CHAPTER 2: THE REVOLT OF THE RELIEF COMMITTEES Local difficulties Transitional payments were to continue until 1935 but

it was clear from the start that there would be difficulties in persuading some of the Labour-controlled local authorities to administer a means test to which they were opposed in principle. The Order in Council of 7 October 1931 provided for the appointment of commissioners to supersede defaulting authorities, but the cabinet was warned that this power, while clearly necessary, would be exceedingly troublesome to operate.
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To insist on rigid adherence to the letter of the law was plainly impossible, especially after Samuels indiscretion and the resulting Ministry of Labour circular on the treatment of savings. Eady explained to a conference of Ministry of Health poor law inspectors the delicate balance the Ministry hoped to maintain between excessive rigidity and overt illegality: The sort of test is that a Committee passes on the total marks and not on the marks for each question! ... It would be a great help to Ministers and to us all if we could avoid having to tell an Authority that it must make a man use the whole of his savings before he can become an applicant for transitional payments. It would be better to say to the Authority that they know the law, and it is for them to judge the needs of the applicant ... Those are my Ministers instructions to me. He says frankly that while he appreciates to the full that we must not overlook any flagrant departures from the law, if we can get a sensible treatment of savings as part of a sensible administration of Public Assistance, he would wish that on transitional payments.
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This statement embodies with admirable clarity the pragmatic approach which was to characterise Eadys performance of the role of Secretary of the Unemployment Assistance Board. Given a certain minimum standard of reasonable behaviour, things could be allowed to find their own level which might fall well short of perfection. By mid-December, little more than a month after the start of the scheme, there were already grounds for doubting whether even that minimum standard could be attained in some parts of the country. In the London area, the inspectors reported, some council members were really out to make the thing unworkable. Two guardians committees in Northumberland had not yet dealt with a single case and might have to be replaced by a special sub-committee appointed by the county council. In Rotherham, one relief sub-committee was badly off the rails, awarding as much as possible in every case. Sheffield had already threatened to withdraw from administering the means test unless precise rules were issued by the minister, and the city councils final decision was still awaited; the betting, the inspector reported, is against their continuing to function. In South Wales, authorities - not

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just the Labour-controlled ones - were giving privileged treatment to transitional payments cases and the word entitled had been used at committee meetings! While Monmouthshire had put themselves technically within the law by treating public assistance and transitional payments cases equally generously, Glamorgan (the authority which was to prove most troublesome) had not.
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For the next two years, the Ministry of Labour, with the help of the Ministry of Health inspectors, fought a running battle with the more recalcitrant local authorities. By the end of 1933, only two local authorities, the county borough of Rotherham and the county of Durham, had been superseded, but eight other county boroughs (Sheffield, Wigan, Oldham, Middlesbrough, Birkenhead, Stoke-on-Trent, Smethwick and Swansea) had asked to be relieved of their responsibility for transitional payments. Among the county councils, a number of guardians committees or sub-committees, including about six in the West Riding of Yorkshire, had refused to act and had been replaced for varying periods by special committees appointed by the councils. There were also a number of county boroughs where Labour Party members had refused to take part in the administration of transitional payments: Barnsley, Bolton, Hull, West Hartlepool, Birkenhead, Dudley and, for a time, Plymouth. The list of trouble spots would have been longer but for the knowledge that the scheme was only a stop-gap. More than a few premonitory rumbles of discontent, the Ministry of Labour reported, have been stifled by a reminder that the scheme would soon be over.
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In several cases, active preparations for supersession were being made when the authority decided to climb down and make at least a pretence of carrying out its duties. As a statement issued by West Ham put it: We were threatened with supersession, and in face of that threat we prefer to keep our poor under our own care and do what we can for them rather than hand them over to an arbitrary Commissioner from whom they could expect little humanity. The supersession of Swansea was narrowly averted in January 1933 by a deputation from the town council which, Hancock wrote, was so submissive that they have made it very difficult for us to go ahead without giving them a further trial. A few days later he wrote, It is now fairly certain that we shall have Wolverhampton on our hands at a very early date; but Wolverhampton, like Swansea, avoided supersession by resolving to be good boys. The county borough of Barnsley employed similar tactics. The chairman of the PAC, having given a personal undertaking that all excessive determinations would be reviewed and that administration would continue on reasonable lines, lost his seat in the November 1933 municipal elections. The PAC immediately repudiated the undertaking. On receiving a stiff letter from the ministry, it rescinded the offending resolutions, but nevertheless proceeded to issue determinations at the full unemployment benefit rates irrespective of applicants resources. As late as July 1934, Oliver Stanley, who had just succeeded Betterton as Minister of Labour, was authorised to give Barnsley two weeks to
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comply with the law or face supersession. True to form, Barnsley undertook to comply with the law. It is unlikely that the undertaking was honoured, but it was enough to prevent supersession.
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Leaving home The most damaging criticism of the household means test was that, by making unreasonable demands on the working members of a household, it led to the break-up of families. An unemployed person might leave home, either voluntarily or under pressure from other members of the family, to prevent their earnings from being taken into account in the transitional payments assessment; or a working son or daughter might move out so that their earnings would not be treated as available for the needs of their unemployed father. The more strictly the means test was enforced, the more likely this was to happen. The PACs were not without means of combating deliberate evasion of the means test by an unemployed person leaving home: they could treat him or her as still having access to the resources of the household, though no longer a member of it. This action was endorsed by the Ministry of Labour in 1932, following an enquiry into the extent of leaving home under the transitional payments scheme, carried out by Ministry of Health inspectors as a result of Ramsay MacDonalds anxiety on the subject. Their reports indicated that the phenomenon was concentrated in a few areas, the most striking of these being Earlestown in Lancashire. Similar but smaller movements were said to have taken place in other parts of Lancashire. The Ministry of Labours view was conveyed in a letter to the county council (similar letters were sent to other local authorities):
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The Minister assumes that if these young persons were applicants for public assistance all necessary steps would be taken to distinguish between cases where the act of leaving home was designed to support an application for relief which would not otherwise be obtained, and cases where it was satisfactorily explained on other grounds, and that in the former cases they would regard it as proper to treat the application on the basis that family resources were available.
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Despite the reassuring conclusions drawn from the inspectors reports (which, Hilton Young informed MacDonald, show there is very little substance in the allegations which have been made ), it is certain that between 1931 and 1934 a considerable number of young people did leave home, at least partly as a result of the means test. The number in a given area depended in part on the policy of the local authority. In Earlestown, it was alleged, they did so with the encouragement of the local relief committee and a review of the cases following the ministrys intervention had dramatic results: according to the inspector, 70 people withdrew their applications after being interviewed, 204 payments were
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discontinued by the relief committee and 121 reduced, the original decision in favour of the applicant being confirmed in only 63 cases. In Darlington, the only other place where the inspectors had found applicants leaving home in large numbers, the practice was said to be encouraged by an outside organisation and the local authority persisted in paying full allowances in defiance of the ministrys guidance.
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Later reports indicated that the problem was more widespread, though still concentrated in the north of England. In January 1934, nearly 300 transitional payment applicants and 120 wage-earners were said to have left home in Manchester over the previous 9-12 months. In Liverpool, around the same time, 120 applicants and about 150 wageearners were said to have moved, though only a minority were definitely thought to have done so because of the means test. In an attempt to discourage young applicants from leaving home, the Liverpool PAC paid dignity money of 5s.-7s. a week to those who would otherwise have been wholly dependent on their parents, refusing to increase the payments if they moved out.
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In Wales and Monmouthshire, significantly, the problem was said to be negligible - a result, no doubt, of relatively lax administration of the means test. Little is known of the situation in Scotland, where the Ministry of Health inspectors did not operate, but it was later alleged that in at least one area, Cowdenbeath, applicants leaving home received full transitional payments regardless of the family income, even if they had moved only a few yards.
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There can be little doubt that the administration of the means test in the period 1931-34 would have aroused much more strenuous opposition if, in the areas most affected, the PACs had not displayed a considerable degree of flexibility in relation to both household earnings and changes of address. It was plainly not in the interests of the Ministry of Labour to insist on strict compliance with the rules in these respects. Glamorgan: the tactics of defiance The most striking example of a large authority which deliberately and successfully defied the Ministry of Labour throughout the three years duration of transitional payments, without being superseded by commissioners, was Glamorgan. The county of Glamorgan, in terms of population, was by far the biggest local authority area in Wales, with some of the worst areas of unemployment in the mining valleys. A table in the report of the Royal Commission on Unemployment Insurance showed that, over the period from 25 January to 3 September 1932, transitional payments were awarded at the full unemployment benefit rate in 93 per cent of cases in Glamorgan, compared with 50.8 per cent for Great Britain as a whole.
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The ministrys difficulties in dealing with Glamorgan were due in part to the two-tier structure of local administration. The PAC of the county council decided policy for the county as a whole, but applicants were dealt with by local guardians committees. Promises of co-operation by the PAC were valueless if the guardians committees maintained a policy of non-co-operation. Where, as in Glamorgan, both the PAC and the guardians committees were opposed in principle to the means test, they could between them make it extremely difficult for the ministry to impose its will or even to pin the blame firmly on either tier. The ministry at first concentrated its attention on the Bridgend guardians committee, in the hope that firm action there would have a salutary effect not only on the rest of Glamorgan but on other parts of the country where trouble was brewing. At the end of February 1932, Betterton informed the cabinet of his intention to send the county council a copy of the inspectors report on Bridgend with a warning that, unless steps were taken at once to secure compliance with the law, he would have to appoint commissioners. There was, he admitted, a risk of other authorities, including the neighbouring county of Monmouthshire which was behaving at least as badly as Glamorgan, reacting to such a threat by refusing to continue administering transitional payments, but the cabinet approved the proposal and a letter was sent to Glamorgan at the beginning of March.
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The authority replied, a month later, that the special rules for dealing with transitional payments cases had been withdrawn, but an inspectors report in June showed that most of the guardians committees were still flagrantly discriminating between public assistance and transitional payments. The Ministry of Labour demanded that all current cases should be reviewed over a period of eight weeks and weekly progress reports submitted. The county council agreed but progress, if any, was slow. In October 1932 Eady, accompanied by the Ministry of Health inspector, attended a meeting of the Glamorgan PAC to spell out their duties and their power to impose their will on the guardians committees. He promised to put these points in writing and the committee undertook to consider the whole situation. But this was just another delaying tactic. A sub-committee was appointed to carry out the promised review, and the guardians committees were asked to report any case where a family on transitional payments had an income of more than 10s. a week per head; but the sub-committee decided that only cases where the income was more than 17s.6d. per head would be reviewed and that, whatever the family income, transitional payments would not be reduced below 10s. for a married man, 7s.6d. for a widower and 5s. for a single man. As a result, large numbers of cases were submitted repeatedly to the sub-committee without any action being taken. An inspector reported that in the Bridgend area payments were actually being increased to the level of the review committees scale. The average attendance at the Pontycymmer sub-committee, where this policy was applied, was later said to be two people, themselves in receipt of transitional payments.
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In March 1933, the ministry sent another official (this time H.D. Hancock, who later served under Eady as a senior official of the UAB) to remonstrate with the erring Glamorgan councillors. He met the review sub-committee and cited a number of cases where large family earnings had been ignored. No attempt was made to defend these decisions but Hancock was assured that they would do their best in difficult circumstances to see that the law was obeyed - though some of those who spoke at the meeting were opposed to any reductions.
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Following this meeting the sub-committee revised the particular cases drawn to their attention but continued to deal with other cases as before. It was now clear that nothing was to be gained by further argument. The case for sending in commissioners was strengthened by the fact that the new unemployment assistance scheme was expected to be in operation before the end of 1934. As Hancock pointed out, a drastic tightening-up was inevitable not only in Glamorgan but in other parts of south Wales and Monmouthshire. Leaving it to the new Board to preside over the tightening-up could jeopardise its whole future at the outset. Sir Francis Floud advised Betterton that there was no alternative to a definite intimation to Glamorgan of his intention to supersede the local authority. It is very important, he wrote, that the scandals in South Wales should be cleared up before the new authority is constituted.
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The advice was sound, as subsequent events were to prove, but Glamorgan was not superseded. Further delay was caused by a letter from the county council maintaining that transitional payments were in fact being administered in the same way as public assistance. By the time another report had been obtained from the inspector refuting this claim the end of the year 1934 was approaching and the Unemployment Bill, bringing transitional payments to an end, had already had its second reading in the House of Commons. Glamorgan remained a source of frustration and embarrassment to the government throughout 1934. Only 37 out of 309 determinations brought before the review sub-committee in June and July were reduced; families with incomes of 1 a week per head or more had their determinations either confirmed or reduced by only a few shillings. The results, according to a ministry official, were quite indefensible by any standard and not the least by the Glamorganshire public assistance standard. But it was too late now to send in commissioners. All that could be done was to write yet another letter which was predictably ineffective: if anything, the inspector reported, the sinners hearts had been hardened. The councils reply, two weeks before the UAB was due to take over transitional payments cases, was openly defiant. The sub-committee, it insisted, had taken its duties very seriously and any pronouncement of departmental policy, whether appearing in the press or in instructions from the minister, had been carefully followed. As an example the letter quoted Bettertons statement during the committee stage of the Unemployment Bill regarding the allowance to be made in the means test for the personal requirements of earning members of a household.

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In practice, Betterton had said, ... the more enlightened public assistance committees allow at any rate something. ... The Bill gives a statutory sanction to this practice ... Glamorgan claimed to have intelligently anticipated this statement, which they regarded as giving authoritative sanction to their conduct. The last shot in this prolonged engagement was another letter from the ministry, dated 12 January 1935 - a week after the end of transitional payments - quoting examples of decisions confirmed by the review sub-committee in December which were, if anything, more grossly illegal than those cited in earlier correspondence, but conceding that as the scheme had now terminated the Minister could take no further action.
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Glamorgan and, on a much smaller scale, the county borough of Merthyr Tydfil, were the most extreme examples of authorities which, in effect, refused to apply the household means test to unemployed people claiming transitional payments, but which were determined to prevent their responsibilities being taken over by commissioners. Time was on their side. The nearer the starting date of the new unemployment assistance scheme approached, the less it seemed worth facing the political controversy and administrative upheaval of installing commissioners for the time that remained. So it was left to the UAB to reap the opprobrium of cutting the incomes of the unemployed in the derelict areas of South Wales. The Durham and Rotherham Commissioners In Rotherham and county Durham, unlike Glamorgan, the local authorities eventually refused to carry out their functions under the Order in Council, compelling the government to send in commissioners. After numerous attempts to persuade Rotherham to administer the means test in accordance with the law, the decision to appoint a commissioner was announced at the end of September 1932. The commissioner, K.G. Holland, took over on 13 October. He was a London barrister with public assistance experience. Seven weeks later he was appointed commissioner for the county of Durham, being replaced at Rotherham by a retired Ministry of Labour official, A.W. Basham. Two other commissioners were appointed to assist Holland in Durham: M.S. MacDonnell, who had served in the Egyptian and Sudan civil service and later as High Commissioner for Danzig under the League of Nations, and Thomas Smith, a Tyneside business man and Gateshead councillor. More important than any of these, however, was W.C. Osmond, an official sent from Ministry of Labour headquarters to act as clerk to the commissioners, first in Rotherham and then in Durham. It was Osmond who bore the main responsibility for setting up and running the administrative machinery. The commissioners seem to have done an unsavoury job well. They saved a substantial amount of public money, estimated at about 250,000 per annum, at an additional cost in administration of less than 30,000. Although this was achieved by large scale reductions in the
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incomes of the unemployed, there was little public disorder. In view of the very different outcome when the UAB undertook a similar operation on a national scale in 1934-35, it is worth considering why things went so smoothly. Durham presented a much greater challenge than the small county borough of Rotherham. For public assistance purposes Durham was divided into ten areas, within which 43 relief sub-committees had carried out the assessment of individual cases. The commissioners operated through a smaller number of area offices which were expected to administer the scheme on more or less uniform lines while avoiding undue hardship. Eadys deputy, George Reid, after a visit to Durham in January 1933, reported that a liberal discretion was being exercised, applicants being given the benefit of every doubt and cuts being made in stages. Notwithstanding attempts to foment agitation, he wrote, administration in Durham is proceeding with remarkable smoothness and efficiency. The economies are not so great as they might be, possibly by a substantial amount. There is, however, much to be said for a policy of disarming criticism and refuting any suggestion of harshness even at a considerable price. While this reassuring view would hardly have been shared by the 20,000 unemployed people who had suffered cuts (Osmond reported in March that about 12,000 dissatisfied applicants had been interviewed at area offices), the Ministrys first experience of administering the means test through appointed officials rather than through elected local authorities had proved much less traumatic than might have been expected.
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One factor which helped the commissioners was the general expectation that they would tighten up the administration of the means test. The best that the unemployed could hope for was that they would administer the scheme conscientiously but fairly, and the evidence suggests that that is what they did. The Durham commissioners began by drawing up and publishing a scale or basis of need, which was by no means ungenerous given the fact that transitional payments could not exceed the unemployment benefit rates. The needs of single persons (except those living with relatives), couples and dependent children were assessed at the benefit rates: 15s.3d. per week for a single man, 13s.6d. for a woman, 23s.3d. for a couple and 2s. for each child. A single adult living with relatives was assessed at 10s. which, while hardly generous, was probably no less so than the practice of most public assistance authorities. Weekly payments could be increased where the rent exceeded 7s. a week, a fair average rent in County Durham. The published basis was supplemented by confidential instructions for dealing with earnings or other income. Earning members of the household were allowed to keep 5s. a week or, if they earned more than 1, a quarter of their earnings, over and above their assumed minimum needs. In spite of this, a report from one of the Durham Commissioners offices in Stockton suggests that applicants were leaving home in considerable numbers. Out of a live register of 3,978
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applicants in September 1934, 139 had left home, 111 of them because of the refusal of other members of the household to provide for them. If this was the result of enforcing the household means test where the local authority had failed to do so, it might have served as a warning to the Unemployment Assistance Board, which was about to do the same thing in many other areas.
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A problem encountered by the commissioners, which the UAB was to face on a much larger scale, was that of staffing the area offices. Apart from a nucleus of Ministry of Labour officers at senior levels, staff had to be recruited locally. The PACs were already employing temporary investigating officers to administer transitional payments, and the commissioners had no alternative but to take them over. Osmond soon decided that many of the Durham officers were unsuitable, including some of those seconded by the ministry. When it was suggested that some of the Durham staff would have to be transferred to Swansea on the supersession of that authority, he wrote to Hancock, You can be quite certain that any people I send you will be good fellows, capable of tackling the job, and that is more than I can say for some of the rubbish sent to me.
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Apart from grumbling, there was little that Osmond could do about the rubbish sent by the ministry. The temporary staff recruited by the local authorities were another matter. Osmond soon set about weeding out those who proved unsuitable. In the main, he wrote, they are the wrong type; miners, bricklayers, carpenters, are not sufficiently well equipped to undertake I.O. [investigating officer] work ... By January 1934, the Durham commissioners had 112 investigating officers, 37 having been dismissed for misconduct or inefficiency in the preceding 12 months. Some may have been dismissed for not applying the means test rigorously enough but, in view of the commissioners anxiety to prevent undue hardship, it is probable that others were considered too harsh and unsympathetic. News of the dismissal of an unpopular local means test man would soon have spread around the pit villages and may have been a factor in persuading some of the unemployed that the coming of the commissioners was not an unmitigated disaster.
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The commissioners had two other advantages over the PACs, to which Osmond drew attention when, as a regional officer of the UAB, he was asked to give his impressions of the working of the transitional payments scheme under the commissioners: His impression was that applicants much preferred to be dealt with by the Central Government rather than by Local Authorities, preferring even that some should get less provided that all were treated with impartiality. He thought also that many applicants resent the necessity of explaining their circumstances to a body of local people many of whom are known to them personally.
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From the point of view of the government, the main advantage of administration by commissioners was the obvious one, that the

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commissioners themselves were handpicked by the Ministry of Labour and their senior staff were ministry officials. They could be relied upon not only to adopt reasonable standards for the assessment of need and the treatment of household resources, but to ensure that those standards were adhered to by their staff. In the rest of the country the situation was very different. However successful the transitional payments scheme may have been in saving government money, it had created a bewildering maze of local variations in policy and practice. That maze was the starting point from which the Unemployment Assistance Board was to set out in January 1935, in the hope of arriving within a few short months in a promised land of uniform national standards. It is little wonder, in retrospect, that the journey was to prove longer and more eventful than either the government or the Board had bargained for.

Reinventing the dole: a history of the Unemployment Assistance Board 1934-1940 by Tony Lynes is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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