Chapter 6

The Liberal government that came to power in 1906 responded to these revelations by adopting several pieces of social welfare legislation that collectively are known as the Liberal Welfare Reforms. The legislation aimed at improving the health of working-class children, reducing poverty among the aged, establishing minimum wages for workers in “sweated industries,” and reducing the income insecurity resulting from loss of work due to sickness or unemployment. The Liberal Welfare Reforms represented a sharp about-face in British social policy after seven decades of increasing stinginess toward the poor. The timing of their adoption largely can be explained by the increased middle-class knowledge of workers’ economic insecurity, along with the greater willingness of Parliament to intervene as a result of the growing political voice of the working class.

Booth’s pioneering work was followed by Rowntree’s 1901 survey of working-class York, Poverty: A Study of Town Life. While Booth had defined as poor any household with an average weekly income of 18–21s. or less, Rowntree determined the “poverty line” for families of various sizes by calculating the income required “to provide the minimum of food, clothing, and shelter needful for the maintenance of merely physical health.” Families whose income was below the minimum level were described as living in “primary poverty.” He defined a second category, “secondary poverty,” as consisting of families whose income would have been above the minimum necessary to maintain physical efficiency “were it not that some portion of it is absorbed by other expenditure, either useful or wasteful.” Rowntree found that 9.9% of the population of York, and 15.5% of the working class, lived in primary poverty in 1899. Another 17.9% of the population, and 27.9% of the working class, lived in secondary poverty.⁴

The other major study of urban poverty undertaken before the war was Bowley and Burnett-Hurst’s 1912–14 investigations of Reading, Northampton, Warrington, Stanley, and Bolton, published in 1915 as Livelihood and Poverty.⁵ Bowley and Burnett-Hurst’s definition of poverty was equivalent to Rowntree’s primary poverty—a family was in poverty if its total income was “insufficient for the maintenance of physical health.”⁶ The top panel of Table 6.1 presents estimates of poverty rates for the five towns surveyed by Bowley and Burnett-Hurst and for York. The share of working-class households living in poverty varied greatly across towns, ranging from 23.2% in Reading to 5.4% in Stanley, a small north-eastern mining town. For each town, the share of working-class individuals in poverty was slightly higher than the share of households in poverty. The share of the total population living in poverty varied from 17.5% in Reading to 4.8% in Stanley.7

The reported poverty rates understate by a large amount the extent of economic insecurity among the working class. Table 6.2 presents the share of families with incomes above but close to the poverty line for each of the towns surveyed by Bowley and Burnett-Hurst.⁸ A majority of working-class households in Reading had earnings below or within 6s. of the poverty line, as did 30.3% of households in Warrington and 18.7% in Bolton. The share with incomes within 8s. of the poverty line varied from 60.3% in Reading to 13.4% in Stanley. Any event that reduced weekly income or increased expenses by a few shillings would have pushed these families into poverty, at least in the short run.

A comparison of the estimated poverty rates with numbers receiving poor relief reveals the extent to which Poor Law data understate the extent of poverty. From 1899 to 1913, the share of the population of England and Wales receiving poor relief at some point over a 12-month period ranged from 4.4% to 5.9%, substantially below the poverty rate in every town except Stanley. In York, 3,451 persons, 4.5% of the population, received poor relief in 1900 (not counting lunatics in asylums), fewer than half of the 7,230 persons living in primary poverty.¹⁰ Large numbers of poor people either did not apply for public assistance or had their applications rejected by local relief officials.

The estimates reported above are snapshots of a community at a point in time. Rowntree was quick to point out that working-class households moved in and out of poverty over time, but that he observed only those in poverty when the survey was undertaken. He maintained that the life of a low-skilled worker was “marked by five alternating periods of want and comparative plenty.” The laborer typically lived in poverty for part of his childhood, again during the period from when his second or third child was born until the oldest child reached 14 and began to work, and finally in old age. Rowntree concluded that “the proportion of the community who at one period or other of their lives suffer from poverty to the point of physical privation is therefore much greater, and the injurious effects of such a condition are much more widespread than would appear from a consideration of the number who can be shown to be below the poverty line at any given moment.”¹¹

The third poverty line, Rowntree’s “human needs standard,” was meant to “provide for the reasonable human needs of men and women living in a civilized community.” It is substantially more generous than either of the previous estimates, mainly in the amount allowed for clothing and personal sundries, including spending on trade union dues, sick clubs, “tram fares to and from work,” newspapers, incidental traveling, recreation, beer, and tobacco.¹⁵ At 1906 prices, the human needs standard for a family of five cost nearly 9s. per week more than Bowley’s “new standard.”

What share of adult males had earnings below that needed to support a family of five? Table 6.4 shows the distribution of weekly earnings for adult working-class males in five towns surveyed by Rowntree and Bowley and Burnett-Hurst. About one-quarter of York workers in 1899 had earnings below 21.67s., the minimum necessary to support a family of five according to Rowntree’s original standard. Wage rates varied sharply across the towns studied by Bowley and Burnett-Hurst. The share of adult males with full-time earnings below 24s. was 50.5% in Reading, 27% in Northampton, 32% in Warrington, and 7% in Stanley (the poverty line for a family of five was 24.58s. in 1912). For the five towns combined, somewhere between a quarter and a third of adult males did not earn enough to support a wife and three schoolchildren. The numbers are far more pessimistic if Rowntree’s human needs standard is used as the poverty line. Fewer than 15% of adult males in Reading and fewer than one-third in Northampton and Warrington earned enough to support a family of five under the human needs standard.

The data in Table 6.4 are for adult male earnings. When calculating poverty rates, it is necessary to compare household earnings (including earnings of wives and children living at home) with the relevant poverty line. Bowley and Burnett-Hurst found that wives or children were employed in 41% of working-class households in Reading, 45% in Warrington, 51% in Northampton, and 31% in Stanley. Combining the households of the four towns, they estimated that “per 100 households” the earning power of all those working was equivalent to 142 adult males. In the absence of wives and children working, their estimated poverty rates would have been substantially higher.16

In sum, on the eve of the First World War 12–15% of urban working-class households had incomes below the poverty line, and an additional 15–20% of households had incomes above but close to the poverty line. The main cause of poverty in these households was the low wage rates paid to male household heads. Rowntree concluded that the going wage for unskilled labor was “insufficient to . . . maintain a family of moderate size in a state of bare physical efficiency,” and Bowley and Burnett-Hurst added that a “great part” of poverty was “not accidental or due to exceptional misfortune, but a regular feature of the industries of the towns concerned. . . . To raise the wages of the worst-paid workers is the most pressing social task with which the country is confronted today.”¹⁷

The serious health consequences for both children and adults associated with living in poverty had been known since the pioneering work of Chadwick and others in the 1830s and 1840s.18 Rowntree documented the relationship between poverty and health by selecting three sections of working-class York—representing the poorest workers, a middle group, and the best paid workers—and comparing infant and child mortality, height, weight, and general physical condition of children across the sections. For each measure, he found a strong negative correlation between health and poverty. Pember Reeves also found that poverty led to a low standard of health from her study of poor families in Lambeth. To her, “the outstanding fact about the children was . . . their puny size and damaged health. . . . Whatever the exact causes are which produce in each case the sickly children so common in these households, the all-embracing one is poverty.”¹⁹

Poor health for children often translated into poor health for adults. The British public became keenly aware of the adverse health consequences of low living standards during the Boer War of 1899–1902, when approximately 30% of recruits were rejected by medical officers because they did not meet “the army’s already shockingly low physical standards.” Rejection rates were especially high in large cities—for the two years 1901–2, 35% of London recruits were rejected, as were 37% from Liverpool and 49% from Manchester.²⁰ Rejection rates were even higher in the mid-1890s—in 1893–96, 40.6% of the 236,000 recruits were rejected due to physical ailments or want of physical development. These numbers understate the share who were deemed physically unfit, because they do not include those rejected by the recruiting officers as unfit for service and therefore not medically inspected. By far the most important cause of rejection was “under chest measurement,” followed by defective vision, “under weight,” and “under height.”²¹

In its 1904 Report the Interdepartmental Committee made a series of recommendations regarding medical inspection of factory employees, reduction in overcrowding and smoke pollution, “systematic instruction” for girls “in the processes of infant feeding and management,” policies to ensure the purity of the supply of milk, the systematized medical inspection of schoolchildren, the feeding of needy elementary schoolchildren by local authorities, and increased physical exercise for children in school and in “obligatory evening continuation classes.” None of its recommendations dealt with the relationship between low household income and health. The committee concluded that while some might argue they offered “no immediate remedy” to the problems raised in the report, they “are confident that if their recommendations are adopted a considerable distance will have been traversed towards an amendment of the conditions they have described.”²³

Rowntree was far less optimistic about the future. He argued that, so long as “nearly 30 per cent of the population are living in poverty and are ill-housed, ill-clothed, and under-fed . . . a low average standard of physical efficiency among the wage-earning classes is inevitable.” In the conclusion to Poverty, he wrote that the existence of so much poverty in “this land of abounding wealth, during a time of perhaps unexampled prosperity . . . is a fact which may well cause great searchings of heart. . . . No civilisation can be sound or stable which has at its base this mass of stunted human life.”²⁴

Aside from the criticisms by COS leaders, the response to Rowntree’s book was quite positive. Journalist and future Liberal MP Charles Masterman wrote in the Contemporary Review that Rowntree’s work was “one of the most important pieces of detailed social investigation ever undertaken in England . . . a revelation, in details never before attempted, of the nature of the Abyss in a prosperous provincial city.” He added that Rowntree’s findings were “apt to soften exultation in modern progress into a certain minor key, and to cause the atmosphere suddenly to grow bleak and chill.”²⁶

Two other important studies of urban working-class communities were published before the First World War: Lady Bell’s 1907 book At the Works, a study of the north-eastern iron-making town of Middlesbrough; and Pember Reeves’s 1913 study of Lambeth, Round about a Pound a Week. These works, while influenced by Rowntree’s book, were more qualitative in nature, although both examined the weekly expenditures of working-class households. Lady Bell and a small team of visitors investigated 900 ironworkers’ households, examining their wages and expenditures, the roles of wives and daughters, and the problems of sickness, accidents, old age, drink and gambling. She found that 125 of the households investigated were “absolutely poor,” meaning that they did not have “money enough to buy what are called the necessities of life.” Another 175 “were so near the poverty-line that they are constantly passing over it.” Adding these two groups together, she concluded that the life of one-third of the households studied was “an unending struggle from day to day to keep abreast of the most ordinary, the simplest, the essential needs.”²⁸

In Round about a Pound a Week, Pember Reeves addressed the question: “How does a working man’s wife bring up a family on 20s. a week?” To answer it, a committee of the Fabian Women’s Group investigated 42 families in Lambeth, south London, where the husband was in regular work and received a regular income of between 18s. and 30s. per week. The men were mainly unskilled laborers. Pember Reeves stressed that these were not the poorest households in the district, and that they included no families where the head was in casual employment.³¹

The investigators found that, at least in Lambeth, it was not possible to adequately bring up a family on a weekly budget of £1. The families lived in houses that were old or badly built, overcrowded, poorly ventilated, and often damp and verminous.³² Pember Reeves concluded that “the great bulk” of persons living on incomes of less than 30s. per week were “under-fed, under-housed, and insufficiently clothed.” The children suffered the most—their diet “is insufficient . . . and utterly unsatisfactory,” and as a result “their growth is stunted, their mental powers are cramped, their health is undermined.” While many within the middle class labeled poverty as “the result of drink, extravagance, or laziness,” Pember Reeves argued that it simply was not possible to “maintain a working man in physical efficiency and rear healthy children” on a weekly income of 20–24s. She concluded that, while it was in the nation’s collective interest for its children to be decently fed, clothed, and housed, large numbers of families headed by low-skilled workers were unable to do so at current wage rates.³³

The Liberal Welfare Reforms were not adopted out of thin air. Booth’s work on The Aged Poor and various government reports, discussed in Chapter 5, revealed the extent of poverty and pauperism among working people aged 65 and older, and the Edwardian studies examined above made it clear that income insecurity remained a major problem for working-class households of all ages at the beginning of the twentieth century. These studies led to debates over the state’s role in reducing poverty and insecurity, culminating in the adoption of the Liberal welfare policies. This section summarizes the debates over old age pensions, unemployment relief, and the Poor Law.

The debate over state-provided pensions began in the early 1890s when the Local Government Board first published data on the extent of pauperism among the aged and Chamberlain and Booth put forward proposals for a national system of old age pensions. In March 1891, after the release of information on the number of aged persons receiving poor relief, Chamberlain stated in a speech that it was “deplorable . . . that so large a proportion of the aged people in our land should find themselves at the close of life forced to accept assistance which carries with it the idea of personal degradation.” He argued that these “veterans of industry” should be “provided for as respected pensioners,” and proposed that Parliament adopt what amounted to a voluntary state-run old age insurance system.³⁵

Booth also offered his first pension proposal in 1891. Unlike Chamberlain, he called for a universal noncontributory pension of 5s. per week for everyone aged 65 or older. He argued that 5s. represented “the minimum cost of life,” and that a small pension would not reduce the work effort of the aged, nor would it discourage thrift among those younger than 65. Indeed, a pension, by ensuring that an aged individual could avoid the workhouse, might “make thrift more attractive” to the working class. Booth estimated that his proposal would cost about £17 million and, even assuming a £3 million decline in poor relief spending, he admitted that it would still create “great (perhaps insuperable) financial difficulties.”³⁷

In 1893 Gladstone appointed the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, chaired by Lord Aberdare. The membership of the commission included, among others, both Chamberlain and Booth, Loch, the Secretary of the COS, and Charles Ritchie, former President of the Local Government Board. Those who testified before the commission included Booth, Chamberlain, the economist Alfred Marshall, Octavia Hill, and Thomas Mackay of the COS, as well as officials of the Local Government Board and the Board of Trade, Poor Law guardians, officers of friendly societies, and a few members of the working class. The commission’s 1895 report examined various schemes for government-financed or -assisted pension/insurance programs to provide for the elderly poor outside of the Poor Law, including those put forward by Booth and Chamberlain, but decided not “to recommend the adoption of any of the schemes . . . in view of the financial and economic difficulties involved.” The report further concluded that “no fundamental alterations are needed in the existing system of poor law relief as it affects the aged.”38 Neither Booth nor Chamberlain signed the report. They, along with three other members of the commission, wrote a brief Minority Report stressing the stigma attached by the poor to the existing system of poor relief (and their “absolute loathing” of the workhouse) and recommending that the government create a new commission to construct, if possible, a “practicable scheme . . . for the assistance of the aged and respectable poor.”³⁹

Booth offered a revised plan for universal pensions in 1899, proposing that pensions begin at age 70, and be equal to 7s. per week for men, 5s. for women, and 12s. for married couples. He argued against means testing on the grounds that universality was necessary “to protect the dignity of the pensions” and eliminate any “possible taint of pauperism,” although he speculated that a substantial share of the well-to-do would not claim their pensions. He estimated that the total cost of the proposal would be about £16 million.⁴⁰

Chamberlain responded that Booth’s new proposal was “absolutely impracticable,” and that any system of universal noncontributory pensions was a “gigantic scheme of outdoor relief for everybody—good and bad, thrifty and unthrifty—the waster, drunkard, and idler as well as the industrious.”⁴¹ On the other hand, labor organizations in general praised the notion of noncontributory pensions. The National Committee of Organized Labour for the Promotion of Old Age Pensions, founded in 1899, proposed an amended version of Booth’s plan (essentially his original proposal), calling for pensions of 5s. a week for men and women beginning at age 65. Pensions were to be funded by general taxation and completely separate from the Poor Law.⁴²

The downturn of 1904–5 led Balfour’s Conservative government to address the problem of unemployment and examine the state of social welfare policy. In August 1905 Parliament adopted the Unemployed Workmen Act, and four months later, just before leaving office, the Balfour government appointed the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress. The commission was charged with inquiring into the workings of the Poor Law and also “into the various means which have been adopted outside of the Poor Laws for meeting distress arising from want of employment, particularly during periods of severe industrial depression; and to consider and report whether any . . . modification of the Poor Laws or changes in their administration or fresh legislation for dealing with distress are advisable.”⁴⁵

The commission was chaired by Lord George Hamilton, and its membership included, among others, C. S. Loch, Helen Bosanquet, and Octavia Hill from the COS, the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb, five Guardians of the Poor, including the socialist George Lansbury, the permanent heads of the Local Government Boards of England, Scotland, and Ireland, three representatives of the Church of England and one of the Roman Catholic Church, two political economists, and Charles Booth, who resigned in 1908 due to ill health. Webb wrote that “the Commission was, in fact, predominantly a body of experts, either in poor law administration or social investigation.”⁴⁶ Its inquiries lasted for three years, and resulted in two large reports published in February 1909: a Majority Report signed by the chairman and 14 others, and a Minority Report—written by the Webbs—signed by Beatrice Webb and three others.

Webb, Beveridge, Chapman, Bowley, and Wilson Fox all argued that the recent experiences of the distress committees proved that chronic underemployment was a serious problem, and that no method of unemployment relief could be successful unless the number of surplus laborers in the casual trades was reduced. This could be accomplished through “the organisation of the labour market” by the establishment of a national system of labor exchanges. Labor exchanges would promote the “decasualisation” of trades such as riverside labor by allocating available work so as to give more or less continuous employment to the “better” workmen, and also would reduce unemployment in more skilled occupations by bringing into contact employers looking for workers and unemployed workers looking for jobs—that is, by disseminating information.49

Several witnesses maintained that public authorities should attempt to “regularise” the national demand for labor by undertaking necessary development projects when the private sector’s demand for labor was slack. Bowley put forward the most detailed proposal, recommending that the state set aside funds “in prosperous years, ear-marked for works of construction which need not be done at a particular time, e.g., dock schemes, great building works, school buildings, public parks, improvement of the national roads.” He argued that his scheme was much different from the work relief programs of the previous 25 years. Jobs would be “contracted out on the ordinary commercial basis,” and there would be no attempt to hire unemployed workers. The scheme would not create an “artificial demand” for labor, “only an adjustment in time of the ordinary demand.” Similar, albeit less detailed, proposals were made by Beveridge and Chapman, who stressed that government employment projects must be “rigidly distinguished from the provision of distress works.”⁵⁰

Everyone who testified before the commission was impressed with existing trade union unemployment benefits. Unemployment insurance generally was regarded as an efficient method of reducing the distress resulting from cyclical unemployment. Beveridge estimated that in 1905–6 the cost per man-week of relieving unemployed workers was twice as high on work relief projects administered by London’s Central Unemployed Body as it was for unemployment insurance administered by London trade unions.⁵¹ Witnesses also agreed that unemployment insurance should be extended to more workers, although there was less agreement on how to achieve this. Webb and Jackson argued that a system of compulsory insurance administered by the government was neither practical nor desirable. They supported instead an extension of the system of voluntary union-provided insurance in which the government paid part of the costs, to encourage unions of low-skilled workers to provide unemployment insurance. Such a subsidy would enable every worker above the grade of casual laborer “to provide against the contingency of unemployment in the method most congenial to himself.”⁵²

The Majority and Minority Reports both proposed adopting a national system of labor exchanges in order to bring the demand and supply of labor “generally and locally in touch with each other.” The Majority Report recommended that use of the exchanges be voluntary, although the Board of Trade should “popularise them in every way.” The Minority Report recommended that resort to exchanges be “optional for employers filling situations of at least a month’s duration,” but compulsory for employers in trades where “excessive Discontinuity of Employment prevails.”⁵⁴

Both reports supported extending unemployment insurance to a larger share of the workforce. Although the Majority Report did not recommend a specific plan, it noted with approval the system operating in Ghent, Belgium, where the municipality subsidized the provision of unemployment insurance by trade unions. The report concluded that “the establishment and promotion of Unemployment Insurance, especially amongst unskilled and unorganised labour . . . is of such national importance as to justify, under specified conditions, contributions from public funds towards its furtherance.” It recommended that a state subsidy be offered not only to trade unions but also to friendly societies providing unemployment benefits to their members. If large numbers of workers remained uninsured, the government could set up a supplementary insurance scheme, administered by the labor exchanges.⁵⁵

The Minority Report also called for the government to reduce cyclical unemployment by undertaking ordinary municipal projects “of a capital nature . . . to a greater extent in the years of slackness than in the years of good trade.” These projects would be the “opposite of Relief Works,” undertaken by “the departments or contractors ordinarily concerned, and by the best of the available workmen and labourers usually engaged in just those kinds of work.” Their function was not to relieve distress, but “to prevent, long before they fall into distress, the two or three hundred thousand good and efficient workmen from becoming Unemployed.” The Majority Report was more cautious; it supported increasing capital expenditure on public projects during “severe and prolonged” downturns, but warned that proposals for “the regularisation of work . . . must be scrutinised with some care.”⁵⁷

In the end, as will be discussed in the following section, the policies adopted by the government to deal with unemployment bore only a faint resemblance to the proposals of either the Majority Report or the Minority Report.

The Royal Commission was charged with examining the Poor Law and recommending whether any modifications of it were “advisable.” Both the Majority and Minority Reports were critical of how poor relief was administered. Their proposed policy responses were similar in some regards and quite different in others. The Majority Report proposed major changes to the Poor Law, while the Minority Report proposed that it be abolished and its functions transferred to specialist (local and national) governmental agencies.

The report recommended that each county and county borough establish a Voluntary Aid Council, which would form a Voluntary Aid Committee to work in cooperation with the Public Assistance Authority in the administration of relief. The main functions of the Voluntary Aid Committees were to assist “(1) persons in distress whose cases do not appear to be suitable for treatment by the Public Assistance Committee, and (2) applicants for Public Assistance whose cases have been referred to the Committee by the Public Assistance Committee.” The committees should make “a careful inquiry into the case of every applicant for relief,” and the assistance given “should be governed by consistent principles.”⁵⁹

As for the methods used to assist the poor, the Majority Report recommended that the general workhouse be abolished and replaced by separate institutions for children, the aged and infirm, the sick, the able-bodied, vagrants, and the mentally ill. Institutions for the aged and the able-bodied should adopt classification systems based on an inmate’s conduct “before and after admission,” and whenever possible treatment should be “curative and restorative.” Outdoor relief, or Home Assistance as the report called it, “should be given only after thorough inquiry, except in cases of sudden and urgent necessity.” Those who received assistance in their homes should be subject to supervision by members of the voluntary agencies on a case basis. The supervision “should include in its purview the conditions, moral and sanitary, under which the recipient is living” and the Public Assistance Authority be given “the power to refuse relief . . . where the conditions of living are bad.” In general, “every effort should be made to foster the instincts of independence and self-maintenance amongst those assisted.”⁶⁰

The Minority Report also was highly critical of the local administration of relief, and it too criticized the general mixed workhouse and the lack of uniformity in administration across Poor Law unions. Its main criticism of the existing system, however, was its one-size-fits-all method of assisting the poor. Each relieving officer had to provide for infants, schoolchildren, able-bodied adults, invalids, the sick, the mentally defective, widows, and the aged.⁶² In the seven decades since the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act, several new specialist governmental agencies had been created, dealing with local health, local education, pensions, unemployment, and the mentally defective. Their functions overlapped with those of the Poor Law. Alongside these rival governmental agencies was a “growing stream of private charity and voluntary agencies” uncoordinated with public activity. As a result, the nation was confronted with “an ever-growing expenditure from public and private funds, which results, on the one hand, in a minimum of prevention and cure, and on the other in far-reaching demoralisation of character and the continuance of no small amount of unrelieved destitution.”⁶³

The Minority Report agreed with the Majority that the Poor Law union was too small to be an efficient unit of relief administration; it did not, however, support replacing local Boards of Guardians by a county-wide Public Assistance Authority.⁶⁴ Instead, it called for the Poor Law to be broken up and its functions transferred to existing specialist agencies, administered at the local level by committees of County and County Borough Councils under the supervision of central government agencies.⁶⁵

Shortly after the Majority and Minority Reports were published, a propaganda war began between the two camps. In May 1909, the Webbs set up the National Committee for the Break-Up of the Poor Law and began a publicity campaign in support of the proposals set forth in the Minority Report. This in turn led to the formation of the National Poor Law Reform Association with Lord Hamilton, who had been chairman of the Royal Commission, as President. The association believed that the Poor Law was in “urgent need” of reform, but disagreed with the notion that it should be broken up and replaced by specialist agencies because “a single administration for public assistance is on all grounds better than a divided responsibility by departments.” A third group also entered the fray—the local boards of guardians and officials of the Local Government Board’s Poor Law Division came out against both the Majority and the Minority Reports and in favor of the status quo. Beatrice Webb, at the end of 1909, put her faith in the results of the upcoming general election; she wrote in her diary, “if the Liberals come in, they must take up a modified version of the Minority Report.”⁶⁷ She was in for a surprise.

The first welfare reforms concerned the health of children and were in response to the poor physical state of army recruits during the Boer War and the subsequent recommendations of the Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration. The 1906 Education (Provision of Meals) Act allowed local authorities to use tax revenue to provide free school meals for needy children. It established the “revolutionary principle” that children had a right to adequate nourishment, and that if their parents “were unable to feed them properly the state should see that they were fed.” This was followed a year later by the Education (Administrative Provisions) Act, which implemented school medical inspections and established a medical department in the Board of Education; government grants for the medical treatment of poor children were introduced in 1912. Finally, the Children’s Act of 1908 made it a legal offense for a parent to neglect a child’s health.⁶⁹

The push for state-provided old age pensions, which had been sidetracked by the Boer War and Treasury opposition, was revived shortly after the Liberals came into power. Prime Minister Asquith and Chancellor of the Exchequer Lloyd George put forward a pension scheme that was noncontributory and means-tested, similar to that proposed by the Select Committee on the Aged Deserving Poor in 1899. After some modifications by Parliament, the Old Age Pension Act was adopted in August 1908 and went into operation in January 1909. It provided a weekly pension of 5s. to individuals aged 70 and older (10s. to couples) with incomes below £21 per annum (about 8s. per week). A sliding scale was introduced that reduced benefits for persons with incomes greater than 8s. per week—pensions were paid to those with incomes as high as £31 10s. (about 12s. per week). Individuals who had received poor relief after January 1, 1908, initially were not eligible for a pension, although this clause was abolished in 1911.70

The number of pension recipients was substantially greater than the government had anticipated. On the last Friday in March 1909, 393,700 persons in England and Wales (38% of the population 70 and older) received a pension from the government (see Table 6.5). This was 164,000 more than the number of persons 70 and older in receipt of poor relief on March 31, 1906. Nearly 90% of pensioners received the maximum benefit of 5s. per week. An additional 175,000–200,000 persons 70 and older received poor relief in March 1909 and were ineligible for a pension. Thus, a majority of persons 70 and older in 1909 received government assistance in the form of either poor relief or a pension.⁷¹ The number of pensioners increased sharply after the Poor Law disqualification was abolished. In March 1911, 57.3% of persons 70 and older received a pension, nearly two-and-a-half times the percentage of persons of the same age who were poor relief recipients five years earlier. A larger percentage of aged women than aged men received a pension, just as a larger percentage of women had received poor relief. Government expenditures on pensions totaled nearly £5.2 million in 1909–10 and over £7.9 million in 1911–12, 26% more than the entire cost of poor relief in 1906–7.⁷²

The authors of the 1908 act went to some length to ensure that old age pensions were not associated with the Poor Law—pensions were collected from the local Post Office rather than Poor Law authorities. There was no stigma attached to receiving a pension. Indeed, they were “immensely popular”—old people spending their pension allowance at a shop in Salford “would bless the name of Lloyd George as if he were a saint from heaven.” Flora Thompson wrote that the pensions transformed the lives of many aged cottagers in her Oxfordshire village, and recalled that when old people first went to the Post Office to draw their pensions, “tears of gratitude would run down the cheeks of some.”⁷³

Appeals for minimum wage legislation began before Rowntree’s survey of York and the Board of Trade’s 1906 wage census revealed that large numbers of low-skilled adult males were paid wages that were not sufficient to maintain a family of five. In their 1897 book, Industrial Democracy, the Webbs called for the adoption of legal minimum wages for both men and women, “determined by practical inquiry as to the cost of the food, clothing, and shelter physiologically necessary, according to national habit and custom, to prevent bodily deterioration.” The minimum wage would be different for men and women, and perhaps also for urban and rural districts. It would not correspond to and would be lower than a “living wage,” but it would be a boon to unskilled men and women in unregulated, parasitic trades.⁷⁵

While support for a national minimum wage was never strong, the 1890s witnessed increasing pressure for legislation regulating wages in so-called sweated industries dominated by women workers. At the instigation of the Women’s Trade Union League, in 1906 the Daily News sponsored a Sweated Industries Exhibition in London, at which visitors could learn about working conditions in 45 sweated trades. The exhibition led to the formation of the National Anti-Sweating League. This pressured the Liberal government to create the Select Committee on Homework, whose 1908 report proposed the establishment of wage boards in certain trades “to fix minimum time and piece rates of payment for Home Workers in those trades.”⁷⁶

For each of the industries covered by the act, the initial rates for women set by the trade boards exceeded the average weekly wage of female workers in 1906. The gap between the previous average wage and the board-determined minimum varied substantially across trades, and was particularly large in lace making, hollow ware, and tin box making. It is not possible to determine how many women experienced wage increases as a result of the act or the magnitude of the average increase in their weekly income, but some idea of the Trade Boards Act’s effects on wages can be obtained from data for the tailoring and box-making trades reported by Tawney and Bulkley. Tawney, using wage data for 11,372 women employed in ready-made tailoring from the 1906 wage census, estimated that at least 38% of women engaged in tailoring should have received a wage increase as a result of the establishment of minimum rates. Roughly a third of those who received increases had their weekly wages raised by up to 1s. 6d. per week, another third received an additional 1s. 6d.–2s. 6d. per week, and the final third received an additional 2s. 6d.–4s. per week. Bulkley estimated that 52% of the 2,934 women employed in box making in the wage census should have had their wages raised. Because the majority of women in tailoring and box making worked on piece rates, the new minimum rates also caused some of those with weekly earnings above the minimum set by the board to receive wage increases.78

The 1909 act applied to a relatively small number of poor women workers, and largely ignored the pressing issue of the low wage rates of adult male unskilled laborers. For this reason, it was criticized by some contemporaries for being too cautious a measure, and historians have echoed these criticisms. For example, Blackburn referred to the act as a “modest reform” and contended that “what was required was a much more radical measure . . . a national minimum wage based on an agreed living income.” Even if one focuses only on female low-wage workers, the Trade Boards Act was a modest reform. Labor leader Joseph Hallsworth concluded after the act’s extension in 1913 that “a very large amount of sweating . . . still continued in trades not covered by the Boards, and particularly among women and girls.”⁷⁹

However, the adoption of a more radical policy, such as a national minimum wage, was not politically feasible in 1909. The evils of the sweating system had been known since the late 1880s, and yet despite the lobbying efforts of various groups, it took two decades for Parliament to adopt legislation addressing the issue. Tawney wrote that “the weight of ignorance and prejudice, as well as reasoned opposition, to be overcome” in adopting the Trade Boards Act “was enormous.” The opposition to a national minimum wage for adult males would have been far stronger, since many reformers who supported regulating women’s employment contracts were opposed to regulating those of men. Churchill, when introducing the bill to Parliament, felt it necessary to emphasize that “these methods of regulating wages by law are only defensible as exceptional measures to deal with diseased and parasitic trades.”⁸⁰

The Labour Exchanges Act authorized the Board of Trade to establish and maintain labor exchanges “in such places as they see fit.” Their use was to be voluntary for both employers and workers—workpeople seeking employment registered at the local exchange and employers notified the exchange of vacancies. The role of the exchange was to fill each vacancy with the best qualified workman in the area; if no suitable workmen were available locally, the exchange passed the job information on to other exchanges. By December 1910, 147 exchanges had been established, and by 1912 there were 414 exchanges covering the entire country. The number of workers registered increased from about 1.4 million in 1910 to nearly 3 million in 1913, while the number of vacancies filled rose from 374,00 in 1910 to 922,000 in 1913. The share of adult male registrants for whom work was found ranged from 27.5% in 1911 to 32.8% in 1912. Placement rates were slightly higher for adult women and substantially higher for boys and girls under age 17, over 40% of whom were found jobs each year.⁸²

At the same time that Beveridge was working on labor exchanges, Llewellyn Smith, Permanent Secretary of the Board of Trade, was drafting a system of national unemployment insurance. In his May 1909 speech to the House of Commons announcing that he was about to introduce a labor exchanges bill, Churchill stated that in the near future the government would propose a system of national unemployment insurance. He argued that labor exchanges and unemployment insurance were “complementary . . . they mutually support and sustain each other.” Labor exchanges provided the “apparatus for finding work and testing willingness to work” without which no unemployment insurance scheme can work. Churchill reminded the House that both the Majority and Minority Reports of the Royal Commission to Investigate the Poor Laws called for the adoption of labor exchanges. He did not add that neither report supported a compulsory system of unemployment insurance.⁸³

The finalized unemployment insurance scheme was introduced to Parliament on May 4, 1911, as Part II of the National Insurance Bill. It established compulsory unemployment insurance (UI) in a limited number of industries—building, construction of works, shipbuilding, mechanical engineering, iron founding, construction of vehicles, and sawmilling—chosen because unemployment in them was “not only high and chronic, but marked by seasonal and cyclical fluctuations.” Some 2.25 million workers were covered—about 20% of employed adult males, and roughly one-third of those “engaged in purely industrial work.” Workers and their employers each contributed 2.5d. per week to the UI fund, and the state contributed 1.67d. An unemployed worker received a weekly benefit of 7s. for a maximum of 15 weeks in any 12-month period, subject to the provision that he had paid five weekly contributions for every week of benefit.⁸⁵

At the same time the Board of Trade was working on an unemployment insurance scheme, officials in the Treasury, under the leadership of Chancellor Lloyd George, were developing a scheme of health insurance. Lloyd George’s interest in health insurance dated from his 1908 trip to Germany to examine their system of national insurance. While his purpose was to learn about pensions, he returned impressed by the fact that German national insurance affected “the great mass of German people in well-nigh every walk of life.” In a speech at Swansea in October, he stated that the Old Age Pension Act was just the beginning of needed social reforms: “We are still confronted with the more gigantic task of dealing with the rest—the sick, the infirm, the unemployed, the widows, and the orphans.”⁸⁷

Lloyd George realized from the beginning that, unlike pensions, health benefits were too costly to be financed by taxation alone. He therefore called for a system of insurance, in which workers and employers, along with the state, contributed to the cost of health benefits. Like Churchill, he believed that the payment of contributions earned workers a right to benefits, and he insisted that benefits be provided even to those who became sick due to their own negligence. The Webbs, among others, strongly objected to both the contributory nature of health insurance and to the idea that workers had a right to benefits regardless of their conduct. Beatrice Webb described the scheme as “rotten” in her diary, and criticized the “naïve delight” among those in the governing class at making workmen pay part of the costs. She also wrote that the “unconditionality” of benefits “constitutes a grave defect. The state gets nothing for its money in the way of conduct, it may even encourage malingering.”⁸⁸

It turned out to be more difficult to get health insurance through Parliament than unemployment insurance. Lloyd George had to deal with three powerful interest groups, all of whom feared the effects of national health insurance—friendly societies, industrial assurance companies, and the British medical profession. As a result, the act adopted in 1911 was substantially different from that proposed in 1908. For example, Lloyd George’s original proposal included widow’s and orphan’s pensions, but these were dropped in response to the strenuous objections of the friendly societies, who viewed them as a form of funeral benefit. Lloyd George responded to friendly societies’ more general objections to national insurance in his April 1909 budget speech, arguing that there were several million people in Britain “who either cannot be persuaded or perhaps cannot afford to bear the expense of the systematic contributions” required to become members of friendly societies, and that nothing “short of an universal compulsory system can ever hope to succeed adequately in coping with the problem.”⁹⁰

The government’s health insurance scheme was introduced in May 1911 as Part I of the National Insurance Bill. There followed several months of negotiations both within Parliament and between the government and interest groups, in particular the British Medical Association and the industrial insurance industry. Indeed, the passage of the bill provided “an almost classic history of lobby activity.” Lloyd George compromised on some points, while at the same time appealing to the public to support his health insurance scheme. In a speech at Birmingham on June 12, he famously stated,

The act that was adopted in December 1911 established a system of compulsory health insurance covering all workers aged 16 and over earning less than £160 per year. The system was contributory—workers paid 4d. per week, their employers 3d., and the state 2d. In return, an insured man received 10s. per week when sick (an ensured woman 7.5s.), payable from the fourth day of illness, for up to 13 weeks. Thereafter, weekly benefits for both men and women were 5s. for an additional 13 weeks. The scheme was administered by approved societies, who set up local branches or committees to deal with the insured. Insured workers received free medical treatment from a doctor whom they could select from a list of those employed by an approved society, and were eligible to obtain treatment in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Dependents of insured workers did not receive medical treatment, except for a 30s. maternity benefit payable to an insured worker’s wife at childbirth.

The Liberal Welfare Reforms, considered together, represent a major shift in British social welfare policy. They provided a minimum level of assistance outside of the Poor Law to the sick, the unemployed, and the aged, and in doing so reduced the economic insecurity associated with industrial capitalism. They also led to a sharp increase in social welfare spending—government spending on old age pensions alone in England and Wales in 1913 was 29% greater than total spending on indoor and outdoor poor relief in 1908.

However, the new policies left many working-class individuals unprotected, and the benefits they provided were far from generous—the safety net created by the Liberal Welfare Reforms was full of holes. The Old Age Pension Act did not cover workers aged 65–70, national unemployment insurance covered only one in five adult males, and those for a maximum of 15 weeks, medical benefits were not provided to the dependents of insured workers, and the Trade Boards Act, even after the creation of additional Boards in 1913, covered only one in ten women employed outside of agriculture or domestic service. The reforms did not address the fact that wage rates for many unskilled workers were “insufficient to . . . maintain a family of moderate size in a state of bare physical efficiency.”⁹² Some of the policies, in particular the Trade Boards Act and national unemployment insurance, must be viewed as experiments, and indeed their coverage was extended after the First World War. The Liberal Welfare Reforms were a step, but a tentative one, toward the post-1945 welfare state.

To explain the timing of the Liberal reforms, it is necessary to add a political economy dimension to the story. This section examines the role played by the increase in the franchise and the rise of the Labour Party in leading the Liberals to turn to social reform, and also compares the timing of welfare legislation in Britain with that of its continental neighbors and economic competitors.

Lindert has argued convincingly that the fall and rise of social welfare spending in Victorian and Edwardian Britain cannot be understood without including political voice. The Great Reform Act of 1832 gave the vote to the middle class, and increased the size of the parliamentary electorate by nearly 65%. The newly enfranchised, many of whom were petty capitalists and shopkeepers, largely were opposed to generous poor relief spending.⁹⁴ The Reform Act of 1867—Disraeli’s “leap in the dark”—granted the vote to all household heads living in boroughs (including a substantial share of urban working-class males) and increased the electorate by 85%.95

In 1884 the Third Reform Act extended the franchise to household heads living in the counties, increasing the electorate by a further 88%. The act gave most agricultural laborers and coal miners the vote. In 1885, the parliamentary electorate totaled 5.7 million, or 63% of the adult male population. The Redistribution of Seats Act of 1885 increased the representation of northern cities and created single-member constituencies in both boroughs and counties. Liverpool gained six seats in Parliament, Birmingham gained four, and Manchester and Sheffield each gained three. The working-class districts of Tower Hamlets and Hackney in East London each gained five seats. Some of the new urban constituencies were “overwhelmingly middle-class or working-class,” which encouraged “the development of a class-based electoral system.” The acts of 1884 and 1885 thus produced “a ‘mass’ electorate . . . in which the traditional parties who ignored the wishes of manual workers would do so at their peril.”⁹⁶

The Liberal Party seemed to most contemporaries to be the logical home for the newly enfranchised, but the party did not go out of its way to appeal to working-class voters, and it paid a heavy price at the polls. The general elections of 1886, 1895, and 1900 were “resounding Liberal defeats.”⁹⁷ Working-class dissatisfaction with the two major parties led in 1893 to the founding of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which in 1900 merged with other Socialist groups to form the Labour Party.

The 1906 election was a landslide victory for the Liberals, who gained a 243-seat majority over the Conservatives. The election also saw a fivefold increase in the number of votes cast for Labour, and an increase in the number of Labour MPs from 2 to 29. The Labour Party had campaigned for the adoption of social welfare policies—its election manifesto stated that underfed schoolchildren, the aged poor, and the unemployed had been neglected by Parliament, and ended with an appeal to workers: “You have it in your power to see that Parliament carries out your wishes.”⁹⁸

Once in power, Lloyd George and others began to call for social welfare legislation. In October 1906, Lloyd George, then President of the Board of Trade, stated in a speech at Cardiff that if the Liberal Parliament would do something “to remove the national degradation of slums and widespread poverty and destitution” and provide “an honourable sustenance for deserving old age, . . . then the Independent Labour party will call in vain upon the working men of Britain to desert Liberalism that is so gallantly fighting to rid the land of the wrongs that have oppressed those who labour in it.” Churchill, at the time Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, also recognized the political benefits to be reaped from the adoption of social welfare legislation. In 1907 he wrote to the editor of the Westminster Review that the working classes “will not continue to bear, they cannot, the awful uncertainties of their lives. Minimum standards of wages and comfort, insurance in some effective form or other against sickness, unemployment, old age—these are the questions and the only questions by which parties are going to live in the future.”¹⁰⁰

The Liberal government’s achievements on the reform front were modest in its first two years in power, consisting mostly of free school lunches and medical inspections for poor children. The “tempo of reform dramatically quickened” when, in 1908, with the Liberals’ popularity declining as a result of rising unemployment, and after losing five by-elections, the gravely ill Campbell-Bannerman resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by Asquith. The resulting Cabinet reshuffling increased the power of the “social Liberals,” and in particular Lloyd George and Churchill, “the heavenly twins of social reform”—Lloyd George became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Churchill replaced him as President of the Board of Trade.¹⁰¹

As predicted by Lloyd George, the Old Age Pension act was “immensely popular” with the working class. He and Churchill believed that health and unemployment insurance also would be popular. Churchill wrote the Prime Minister in December 1908 that the government should put forward a program of national sickness and unemployment insurance, and predicted that it “would not only benefit the state but fortify the party.” At the time of its passage, many members of the opposition also believed that national insurance would yield political benefits to the Liberals. Austen Chamberlain, a leading Conservative, commented in 1911, “Confound Ll. George. He has strengthened the Government again. His sickness scheme is a good one and he is on the right lines this time.”¹⁰³

In the event, national insurance turned out to be less popular with the working class than old age pensions, due in large part to differences in how the programs were funded. Pensions were noncontributory, while national insurance required weekly deductions from workers’ wages. Workers liked the extension of the safety net and reduction in economic insecurity provided by health and unemployment insurance, but did not like the decline in their disposable income. The more militant among the working class argued that what was needed was not compulsory state-based insurance, but steady work and higher wages. Once these were secured, workers would be able to protect themselves.¹⁰⁴

The Liberal Welfare Reforms did not yield the positive political bump that Lloyd George and Churchill had hoped to achieve—they did not “stop the electoral rot” in the long run. Working-class voters came to believe that their interests would be better served by a working-class party than by a middle-class party catering to the working class. There was “a growing feeling in the country that the Liberal Party was no longer the party of the working classes, but that in some perceived if indefinable way the Labour Party was.”¹⁰⁵

How did British workers’ living standards and social welfare policies at the turn of the century compare with living standards and social policies in other European countries? Table 6.6 presents data for seven measures of the standard of living for nine European countries circa 1900–1910: GDP per capita, real wages for manual laborers, life expectancy at birth, heights of adult males, literacy, school enrollment, and annual discretionary hours. GDP per capita is measured in 1990 international dollars. The real wage series is an index, with British wages in 1904–8 equal to 100. The school enrollment rate is defined as the number of primary and secondary school students per 1,000 children aged 5–14. Annual discretionary (leisure) time is defined as 4,160 hours minus the average annual number of hours worked.¹⁰⁶

Many economists believe that income, measured by either GDP per capita or real wages, is the best measure of living standards. Higher incomes enable workers to purchase more of what they value most, be it more nutritious food, better housing, better health care, education for their children, or more beer. Richer countries will have healthier and better educated workers. Others view income as a measure of command over resources, an input to well-being rather than an indicator of well-being, which is better measured by life expectancy, health, education, and voluntary leisure time. Height by age is a function of net nutrition in childhood and adolescence, and therefore a proxy for health. Workers gain satisfaction from leisure as well as income. The decline in annual hours of work that occurred in virtually all industrialized nations after 1870 “did not come about as an accident,” and resulted in a significant increase in workers’ well-being.¹⁰⁷

Britain’s ranking in the league table depends on which measure of the standard of living is being considered. In 1900 Britain was the richest nation in Europe, with a per capita GDP 19% greater than Belgium and one-third greater than Germany. British workers’ material living standards, as measured by real wages, were higher than those of other European workers. They also enjoyed more leisure time than workers on the continent, to go with their higher income.

Table 6.6 raises another perplexing issue—how can the fact that British wages were higher than wages on the continent be reconciled with the poverty estimates of Rowntree and Bowley? Perhaps urban poverty rates were even higher in Europe than in Britain. Unfortunately, there are no comparable poverty surveys of German or French towns with which to test this hypothesis. Moreover, there was no “condition of Germany” debate comparable to the “condition of England” debate discussed in Section I. A recent comparative study of British and German workers’ living standards suggests an answer. Broadberry and Burhop compared British and German real wages in 12 occupations in 1905 and found that while skilled workers’ wages were 10–30% lower in Germany, wages for unskilled engineering laborers were the same in the two countries. In other words, the skill premium was higher in Britain than in Germany. They conclude that the relatively low wages of unskilled British workers makes it “easier to understand the persistence of large pockets of poverty in Europe’s highest wage economy.”¹⁰⁹

Flora and Alber constructed an index of social insurance coverage consisting of a “weighted average of the percent of the labor force covered” by old age pensions and sickness, unemployment, and accident insurance. This indicates, not surprisingly, that in the first decade of the century coverage was highest in Germany, followed by Denmark. With the adoption of the Old Age Pension Act in 1908, Britain overtook Denmark, and after the passage of the National Insurance Act coverage rates were higher in Britain than in any other European country. Britain’s lead was short-lived, however, as it was overtaken by Sweden in 1913. On the eve of the First World War, Britain was one of three leading European “welfare” states, along with Sweden and Germany, in terms of worker coverage.¹¹³

While the number of workers covered by social insurance increased rapidly in the decades leading up to the First World War, government spending on social welfare programs remained tiny in all European countries, as can be seen in panel (b) of Table 6.7. In 1910 only the three Scandinavian countries and Britain spent more than 1% of gross domestic product on social transfers. By contrast, in 1995 the ratio of social transfer spending to GDP exceeded 20% in all nine countries, and exceeded 30% in Denmark and Sweden. A comparison of panels (a) and (b) shows that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between social insurance coverage and social spending. The reason for this is that in some countries government-mandated social insurance programs were not paid for by taxpayer contributions. Germany is a prime example. The entire cost of German sickness insurance up to 1914 was borne by workers, who paid two-thirds of the costs, and their employers, who paid the remaining one-third. The state provided a small subsidy to the old age and invalidity insurance fund, but in 1908 this equaled only 0.12% of German national product. In the words of Lindert, “the famous Bismarckian social insurance involved almost no redistribution through government budgets.”¹¹⁴

To what extent were the Liberal Welfare Reforms modeled on European, and in particular German, precedents? Daniel Rodgers maintained that Churchill, Lloyd George, and the Liberals were “eager policy borrowers, scavengers across the boundaries of national political cultures.” Beveridge (1907) and Lloyd George (1908) visited Germany to study its social welfare policies, and both came back impressed with the German system of social insurance. Journalist Harold Spender, who accompanied Lloyd George on his visit, wrote, “The German example has taught us this great lesson—that the principle of insurance, which is used so freely in our own country to protect the prosperous, . . . may be even more successfully extended to protect the unprosperous. . . . Within a few years, practically the whole of the working classes of Germany will be made immune from the quadruple risks of old age, accident, invalidity and sickness, while the State that has brought that about will be contributing little more than the cost of administration.” Churchill compared British private voluntary insurance with German compulsory insurance in a January 1908 letter to Wilson Fox and concluded that the “enormous advantage” of the German system was that “it catches everybody,” whereas the British system offered no provision for “the residue” who “have neither the character nor the resources” to provide for themselves. Eleven months later, after becoming President of the Board of Trade, he wrote the Prime Minister recommending that the government “thrust a big slice of Bismarckianism over the whole underside of our industrial system, and await the consequences.”¹¹⁵

The German sickness insurance program was funded completely by contributions from workers and employers, with workers paying two-thirds of the cost. The British system was similar in the sense that workers and employers contributed to the fund—in both the German and British plans, employers paid one-third of the weekly contributions (3d. per worker per week in Britain). However, the British government contributed 2d. per worker per week out of tax revenue, so that workers paid only 44% of the cost (4d. per week). In the words of Lloyd George, workers received 9d. for a contribution of 4d.

Great Britain was the first country to adopt a compulsory system of unemployment insurance. Ten years earlier the city of Ghent, Belgium, had adopted a voluntary unemployment insurance scheme in which the municipality subsidized the provision of the insurance by trade unions. Ghent-type systems quickly spread to cities throughout Western Europe, and by 1908 national schemes for subsidizing voluntary (mainly trade union) unemployment insurance funds were adopted by France, Denmark, and Norway. It was hoped that government subsidies would lead additional unions—including unions of low-skilled workers—to offer unemployment benefits to their members, although in this regard the plans were not especially successful. The Minority Report of the Poor Law Commission proposed that Britain adopt a version of the Ghent system, and the Majority Report also noted the Ghent system with approval. In the end, however, Churchill rejected a Ghent-type system and insisted that employers, as well as workers and the state, contribute to the scheme. The resulting British system therefore differed from all previous unemployment insurance plans.

In sum, while Britain was a bit of a latecomer in the adoption of state-supported social welfare programs, it caught up in 1908–11. On the eve of the First World War, it was a leader in social welfare protection, measured either by the share of persons covered or by expenditures as a share of national income. Britain expanded its social safety net in the 1920s, as we will see in Chapter 7, and remained a leader in social welfare throughout the interwar period.

The decade that began with the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and ended with the passage of the National Insurance Act marked a watershed in British social welfare policy. The Liberal Welfare Reforms provided assistance to the working class, which was outside of the Poor Law and therefore did not involve “the stigma of pauperism.” Parliament did not, however, break up the Poor Law as the Webbs had called for, and it continued to play an important role during the interwar years, assisting those who fell through the cracks in the safety net.

Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain witnessed an explosion of information on working-class living standards, which revealed that poverty and insecurity remained serious problems despite decades of economic growth—trickle down clearly was not sufficient to eliminate economic distress among the lower stratum of the working class. The findings disturbed middle-class Britain on both humanitarian and national efficiency grounds and helped turn the tide of public opinion in favor of government-supported social safety nets. The drive for welfare reform was further encouraged by the granting of political voice to a large share of the working class and the Liberal government’s attempt to slow the growth of the Labour Party.

In terms of the funding of social policy, the Liberal Welfare Reforms marked a sharp break from the past. The Poor Law and municipal relief works were financed out of local taxation. In contrast, old age pensions were funded entirely by the central government, and national insurance was financed by contributions from employers, workers, and the state. By increasing the central government’s role in the funding of social welfare policies, the Liberal Welfare Reforms helped pave the way for the rise of the welfare state in the 1940s.

1. Read (1972: 151).

2. Boyer (2004b) provides a detailed discussion of working-class living standards in the decades leading up to the First World War.

3. Booth (1888) contains his initial findings for East London and Hackney. The poverty rates for London as a whole are from Booth (1892b: 2:21).

4. Rowntree (1901: 110–18).

5. Bowley’s study of poverty in Reading had been published previously in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. See Bowley (1913). The analysis of Bolton was published as a supplementary chapter to Livelihood and Poverty in 1920.

6. Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1915: 36–37).

7. Mann (1904) and Davies (1909) used similar methods to estimate poverty rates in the rural villages of Ridgmount, Bedfordshire, and Corsley, Wiltshire. Their results suggest that rural poverty rates, at least in southern England, were as high as or higher than urban poverty rates. See Mann (1904: 177, 185), Davies (1909: 105–7, 142–43, 147), and Freeman (2000).

8. Bowley and Burnett-Hurst stressed that their minimum standards of expenditure probably were set too low since few families spent their income solely for the purpose of maintaining physical health. See Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1915: 36–37).

9. Gazeley and Newell (2011: 63–65). Using Rowntree’s York standard poverty line, the share of working-class households living in poverty increases to 16.1%. The share of individuals living in poverty was 15.5% using Bowley’s poverty line and 17.0% using Rowntree’s poverty line.

10. Rowntree (1901: 365–67).

11. Rowntree (1901: 136–38).

12. The estimates for Reading, Northampton, Warrington, and Bolton are from a later study by Bowley and Hogg (1925) and are slightly different from those reported by Bowley and Burnett-Hurst.

13. In contrast, Booth (1892b: 1:146–49) found that the majority of Londoners in poverty were poor because of the casual or irregular nature of their employment.

14. Rowntree (1901: 111, emphasis original); Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1915: 36–37).

15. Rowntree (1918: 9, 103–5, 128–29).

16. Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1915: 28–31). Virtually all children working were aged 14 or older.

17. Rowntree (1901: 133); Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1915: 41–42).

18. Chadwick ([1842] 1965); Flinn (1965: 3–37); Mokyr (2009: 295–96, 466, 479–81).

19. Rowntree (1901: 198–216); Pember Reeves (1913: 193–94).

20. Searle (2004: 305). The London data are for St. George’s Barracks. Data on rejection rates by city are from Parl. Papers, Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, vol. 3, App. 6 (1904, XXXII), pp. 2–3.

21. Data on rejection rates for 1893–1902 and causes of rejection are from Parl. Papers, Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, vol. 1, App. 1 (1904: XXXII), pp. 96–97. Rowntree (1901: 217–19) maintained that the decline in rejection rates from 1896 to 1900 largely was a result of a lowering of standards and instructions to officers in charge of recruiting “not to send a recruit up for medical examination unless there is a reasonable probability of his passing.”

22. Searle (2004: 375). Taylor’s memorandum is in Appendix 1 of Parl. Papers, Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, vol. 1 (1904: XXXII), pp. 96–97. Wilson’s quote is from his testimony to the committee: vol. 2, q. 1,916, p. 80.

23. Parl. Papers, Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, vol. 1 (1904: XXXII), pp. 84–93.

24. Rowntree (1901: 216, 304, emphasis original).

25. See Bosanquet (1902: 108–9), Bosanquet (1905: 233), Loch (1902: 8), Loch (1910: 386, 474), and Appendix III (by Loch) to Parl. Papers, Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, vol. 1 (1904, XXXII), pp. 109–11. Bowpitt (2000) discusses Rowntree’s “early critics.”

26. Masterman (1902: 24, 26, 31). Seven years later Masterman (1909) published his own masterpiece, a critique of Edwardian society titled The Condition of England.

27. See Churchill (1967: 29–31) and Gilbert (1991: 146). Churchill’s unpublished review of Poverty is included in Churchill (1969: 105–11).

28. Bell (1907: 50–51). It is not clear precisely how Bell and her team determined the number of households living below or near the poverty line. The text does not report the poverty line used or household income for the families investigated.

29. Bell (1907: 49–50, 83–84).

30. Bell (1907: 86, 108, 118–19, 122, 271).

31. Pember Reeves (1913: 8–21); Pember Reeves (1912: 2–3).

32. Pember Reeves (1913: 21–42). Despite its poor quality, housing was expensive. Many families paid 8s. per week in rent, rates, and taxes, which often was one-third or more of their income. The high cost of housing, when necessary heating, lighting, and clothing costs were taken into account, often left only 10s. or less for food.

33. Pember Reeves (1913: 75–80, 145, 213–14, 226–31). In the book’s concluding chapter she called for the government to adopt a legal minimum wage or, if that was politically unfeasible, to act as guardian and guarantee “the necessities of life to every child.”

34. Rowntree (1901: 221).

35. Chamberlain’s speech is summarized in the Times, March 18, 1891, p. 10.

36. Parl. Papers, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor, vol. 3 (1895, XV), qq. 12,199–12,353.

37. Booth (1891: 634–40).

38. Parl. Papers, Report of the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor (1895, XIV), pp. lxxxiii–lxxxvii.

39. Parl. Papers, Report of the Royal Commission on the Aged Poor (1895, XIV), pp. xciii–xcvi.

40. Booth (1899a: 45–56).

41. Chamberlain’s comments regarding universal pensions are reported in the Times, May 25, 1899, p. 12.

42. Stead (1909: 59–66).

43. Parl. Papers, Report from the Select Committee on the Aged Deserving Poor (1899, VIII), pp. viii–xii.

44. Parl. Papers, Report of the Departmental Committee on the Aged Deserving Poor (1900, X), pp. xxiv–xxviii. On the debate concerning pensions from 1891 to 1906, see Hennock (1987: 117–25), Thane (1978), Thane (2000: 198–212), and Macnicol (1998: 65–84, 145–53).

45. Parl. Papers, Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress (1909, XXXVII), p. 1.

46. Webb (1948: 316–21). Detailed discussions of the Royal Commission can be found in Harris (1972: 245–64), Woodroofe (1977), and McBriar (1987). Webb (1948: chap. 7) offers a behind-the-scenes discussion of the workings of the commission.

47. Parl. Papers, Report . . . on the Effects of Employment or Assistance (1909, XLIV), p. 148. The Chamberlain Circular and the Unemployed Workmen Act are discussed in Chapter 4.

48. Parl. Papers, Minutes of Evidence . . . of Witnesses Further Relating to the Subject of Unemployment (1910, XLIX), p. 186.

49. See, for example, the statement given by Beveridge to the Royal Commission: Parl. Papers, Minutes of Evidence . . . of Witnesses Relating Chiefly to the Subject of Unemployment (1910, XLVIII), pp. 15–16. Beveridge and others stated that casual laborers thrown out of work as a result of “decasualisation” should be aided by the labor exchanges to find employment in other occupations.

50. The proposals of Bowley, Beveridge, and Chapman are in Parl. Papers, Minutes of Evidence . . . of Witnesses Relating Chiefly to the Subject of Unemployment (1910, XLVIII), pp. 467–69, 18, 332.

51. Parl. Papers, Minutes of Evidence . . . of Witnesses Relating Chiefly to the Subject of Unemployment (1910, XLVIII), p. 17.

52. Webb suggested the government pay “one half what the trade union paid.” Parl. Papers, Minutes of Evidence . . . of Witnesses Further Relating to the Subject of Unemployment (1910, XLIX), pp. 188–89, 194. Jackson (1910: 34–39) wrote that “a State subsidy . . . is very necessary for the less well-paid trades which have not at present been able to secure sufficient contributions to enable them to pay unemployed benefit to their members.”

53. Beveridge (1909: 227–30); Parl. Papers, Minutes of Evidence . . . of Witnesses Relating Chiefly to the Subject of Unemployment (1910, XLVIII), pp. 17, 450–53; Smith (1910: 527–28).

54. Parl. Papers, Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress (1909, XXXVII), pp. 404–5, 630–31; Webb and Webb (1909b: 248–64, 341).

55. Parl. Papers, Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1909, XXXVII), pp. 415–21.

56. Webb and Webb (1909b: 288–93, 343).

57. Webb and Webb (1909b: 283–84); Parl. Papers, Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1909, XXXVII), pp. 411, 633.

58. Parl. Papers, Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1909, XXXVII), pp. 596–601.

59. Parl. Papers, Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1909, XXXVII), pp. 655, 664–65.

60. Parl. Papers, Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1909, XXXVII), pp. 617–19, 654–55.

61. According to the report, drink was “the most potent and universal” cause of pauperism. Old age was “hardly in itself a ‘cause’ of pauperism,” although it was a major factor when combined with “low earning power, drink, or thriftlessness.” Parl. Papers, Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (1909, XXXVII), pp. 219–27, 643–44.

62. Relieving officers inevitably concentrated their attention “not on the different methods of curative or reformatory treatment that [the applicants] severally require, but on their one common attribute of destitution, and the one common remedy of ‘relief,’ indiscriminate and unconditional.” Webb and Webb (1909a: 574–79).

63. Webb and Webb (1909a: 499–501).

64. Indeed, it accused the Majority Report of proposing to establish “what is practically the same system of Poor Relief, with new members and under another name!” Webb and Webb (1909a: xv–xvi).

65. For example, the care of school-age pauper children would be undertaken by Local Education Authorities, supervised by the Board of Education, and the treatment of the sick undertaken by Local Health Authorities supervised by the Department of Public Health. Webb and Webb (1909a: 516–29).

66. Webb and Webb (1909a: 499–500, 518, 590, emphasis original).

67. Webb (1948: 422–41); Woodroofe (1977: 161–63); Hamilton, Spectator, May 28, 1910, p. 17.

68. Fraser (2003: 176).

69. For a detailed discussion of social welfare legislation for children, see Gilbert (1966a: chap. 3) and Fraser (2003: 161–64). The quote is from Pipkin (1931: 73).

70. On the adoption of the Old Age Pension Act, see Macnicol (1998: 155–63), Thane (2000: 217–28), and Gilbert (1966a: chap. 4).

71. On January 1, 1910, there were 195,924 paupers aged 70 and older in England and Wales. Parl. Papers, Old Age Pensioners and Aged Pauperism (1913, LV), p. 3.

72. Data on the cost of pensions from Board of Trade, Seventeenth Abstract of Labour Statistics (1915: 185). Poor Law expenditures for 1906–7 from Williams (1981: 171).

73. Roberts (1990: 84); Thompson ([1945] 2011: 86).

74. Thane (2000: 227–28). Budd and Guinnane (1991) found that some Irish pensioners misrepresented their age in order to collect a pension before reaching 70. Some English pensioners also might have exaggerated their age.

75. Webb and Webb (1897: 774–78).

76. Schmiechen (1984: 162–70); Morris (1986: 195–207); Parl. Papers, Report from the Select Committee on Home Work (1908, VIII), p. xviii.

77. For more on the Trade Boards Act, see Bean and Boyer (2009), Sells (1923), Blackburn (2007), and Hatton (1997).

78. Sells (1923: 80); Tawney (1915: 77–78); Bulkley (1915: 32–33).

79. Blackburn (1999: 111, 107); Hallsworth (1925: 9). See also Blackburn (1991; 2007).

80. Tawney (1927: 19); Churchill (1969: 879). Checkland (1983: 216) wrote, regarding the adoption of a national minimum wage before the First World War, that “for any government to contemplate so far-reaching an interference in the labour market and in income distribution was as yet unthinkable.”

81. Harris (1997: 153–73); Parl. Papers, Minutes of Evidence . . . of Witnesses Relating Chiefly to the Subject of Unemployment (1910, XLVIII), pp. 6–7, 15–17.

82. Beveridge (1930: 295–306). Data on number of registrants and placement rates are from Board of Trade, Seventeenth Abstract of Labour Statistics (1915: 13).

83. Churchill (1909: 253–65).

84. Churchill (1909: 265–67); Harris (1972: 302–9); Gilbert (1966b: 855–56).

85. Fraser (2003: 188); Churchill (1909: 267–68).

86. Beveridge (1930: 266–69); Harris (1972: 332–34).

87. Hennock (1987: 149–50); Gilbert (1966a: 231–32, 294).

88. Webb (1948: 430, 475–77). William Braithwaite, a civil servant who worked with Lloyd George in writing the health insurance bill, described a “Homeric” breakfast meeting between the Chancellor and the Webbs. Before Lloyd George could speak, “Mr. and Mrs. Webb, singly and in pairs, leap down his throat. . . . The Chancellor was unable to get a word in, and was evidently partly amused and partly annoyed.” Braithwaite (1957: 115–16).

89. Gilbert (1966a: 315); Webb (1948: 478–79).

90. Gilbert (1966a: 294–300).

91. Gilbert (1966a: 356–57); Fraser (2003: 180–83); Braithwaite (1957: 176–77).

92. See Rowntree (1901: 133) and Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1915: 41–42). There also were odd inconsistencies across programs. A worker covered by unemployment insurance who lost his job received 7s. per week; the same worker received 10s. per week if he was unable to work due to sickness.

93. Masterman (1901: 1–4).

94. See Lindert (2004: 71–73, 80–83) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2006: 3).

95. The number of voters in English and Welsh boroughs increased by 138% as a result of the act. In 1871, 44.7% of adult males were on the electoral registers in boroughs, as compared to 19.7% in 1861 (Hoppen 1998: 253). Lindert (2004: 72) estimates that the share of UK adult men who had the right to vote increased from 18.0% in 1866 to 31.4% in 1868.

96. Searle (1992: 49–50); Youngs (1979; 1991).

97. Searle (1992: 51).

98. Craig (1989: 18); Dale (2000: 10–11).

99. Grigg (1978: 77); Searle (2004: 361).

100. Lloyd George (1910: 36); Hay (1978: 72).

101. Searle (2004: 362–66); Churchill (1967: 238).

102. Searle (2004: 366); George (1958: 220); Lloyd George (1910: 58); Churchill (1967: 255).

103. Churchill (1969: 862–64).

104. Thane (1984); Searle (1992: 111–13).

105. McKibbin (1974: 70–71); Searle (1992: 68–76, 112–20).

106. I chose 4,160 hours as the maximum length of the work year. It is equal to 52 times 80 hours per week. This assumes that the remaining 88 hours in the week are necessary for sleep, meals, chores, and commuting to and from work. Fogel (2000: 184) estimates that sleep, meals, chores, and commuting took 13 hours per day.

107. See Sen (1987), Steckel and Floud (1997), Fogel (2000: 184–86), Kuznets (1952: 63–69), Nordhaus and Tobin (1973), and Williamson (1984).

108. On public health investments, see Hennock (1973), Williamson (1990: chap. 10), Szreter (1988; 1997), and Sandberg and Steckel (1997, 143–45). On Britain’s lag in educational attainment, see Lindert (2004: chap. 5).

109. Broadberry and Burhop (2010: 419–23). Their conclusion fits well with the findings of Rowntree and Bowley that the major cause of poverty in Edwardian cities was the low wages paid to unskilled laborers. Broadberry and Burhop’s finding that wages for unskilled laborers in the engineering trades were equal in Britain and Germany appears not to jive with Williamson’s (1995) estimate that laborers’ wages were 13% lower in Germany than in Britain (see Table 6.6). Williamson’s wage data are for laborers in the building trades, and his estimate is similar to Broadberry and Burhop’s finding that wages for building trades laborers were 14% lower in Germany than in Britain.

110. See Flora and Alber (1981), Lindert (1994; 2004), Huberman and Lewchuk (2003), and Huberman (2012).

111. Flora and Alber (1981: 75). Hennock (2007: 180) estimates that in 1911 German membership in sickness funds of all kinds equaled about 14.25 million, which was 36.1% of the population aged 15–64. This percentage, while far below that reported by Flora and Alber, still leaves German coverage second in rank, behind only Denmark.

112. Flora and Alber (1981: 76–77).

113. Flora and Alber (1981: 54–57). Hennock (2007: 172–81) estimates that in 1913–14 the share of the working-age population eligible for sickness benefits was 48.5% in England and Wales and 46.7% in Germany.

114. Lindert (2004: 12–13); Lindert (1994: 9–14).

115. Rodgers (1998: 229–32); Hennock (1987: 133–38, 149–51); Spender (1909: 27); Churchill (1969: 759, 862–64).

116. Rodgers (1998: 230); Abbott (1918: 9–10).

TABLE 6.1. Poverty Rates and Causes of Poverty in York and Bowley’s Five Towns
	York 1899	Reading 1912	Northampton 1913	Warrington 1913	Stanley 1913	Bolton 1914
Population	75,812	87,693	90,064	72,100	23,294	180,851
(a) Percentage in Poverty (%)
Working-class households
Primary poverty	12.7	23.2	8.2	12.8	5.4	7.8
Working-class population
Primary poverty	15.5	29.0	9.3	14.7	6.1	8.0
Town population
Primary poverty	9.9	17.5	7.2	12.2	4.8
(b) Causes of Poverty (%)
Chief wage earner:
Dead or absent	27.5	14.0	25.0	6.0		35.0
Ill or old	10.0	11.0	14.0	1.0		17.0
Out of work	2.6	2.0	3.5	3.0		3.0
Irregularly employed	3.5	4.0	9.0	3.0		6.0
In full work but:
Low wages	43.7
Second adult dependent			3.5
Wage insufficient for 3 children:
3 children or less		33.0	16.0	22.0		20.0
4 children or more		16.0	7.0	38.0		9.0
Wage sufficient for 3 children but more than 3 children	12.8	20.0	22.0	27.0		10.0
Sources: York: Rowntree (1901: 26, 111–12, 117–20); other towns: Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1915: 38–44), Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1920: 237, 240), Bowley and Hogg (1925: 18, 78, 104, 128, 158).

TABLE 6.2. Economic Insecurity in Bowley’s Five Towns
Working-Class Households	Reading 1912	Northampton 1913	Warrington 1913	Stanley 1913	Bolton 1914
% of households below poverty line	23.2	8.2	12.8	5.4	7.8
% above, but within 6s. of poverty line	28.8	4.0	17.5	5.0	10.9
% above, but within 6–8s. of poverty line	8.4	3.3	6.1	3.0	4.1
% in poverty or within 6s. of poverty line	51.9	12.3	30.3	10.4	18.7
% in poverty or within 8s. of poverty line	60.3	15.5	36.4	13.4	22.8
Sources: Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1915: 88, 134, 157, 172), Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1920: 238). Note: These estimates understate slightly the true share of households within 6s. or 8s. of the poverty line because I assume that none of the few households with incomes above the poverty line by an unknown amount had incomes within 8s. of the poverty line.

TABLE 6.3. Poverty-Line Budgets for a Family of Five
	Rowntree “York” Standard 1899 (s. per week)	Bowley New Standard 1912 (s. per week)	Rowntree Human Needs Standard 1914 (s. per week)
Food	12.75	14.92	15.08
Rent	4.0	5.0^a	6.0
Clothing	2.25	3.08^b	5.0
Fuel	1.83	1.58	2.5
Sundries (total)	0.83		6.67
Household			1.67
Personal			5.0^c
Total	21.67	24.58	35.25
COL index (1906 = 100)	95.4	108.5	112.0
Min. standard 1906 prices	22.71	22.65	31.47
Min. standard 1912 prices	24.65	24.58	34.15
Sources: Minimum budget data from Rowntree (1901: 110); Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1915: 82); Rowntree (1918: 128–29). Notes: COL = cost of living. The budgets are for a family consisting of a husband, wife, and three children aged 5–14. In the bottom two rows the three standards have been revalued to take account of price changes over time, using aggregate COL data from Feinstein (1991: 171). ^aBowley and Burnett-Hurst excluded rent in their estimate of a minimum standard. Their housing data suggest that the typical family of five paid rent of 5s. per week. ^bBowley and Burnett-Hurst’s estimate for clothing includes sundries. ^cIncludes “such personal expenses as insurance and sick clubs, recreation, traveling, and numbers of other claims.”

TABLE 6.4. Distribution of Weekly Wages of Adult Males—Five Towns, 1899–1913
	APPROXIMATE PERCENTAGE OF ADULT MALES IN EACH CATEGORY
Weekly Wage	York 1899	Reading 1912	Northampton 1913	Warrington 1913	Stanley 1913
Under 20s.	10.0	15.0	13.0	3.5	4.0
20–22s.	16.0	25.0	7.0	15.0	2.0
22–24s.	10.0	10.5	7.0	13.5	3.0
24–26s.	13.0	17.0	9.0	17.0	2.0
26–28s.	6.0	5.0	7.0	6.0	7.0
28–30s.	5.0	2.5	8.0	7.0	7.0
30–31s.	25.0	11.0	22.0	7.5	7.0
31–35s.	6.0	4.0	9.0	7.0	21.0
35–40s.	4.0	6.0	8.0	12.5	19.0
40s. and over	5.0	4.0	10.0	11.0	28.0
Under 24s.	36.0	50.5	27.0	32.0	9.0
24–30s.	24.0	24.5	24.0	30.0	16.0
30s. and over	40.0	25.0	49.0	38.0	75.0
Source: Bowley and Burnett-Hurst (1915: 33).

TABLE 6.5. Number of Old Age Pensioners in England and Wales, 1909–13
	PAUPERS AGED 70+	OLD-AGE PENSIONERS
	1906	1909	1910	1911	1912	1913
Total	229,474	393,700	441,489	613,873	642,524	668,646
Males	88,098			218,158	232,966	245,418
Females	141,376			395,715	409,558	423,228
% getting 5s.		87.4	89.5	92.7	93.9	94.2
	% OF PERSONS AGED 70+ RECEIVING POOR RELIEF (1906) OR PENSIONS
Total	23.4	38.0	41.9	57.3	60.0
Male	21.4			49.2
Female	24.9			63.0
Sources: Data on paupers aged 70 and older in March 1906 from Parl. Papers, Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress, Appendix Vol. XXV, Statistical Memoranda (1910, LIII), pp. 176–93. Data on number of old-age pensioners from Board of Trade, Seventeenth Abstract of Labour Statistics (1915: 184). Note: For both paupers and pensioners, data are for one day in late March of the year.

TABLE 6.6. Measures of Living Standards, Europe 1900–1910
	GDP per Capita 1900	Real Wages 1904–8	Life Expectancy 1910	Adult Male Heights 1900	Literacy Rate 1910	School Enrollment 1900	Annual Discretionary Hours 1900
United Kingdom	4,714.0	100.0	53.4	169.3	92.5	728	1,504
Belgium	3,975.0	86.2	49.6	165.8	86.6	374	1,096
Denmark	3,592.7	93.7	57.7	168.8	97.0	731	1,418
France	3,097.7	76.1	50.4	166.6	88.1	636	1,045
Germany	3,526.0	87.4	49.0	169.0	97.0	772	1,104
Italy	2,359.3	45.6	47.2	163.8	60.7	371	1,146
Netherlands	3,704.0	78.5	56.1	170.0	92.5	465	1,123
Norway	2,049.3	89.5	57.2	170.4	97.0	718	1,416
Sweden	2,930.3	91.5	57.0	172.5	98.5	705	1,415
Sources: GDP per capita: Maddison (2003). Real wages: Williamson (1995). Revised series for Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom constructed by O’Rourke and Williamson (1997) obtained from the authors. Life expectancy: Crafts (1997). Adult male heights: Data for France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, and United Kingdom from Steckel and Floud (1997); data for Belgium, Denmark, Italy, and Norway from Floud (1994). Literacy: Flora (1973). School enrollment: Lindert (2004: vol. 2), and revised numbers from his UC Davis website. Discretionary time: Calculated by author using data on annual hours worked from Huberman (2012: 149); Norway calculated as average of Denmark and Sweden. Note: See text for definition of variables.

TABLE 6.7. Social Welfare Legislation and Spending, Europe Pre-1914
(A) ADOPTION DATE FOR SOCIAL WELFARE LEGISLATION
	Accident Insurance	Old Age Pensions	Sickness Insurance	Unemployment Insurance
United Kingdom	1897	1908	1911	1911
Belgium	1903	1900(V)	1894	1907(V)
Denmark	1898	1891	1892(V)	1907(V)
France	1898	1900(V)	1898(V)	1905(V)
Germany	1884	1889	1883	—
Italy	1898	1898(V)	1886(V)	—
Netherlands	1901	1913	1913	—
Norway	1894	—	1909	1906(V)
Sweden	1901	1913	1891(V)	—
(B) SOCIAL TRANSFERS AS A PERCENTAGE OF GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT
	1880	1890	1900	1910
United Kingdom	0.86	0.83	1.00	1.38
Belgium	0.17	0.22	0.26	0.43
Denmark	0.96	1.11	1.41	1.75
France	0.46	0.54	0.57	0.81
Germany	0.50	0.53	0.59	NA
Italy	0.00	0.00	0.00	0.00
Netherlands	0.29	0.30	0.39	0.39
Norway	1.07	0.95	1.24	1.18
Sweden	0.72	0.85	0.85	1.03
Sources: Adoption dates for social legislation from Huberman and Lewchuk (2003: 11). Data on social transfers from Lindert (2004: 12–13). Note: V indicates a voluntary program.