CHAPTER 5: THE BILL IN PARLIAMENT The parliamentary debates on the Unemployment Bill began with a second reading debate

in the House of Commons - the first general debate on the principles of the bill - extending over three days between 30 November and 5 December 1933. Another three days were devoted to money resolutions giving authority for the spending of public money under the bill. The committee stage, providing an opportunity for detailed scrutiny of the bill, followed in the new year. It took place on the floor of the House, as befitted a bill of such importance, rather than in a standing committee. The government imposed a guillotine, limiting the committee stage to fourteen days, with four days for the remaining stages (report and third reading). The first five days, however, were spent on Part I of the bill and the time remaining for Part II proved inadequate. An extension was agreed and the committee stage dragged on, with long interruptions, until 25 April 1934. After debate in the House of Lords, the bill received Royal assent and became an Act on 28 June. Unusually, the Act conferred on Part II its own title: the Unemployment Assistance Act, 1934. When Parts I and III were replaced the following year by a consolidating act (the Unemployment Insurance Act 1935), the Unemployment Assistance Act became a self-contained statute. The bills relatively uneventful passage through the House of Commons owed a good deal to the personality of the Minister of Labour. Betterton was well liked: if anything he was suspected of being too nice. Labour members repeatedly contrasted the provisions of the bill with the qualities of the minister. As the debates drew to a close, the bills most outspoken opponent, George Buchanan, exclaimed in exasperation, The Minister of Labour with his civil and nice manner gets us down. We all feel at a disadvantage with him. And in the final debate on the bills third reading, the Liberal spokesman, Sir Percy Harris, added his tribute:
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For 27 days he has sat in his place with commendable diligence, a model of how a Minister should guide through the House of Commons a long, complicated and involved Bill. ... no Minister whom I have known has been more conciliatory in his manner and deportment and apparently more desirous to meet criticism, and, according to his own ideas, anxious to disarm opposition.
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Bettertons diplomatic skills, combined with the governments invincible majority, ensured that such amendments as were made were mainly on matters of detail. The most important was to Part I of the bill, though it had major implications for Part II: in his budget speech on 17 April, Chamberlain announced the restoration from 1 July 1934 of the 10 per cent cut in unemployment benefit rates imposed in 1931.
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Some of the issues raised in the Commons debates are summarised in the following pages. For those seeking a fuller account, reports of the debates in both Houses are readily available in the pages of Hansard.

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The means test Opening the second reading debate, Betterton commended the bill to the House of Commons as one of the most comprehensive and constructive pieces of social legislation which have been introduced into this House for many generations, based on the view that the Poor Law is not the appropriate medium of relief for able-bodied industrial workers who are unemployed through causes quite outside their own control, and who are anxious to work, as the overwhelming majority of them are. While rejecting the poor law, however, he strongly defended the principle of a means test, contrasting it with the Labour Partys policy that an unemployed man should receive, out of the pockets of his fellow-citizens, a fixed payment as of right for the duration of the period of his unemployment, whether he needs it or not - a policy which, he asserted, would compel the state to determine what kind of employment the worker should be willing to take and on what terms. Not only was a means test necessary, but it must be a household means test: I cannot attach any meaning to a test of need which is not related to the resources of the household of which the applicant is a member.
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The household means test was the main focus of criticism during the debates; in particular, the assumption that an unemployed man would and should be maintained by his children or children-in-law. Government supporters representing Tyneside constituencies gave disturbing examples of the operation of the means test in their areas. Opposition to the principle of a household means test, however, came mainly from the Labour benches. Aneurin Bevan declared that the family was no longer the unit of modern society; it had been destroyed by the industrial revolution. As for the argument, beloved of supporters of the means test, that if people were not prepared to maintain their own parents they should not expect other peoples children to do so, he told Hudson:
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... we have had to keep his father and the fathers of most of those who are here. As a matter of fact, my own people have been keeping your fathers for generations. The point of view is absurd and ridiculous that an individual of 70 years of age, if he should happen to be in employment, should be expected to support sons of 30 or 40 years of age; that a young man of 20 or 25 years of age, who is building up a home for himself and is for the time being living under the roof of his parents, should be asked to support brothers and sisters of 30 or 40 years of age; that sisters of 17 or 18 who happen to be lucky enough to get a little domestic service should keep their brothers of 30 or 40; that aunts should keep their nephews; that nieces should keep their aunts. ... That a son who happens to find employment near home, and therefore can live at home, should help to maintain the home, while a son who has gone to work in the south of England, perhaps 100 miles from home, should not make any contribution, is ridiculous. It

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amounts simply to making accident a basis of responsibility, and is not firmly founded on any principle of equity that this House can defend.
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Discussion was severely hampered by the fact that the details of the means test and, in particular, the allowance to be made for personal requirements of members of the household, were to be set out later in the boards regulations. It was a Conservative, Harold Macmillan, who pointed out the significance of the term personal requirements: I am not a lawyer, but I take it that the word needs ... indicates a Poor Law basis, but that the word requirements envisages a somewhat more generous and wider view of the proper amount to be disregarded of the income of other members of a household before an assessment is made. In fact, on the regulations made under this part of the Clause will depend whether the administration of the means test is acceptable or not to the great majority of the people of the country.
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This interpretation was confirmed by Betterton, who claimed that, although the more enlightened PACs made an allowance of this sort, the bill was an advance on any previous legislation in making the practice mandatory and enabling the board to take into account the degree of relationship between the household member and the applicant.
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The assessment of need The crucial question of the boards scale - the amounts of money that applicants and their families would be assumed to need - would, similarly, remain unanswerable until the bill had passed into law and the boards regulations were drafted. A good deal of concern was expressed about the relationship between the boards allowances and the insurance benefit rates. Replying to the suggestion that, like transitional payments, the boards allowances would be limited to the benefit rates, the parliamentary secretary, Robert Hudson, insisted that, far from being a ceiling, the benefit rates were the ground floor of the scheme: The limit of need will not be confined in any way to the rates of unemployment benefit. The possibility of the boards allowances exceeding the benefit rates, however, was seen by some as a threat to the insurance scheme. The Liberal member for East Birkenhead, Graham White, predicted that, if the board were to take into account all the needs of the unemployed, it would make the insurance scheme look simply silly. When the restoration of the 10 per cent benefit cut was announced, he welcomed it as making it more possible for the contributory scheme to survive, though it remained to be seen whether the disadvantages, if any, of receiving an allowance from the board would make it worth while to pay contributions to earn the right to an insurance benefit. As we shall see, the benefit rates were to be one of the main factors taken into account by the board in fixing the level of its
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allowances, and the fact that, in spite of this, allowances often exceeded them was to cause severe problems. Amendments prescribing a minimum level of allowances were predictably defeated, though a proposal for a 3s. minimum scale rate for a child (the insurance benefit addition for a child was only 2s.) attracted 125 votes compared with the normal opposition tally of about 70. When Eleanor Rathbone, the independent MP and campaigner for family allowances, moved an amendment requiring the board to take into account the minimum requirements of healthy physical subsistence an attempt to introduce the idea of a scientific minimum - Betterton insisted that the Boards duty to promote the welfare of the unemployed was a sufficient guarantee. Only time and the publication of the boards regulations would show whether this assurance was justified.
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Penal sanctions The penal provisions of clauses 39 and 40, described in chapter 4, provided a more tangible topic for debate, since they were set out fully in the bill itself. The strongest criticism was aimed at the power to send applicants to the workhouse as a condition of maintaining their families. A government supporter, Ian Horobin, argued that if this was intended as a sharp lesson, making the man more amenable to training or employment, from ones knowledge of the house that does not seem to be a very likely effect. If it had merely been put in as a last weapon, would it not be better to face the fact that the applicants in question were not appropriate people to be dealt with by the board?
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The ensuing debate revealed some confusion in the minds of ministers as to the position of a man who, having been sentenced to the workhouse, decided to walk out. Would he be left to starve, given that local authorities were to be prohibited from paying outdoor relief to a person to whom Part II of the Act applied? Bettertons reply was that such a person would be excluded from the boards scope under clause 40 (the grounds for exclusion could be either failure to maintain himself or persistently contravening the condition that he become an inmate of the workhouse), whereupon the outdoor relief prohibition would cease to apply. The parliamentary secretary, Hudson, offered a simpler solution. By discharging himself from the workhouse, he explained, the man would automatically lose his status under Part II and could then be dealt with by the PAC as they saw fit. Aneurin Bevan accurately described this as an absolute travesty of the Bill and raised the question again the following day. If a man who discharged himself from the workhouse was to be entitled to outdoor relief, he argued, all the penalties imposed upon him under sections 39 and 40 vanish into thin air; we have deprived ourselves of any means of punishing this terribly incorrigible person. But if he was not to be entitled to outdoor relief, the effect would be that he was permanently imprisoned in the workhouse.
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The local authorities were not, in fact, quite as defenceless as Bevan implied. A person who failed to maintain himself or his family, resulting in their having to be relieved by the public assistance authority, could be prosecuted under the Vagrancy Act 1824 as an idle and disorderly person, an offence punishable with imprisonment. The local authorities, however, did not want the odium of prosecuting the boards rejects, and an attempt was made in the Bills closing stages to place on the board the responsibility for prosecuting its applicants for persistent failure to maintain themselves or their dependants or to comply with conditions imposed by the board. Hudson argued that this would cut across the whole conception of the Bill which was to leave the public assistance authorities as residual legatees, and the amendment was withdrawn.
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The proposal to require attendance at a local authority work centre in cases of special difficulty also came under attack. A number of local authorities had work centres, set up to comply with their duty to set able-bodied paupers to work, which the board was to be allowed to use in addition to or instead of its own centres. The poor law work test had in practice been largely ignored in the face of the mass unemployment of the 1920s, and since 1930 local authorities in England and Wales (there was no similar requirement in Scotland) had been required only to formulate such arrangements as may in the circumstances of their area be practicable for setting to work male persons who are capable of work to whom relief ... is afforded, and for training and instructing such men, and for their attendance at suitable classes of physical training or of an educational character. Despite the emphasis on training and instruction, however, there was little about the centres that was either constructive or useful. A Labour MP recalled a visit to the London County Councils Belmont Colony, an institution with a relatively good reputation:
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...men were sent there not for training but as a punishment. ... I remember going to Belmont as a visiting guardian and seeing men engaged there in carrying earth in sacks from one place and depositing it in another place.
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Betterton, however, assured the House that before making any arrangement to use such a centre the board would satisfy itself as to the type of work and instruction provided. It would be absurd, he added, to set up new centres to do what local authority centres such as Belmont were already doing.
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Relatively little was said in the debates about the constructive side of the boards work, including its power to provide training. Betterton referred enthusiastically to the clause allowing grants to local authorities for work schemes of the Whipsnade type. There was some criticism by opposition members of the proposal to allow the board to subsidise training courses provided by voluntary bodies over which parliament would have no control. One such body was the Central Committee for Womens Training and Employment, which trained unemployed women for domestic service and whose chairman, Violet
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Markham, was to be a member of the UAB (although this was not known at the time of the debate). The working class, George Buchanan remarked, cannot employ domestic servants, and I have a fundamental objection to working-class money being used to provide domestic servants for the rich.
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Appeals Throughout the debates, there were frequent references to the appeal machinery. There was strong criticism of the proposed method of appointing tribunal members, the chairman being appointed by the Minister, the workpeoples representative by the board from a panel nominated by the Minister, and the third member being the boards own representative. Graham White described it as simply grotesque that disputes between the board and local authorities as to responsibility for border-line cases were to be decided by tribunals set up by the board itself consisting of their own chosen men, with no higher authority to ensure uniformity. He moved, unsuccessfully, an amendment to have these scope appeals heard by the unemployment insurance appeal bodies - the court of referees and the umpire. Later, Sir Stafford Cripps moved an amendment, also unsuccessfully, to make the minister responsible for appointing all tribunal members, not just chairmen. Appointment by the board, he said, seems to be about the worst conceivable type of appointment there could be, because the board is the body against whom the appeals are to be made. Hudson explained that, so far as the workpeoples representatives were concerned, it was simply a matter of administrative convenience that the tribunal clerk, an officer of the board, should decide which member of the panel nominated by the minister would be invited to sit on a particular occasion. He suggested that selected should be substituted for appointed, to make it clear that it was the minister who did the appointing. The change was merely cosmetic and even the cosmetic effect was frustrated by a further government amendment moved in the House of Lords simply for the purpose of clarity, providing that the workpeoples representative was to be not only selected but also appointed by the board.
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Surprisingly little was said about the selection of tribunal chairmen. They were not only certain to play the leading role in the tribunals deliberations but were to have sole responsibility for hearing scope appeals and for granting leave to appeal in other cases. George Buchanan asked Betterton whether, like nearly all the courts of referees in the insurance scheme, the tribunals would have lawyers as chairmen. Not necessarily, Betterton replied; chairmen of courts of referees were usually lawyers because the points they had to decide were largely legal. But lawyers would not be disqualified and the same practice would probably be followed in regard to the chairmen of both bodies (in fact, as we shall see in chapter 7, most of the chairmen were not qualified lawyers).
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The question of payment of tribunal members was raised rather halfheartedly by Lawson who, moving an amendment providing for payment of a salary, admitted that he was not too strong on it. Hudson replied smugly: One of the outstanding characteristics on which this country can pride itself in its government is its capacity to get a great deal of often onerous and unpleasant work done for nothing or for bare out-of-pocket expenses. The court of referees ... has been in existence for years, and members other than the Chairman have been willing to give their services free with only out-of-pocket expenses and payment for loss of remunerative time. We do not want to do anything that will put the members of this tribunal on a lower plane than the court of referees ...
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Whether unemployment assistance tribunal members would have regarded payment for their services as a slight or as welcome recognition of the value of their work remains an open question, but the practice of paying the chairman a fee and allowing the other members to claim only expenses and an allowance for loss of earnings has remained firmly established in the British social security system, the only exceptions being those tribunals with one or more medically qualified members (doctors, it seems, do not object to being put on a lower plane than other tribunal members). Ministers were at pains to stress that, whatever similarities there might be between the tribunals and the courts of referees, there was one fundamental difference: the referees were concerned with questions of law and the tribunals were not. Thus, while a higher authority - the umpire - was needed on the insurance side to ensure uniformity in the interpretation of the law, no such need arose in the assistance scheme. When Graham White demanded that scope appeals should be heard by the courts of referees, with a further right of appeal to the umpire, Hudson replied that such questions as a mans normal occupation were questions of fact: There is no question of co-ordination. ... We do not need an Umpire sitting in London who has not seen the man to decide whether John Jones is or is not normally a coalminer. Resisting a proposal to allow appellants to be represented at appeal hearings, rather than merely accompanied by a friend, Hudson argued that legal questions would not be involved: all the tribunal would have to do was to establish the facts - ignoring the fact that one of the two grounds on which leave to appeal could be given was to be that the decision appeared not to be in accordance with the regulations. Similarly, the Solicitor-General, Sir Donald Somervell, replying to the debate on an amendment requiring the tribunals to arrive at their decisions in a judicial manner, stressed the discretionary nature of the scheme. The tribunals, he argued, would be concerned with the human element.
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Debate on the appeal provisions was curtailed by the guillotine and a Labour amendment removing the requirement of leave to appeal was not reached. The fact that the opportunity of moving it at the report

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stage of the bill was not taken suggests that it was not regarded as of great importance, though later events were to show that it would have been in the governments interests, as well as in the interests of the unemployed, to allow unrestricted access to the tribunals. Parliament and the board The most fundamental change proposed in Part II of the bill was, of course, the creation of the Unemployment Assistance Board. In his opening speech in the second reading debate, Betterton argued the case for centralisation. The existing disparities in the administration of transitional payments must be brought to an end: I do not mean that there should be a rigid, uniform system all over the country; but I do feel quite certain that it is indefensible that one authority should provide the money while another spends it. Central administration, he explained, could take a number of forms. Direct administration by the Ministry of Labour would mean transferring the whole question of discretionary payments into national politics in a most acute form; even if local committees were to decide individual cases, rules would have to be laid down and the Minister would be held responsible for the decisions. An independent board subject to no parliamentary control would be just as objectionable. So the government had chosen a third course: The Minister of Labour will be responsible to Parliament for general policy and for obtaining the necessary money, but the application to individual cases of the policy approved by the Minister and by Parliament will be the business of an independent Board. To ensure that the services of local people were not lost, he added, the bill provided for the establishment by the board of local advisory committees, and he felt certain that the board would be quick to seize this opportunity (in fact, for reasons to be explained in chapter 14, the board was, in this respect, extremely dilatory).
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The Labour spokesman, Arthur Greenwood, opened his attack on Part II of the bill with the accusation that it centralises, bureaucratises and intensifies the Poor Law principle and that the board was to be appointed by the Crown and removed from the criticism of this House. The financial secretary to the Treasury, Leslie Hore-Belisha, presented the board in a more favourable light, arguing, first, that the appointment of its members by Royal warrant and the payment of their salaries from the consolidated fund was intended to impress upon the nation that the board is not a servant of the Ministry of Labour, but enjoys an absolutely independent status and, secondly, that the House of Commons would have increased control:
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Every regulation ... made by the board will be subject to Parliamentary approval. Every report submitted by the board will be discussed by this House, if this House so desire. So will the
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accounts of the board. The Vote on Account, the Appropriation Bill, Votes of Censure, Adjournment Motions and the Consolidated Fund Bill itself will provide occasions for deliberation upon this board.
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But serious doubts remained on both sides of the House. As Dingle Foot had pointed out, while the Boards regulations could be debated, they could not be amended and would have to be accepted or rejected as a whole. Parliamentary approval would in practice, therefore, be little more than a formality, however forcefully the regulations might have been criticised before the vote was taken. Other members raised this point and the issue was debated at length on the last day of the committee stage of the bill, 26 March 1934 (on that occasion there was much confusion between the provisions relating to the regulations and those dealing with the procedural rules to be made by the board, the latter not being subject to approval by parliament), but no concession was offered by ministers.
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There was concern about the fact that MPs would be precluded from raising in the House the treatment of individual constituents. Where an allowance was in dispute there would be a right of appeal, but the appeal tribunal would not be concerned with the behaviour of the boards officers. If an applicant was treated harshly, brusquely or intolerantly, Aneurin Bevan asked, to whom could he complain? Neither the local authority nor the tribunal would have any power to deal with the complaint, and the mans MP would not be able to raise the matter either. The officers would be responsible only to a board sitting in London, over whom the House would have no control.
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In the course of debate, it emerged that MPs might, after all, be able to question a minister about the actions of an officer of the board. A Labour member, Major Nathan, drew attention to the fact that under the bill it was the boards officers, not the board itself, who were to decide individual applications, and the officers, unlike the members of the board, were to be paid out of money voted by parliament. It ought, therefore, to be possible for parliament to discuss their actions. HoreBelisha, plainly unprepared for this suggestion, gave no clear reply. Winding up the debate on the second money resolution a week later, however, Chamberlain conceded Nathans point: I certainly think questions can be put down about the acts and procedure of the staffs who are not on the Consolidated Fund. On the face of it, this was an important breach in the ministers defences, but in practice the treatment of individual applicants was seldom raised on the floor of the House during the period of the boards existence.
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Finance and the local authorities The complaints of the local authorities about being asked to contribute to the cost of a scheme over which they would have no control were supported by Labour and Liberal speakers in the second reading debate. Greenwood and Dingle Foot both argued that the whole cost ought to be

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borne by the exchequer. Foot maintained that Hilton Youngs statement in the censure debate on 12 April had led the local authorities to expect this.
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The House returned to the subject the following week, when the money resolutions were debated. At a series of meetings with local authority representatives, Chamberlain had tried to arrive at a formula acceptable to them. The Association of Municipal Corporations, representing the urban authorities outside London, maintained that the whole cost should be borne by the exchequer. The County Councils Association and the London County Council, both sympathetic to the government, accepted that the local authorities should contribute a proportion of their outdoor relief expenditure for a standard year, but were disposed to argue about both the proportion and the year. They were also concerned that the local authorities might have to deal with large numbers of applicants turned down by the UAB for refusing training. Chamberlain complained to his sister on 9 December: The Local Authorities have been very stupid over the Unemployment Bill. I did think of making a small further concession to the so-called distressed areas but instead of asking for that they turned up with the old story that the Exchequer ought to bear the whole cost. Seeing that we do bear over 95 per cent I am rather fed up with this greediness.
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A few days later later, however, he relented and a decision to limit the contribution demanded of authorities in the distressed areas was announced. The Unemployment Assistance Act After scrutiny by the House of Lords, the bill received Royal assent and became an Act on 28 June 1934. The names of the six members of the Unemployment Assistance Board were announced by the Prime Minister the following day. After six months of debate, the effects of the Act on the unemployed remained almost as uncertain as on the day of the bills publication. Labour MPs certainly did not regard the board as a body created to improve the lot of the unemployed; but perhaps even they were prepared to suspend judgment until the boards regulations were made public and it became possible to assess their likely impact. If there had to be a means test and it could no longer be administered by Labour-controlled local authorities at the expense of the national exchequer, it was at least possible that the board would make as good a job of it as anyone else would have done.

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.5/10