One example of such a scheme was the ‘Speenhamland System’ where the supplement was a sliding scale dependant on the size of the family and the current price of bread. It was copied, with some variation, throughout most of Southern and Eastern England, aimed at stopping the gap and preventing mass poverty and starvation while prices were extremely high during the war. However, this depressed already low wages, and encouraged the workers to depend on charity, rather than their pay. The supplement also increased with the size of the worker’s family, so this system also encouraged larger families, overstretching the system and creating even more of a burden. It has been argued that it was as much of a system of relief to the employers as to the workers, because it enabled them to keep wage expenditure down. It tied workers down to the land, at a time when rural redundancy was increasing, as was the need for urban industrial labour. It has also been suggested that had this continued, the population of the working class would had exceeded its means of subsistence.
There were four basic terms to the new act, which completely changed the direction of the Law. These reforms changed the emphasis from attempting to aid the poor at the expense of the taxpayers, to attempting to help the poor with the minimum of expenditure of tax payer’s money. The first of these terms was the scrapping of outdoor relief, so relief would no longer be given to the able-bodied poor. This was to stop the increasing burden that systems like the Speenhamland System placed upon taxpayers. Unfortunately, this did not encourage employers to pay their workers more, so the workers were suddenly suffering an income deficit, and even if healthy enough to work, could still not feed themselves or their families without help. This was vastly more financially effective than the old system, as we can see from statistics showing the cost of poor relief, which fell from 6.79 million pounds in 1833 to 3.74 million in 1840. This shows that the new system was more financially effective than the system it replaced, reducing the burden on the taxpayers. However, it was less effective at reducing the burden on the poor, as it drove many into the workhouse system, which was also undergoing radical change. The situation however, was not as bad as it could have been, due to several good harvests, which kept the price of bread down, and the jobs created by the newly emerging railway industry.
Prior to the Poor Law Amendment Act, conditions in a typical workhouse were not appalling. A typical diet from a pre-1843 workhouse shows ‘unlimited thick broth, beer, boiled pickled pork with vegetables’. However, steps were taken to make the option of going to a workhouse as unattractive as possible, so people would make every effort to find work, because conditions were deliberately made more miserable than the conditions of even the poorest worker. This is shown in the starkly contrasting example of an average diet after the 1834 Amendment Act ‘1½ pints of gruel, ¾1b of potatoes, 6oz bread’. Anyone taking longer than 10 minutes to eat, or talking during meals would be punished by 39 lashes. Also, unlike the workhouses of the past, children were separated from their parents, husbands from wives, and all were exposed to the ‘criminals, prostitutes and lunatics’ who populated them. The inmates were given inane and backbreaking menial tasks to do, including bone grinding, stone breaking and unknotting hemp ropes, as well as being forced to wear prison-like uniform. All these combined to create conditions that only the most desperate of paupers would enter into, encouraging ‘self help’.
As well as making the conditions in workhouses extremely unpleasant, parishes were grouped into unions, with each union having a workhouse that took in paupers from all over the area- so not only were there harsh conditions, but often hugely overcrowded. Unions were intended to have separate workhouses for the able-bodied, impotent and idle poor, but in practice, often only one sufficed. In the Elizabethan 1601 Poor Act, paupers were classified into these three groups, but after 1834, they tended to be grouped together, with little differentiation. These Unions meant that the financial cost would be more centralised, so the government could distribute money more easily and efficiently. This particular term had little benefit to the taxpayers, since they still paid money towards their individual parishes up until 1865. It didn’t change the parish system of payment much either, because how much they paid to the union depended on the numbers of poor from their parish travelling to the workhouse, so the parishes with the most poor still had the largest burden. This change also made it harder for the poor, as they had to then travel to the workhouse, rather than it being local.
The final term outlined by the Royal Commission was the institution of paid officials operating under the unpaid Board of Commissioners. The quality of these officials varied from workhouse to workhouse- some were genuinely compassionate people, such as a decorated naval officer, whose inmates cried at news of his retirement. Many more were brutish, ill-educated and drunkards, who used their position to steal monies meant for food, abuse inmates and commit other offences. The effectiveness of these instituted officials varied on their personalities, and it is impossible to gauge the overall effectiveness either for the ratepayers or the paupers, because of this great variation.
In conclusion, when gauging the effectiveness of the Poor Law Amendment Act, it has to be broken down into two- the effectiveness of the Act on the poor, and the effectiveness of the Act on the taxpayers. Bearing in mind that the Act was written from the recommendations of the Royal Commission, which had strong Benthamite influences, it is unsurprising that the Act was aimed at reducing the burden on the taxpayers. The needs of the poor were largely ignored, treated as malingerers, and little provision was made for them in the new act. The Poor Law Amendment Act was carefully crafted to reduce the amount being spent on poor relief, however, it could be argued that by removing dependence, it forced the poor to actively seek work, and pull themselves out of their situation. Although the new system barely lasted a year before more reforms occurred, and indeed in some places it was never fully implemented, such as in the North, where to get rid of outdoor relief would mean sure death for hundreds of poor people,