we have erected wthn [sic] our borough a workhouse to set poorer people to work".

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A poorhouse or workhouse is a government-run facility to support and provide housing for the dependent or needy.

A vestry was a committee for the local secular and ecclesiastical government of a parish in England, Wales and some English colonies, which originally met in the vestry or sacristy of the parish church, and consequently became known colloquially as the "vestry". At their height, the vestries were the only form of local government in many places and spent nearly one-fifth of the budget of the British government. They were stripped of their secular functions in 1894 and were abolished in 1921.

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The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 (PLAA) known widely as the New Poor Law, was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom passed by the Whig government of Earl Grey denying the right of the poor to subsistence. It completely replaced earlier legislation based on the Poor Relief Act 1601 and attempted to fundamentally change the poverty relief system in England and Wales. It resulted from the 1832 Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws, which included Edwin Chadwick, John Bird Sumner and Nassau William Senior. Chadwick was dissatisfied with the law that resulted from his report. The Act was passed two years after the Representation of the People Act 1832 which extended the franchise to middle-class men. Some historians have argued that this was a major factor in the PLAA being passed.

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The Andover workhouse scandal of the mid-1840s exposed serious defects in the administration of the English 'New Poor Law'. It led to significant changes in its central supervision and to increased parliamentary scrutiny. The scandal began with the revelation in August 1845 that inmates of the workhouse in Andover, Hampshire, England were driven by hunger to eat the marrow and gristle from bones which they were to crush to make fertilizer. The inmates' rations set by the local Poor Law guardians were less than the subsistence diet decreed by the central Poor Law Commission (PLC), and the master of the workhouse was diverting some of the funds, or the rations, for private gain. The guardians were loath to lose the services of the master, despite this and despite allegations of the master's drunkenness on duty and sexual abuse of female inmates. The commission eventually exercised its power to order dismissal of the master, after ordering two enquiries by an assistant-commissioner subject to a conflict of interest; the conduct of the second led to more public inquiry and drew criticism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poor Relief Act 1601</span> United Kingdom legislation

The Poor Relief Act 1601 was an Act of the Parliament of England. The Act for the Relief of the Poor 1601, popularly known as the Elizabethan Poor Law, the "43rd Elizabeth", or the "Old Poor Law", was passed in 1601 and created a poor law system for England and Wales.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poor relief</span> British government and ecclesiastical action to relieve poverty

In English and British history, poor relief refers to government and ecclesiastical action to relieve poverty. Over the centuries, various authorities have needed to decide whose poverty deserves relief and also who should bear the cost of helping the poor. Alongside ever-changing attitudes towards poverty, many methods have been attempted to answer these questions. Since the early 16th century legislation on poverty enacted by the Parliament of England, poor relief has developed from being little more than a systematic means of punishment into a complex system of government-funded support and protection, especially following the creation in the 1940s of the welfare state.

From the reign of Elizabeth I until the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 relief of the poor in England was administered on the basis of a Poor Relief Act 1601. From the start of the nineteenth century the basic concept of providing poor relief was criticised as misguided by leading political economists and in southern agricultural counties the burden of poor-rates was felt to be excessive (especially where poor-rates were used to supplement low wages. Opposition to the Elizabethan Poor Law led to a Royal Commission on poor relief, which recommended that poor relief could not in the short term be abolished; however it should be curtailed, and administered on such terms that none but the desperate would claim it. Relief should only be administered in workhouses, whose inhabitants were to be confined, 'classified' and segregated. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 allowed these changes to be implemented by a Poor Law Commission largely unaccountable to Parliament. The act was passed by large majorities in Parliament, but the regime it was intended to bring about was denounced by its critics as un-Christian, un-English, unconstitutional, and impracticable for the great manufacturing districts of Northern England. The Act itself did not introduce the regime, but introduced a framework by which it might easily be brought in.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws 1832</span>

The 1832 Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws was a group set up to decide how to change the Poor Law systems in England and Wales. The group included Nassau Senior, a professor from Oxford University who was against the allowance system, and Edwin Chadwick, who was a Benthamite. The recommendations of the Royal Commission's report were implemented in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834.

Boards of guardians were ad hoc authorities that administered Poor Law in the United Kingdom from 1835 to 1930.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irish poor laws</span> Acts of Parliament to address poverty and social instability in Ireland

The Irish poor laws were a series of acts of Parliament intended to address social instability due to widespread and persistent poverty in Ireland. While some legislation had been introduced by the pre-Union Parliament of Ireland prior to the Act of Union, the most radical and comprehensive attempt was the Irish act of 1838, closely modelled on the English Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. In England, this replaced Elizabethan era legislation which had no equivalent in Ireland.

The Scottish poor laws were the statutes concerning poor relief passed in Scotland between 1579 and 1929. Scotland had a different poor law system to England and the workings of the Scottish laws differed greatly to the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 which applied in England and Wales.

The Historiography of the Poor Laws can be said to have passed through three distinct phases. Early historiography was concerned with the deficiencies of the Old Poor Law system, later work can be characterized as an early attempt at revisionism before the writings of Mark Blaug present a truly revisionist analysis of the Poor Law system.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1838</span> United Kingdom legislation

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Moycarkey (electoral division)</span> Electoral division in Tipperary, Ireland

Moycarkey is an electoral division in County Tipperary in Ireland. It was originally an electoral division in the Thurles Poor Law Union in North Tipperary but is still used for various administrative purposes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scottish poorhouse</span> Scottish facility to support and provide housing for the needy

The Scottish poorhouse, occasionally referred to as a workhouse, provided accommodation for the destitute and poor in Scotland. The term poorhouse was almost invariably used to describe the institutions in that country, as unlike the regime in their workhouse counterparts in neighbouring England and Wales residents were not usually required to labour in return for their upkeep.

The Bedwellty Union Workhouse was situated in Georgetown, Tredegar. It is 2.9 miles (4.7 km) from the Nanybwtch Junction A465. The building was in existence for approximately 127 years. The workhouse building was also used as a hospital. Today, the site where the building once stood, there is a housing estate known as St James Park.

References

  1. 1 2 "Encyclopedia: English Poor Laws". Eh.net. 7 May 2002. Archived from the original on 5 January 2010. Retrieved 14 March 2010.
  2. ↑ "The Poor Law: overview". Victorianweb.org. 8 November 2002. Retrieved 14 March 2010.
  3. ↑ "British social policy 1601–1948". .rgu.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 20 July 2007. Retrieved 14 March 2010.
  4. ↑ Blaug, Mark. "The Poor Law Report Re-examined." Journal of Economic History (1964) 24: 229–45
  5. ↑ Poverty and Poor Law Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 1834–1914, David Englander (2013)
  6. ↑ "The implementation of the Poor Law". Victorianweb.org. 12 November 2002. Retrieved 14 March 2010.
  7. ↑ Poor Relief (Ireland) Act 1838 ( 1 & 2 Vict.,c. 56 of 1838 ). Enacted on 31 July 1838. Act of the UK Parliament .Retrieved from Irish Statute Book on 6 May 2016.
  8. ↑ "History & Heritage > Poor Law Union > Poor Law Unions and their Records > The Union". AskAboutIreland. An Chomhairle Leabharlanna. Retrieved 6 May 2016.
  9. ↑ O'Brien, Gerard (November 1982). "The Establishment of Poor-Law Unions in Ireland, 1838–43". Irish Historical Studies. 23 (90). Cambridge University Press: 97–120. doi:10.1017/S0021121400017545. JSTOR   30008402. S2CID   163411266.
  10. ↑ Nicholls, George (1856). A History of the Irish Poor Law: In Connexion with the Condition of the People. J. Murray. p.  423 . Retrieved 6 May 2016.
  11. 1 2 "History & Heritage > Poor Law Union > Poor Law Unions and their Records > The Establishment of the Poor Law System". AskAboutIreland. An Chomhairle Leabharlanna. Retrieved 6 May 2016.
  12. ↑ "Browse > Census > 1871 > Ireland > Alphabetical index to townlands of Ireland, 1871". HISTPOP.ORG. Retrieved 6 May 2016.
  13. ↑ "Adaptation Of Children's Act 1908 Order 1925". Irish Statute Book . 27 May 1925. Retrieved 6 May 2016.
  14. ↑ Higginbotham, Peter. "The Workhouse in Scotland". The Workhouse Web Site. Retrieved 7 March 2011.
  15. ↑ Higginbotham, Peter. "Poorhouses in Scotland". The Workhouse Web Site. Retrieved 7 March 2011.
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