Oxford's oldest student newspaper

Independent since 1920

We still have a nineteenth century approach to welfare

Welfare reform is nothing new. British politicians have been debating how to administer social security benefits for centuries. What is surprising is that the discourse surrounding welfare has changed so little since the Victorian period.

Just over 180 years ago, Nassau Senior, a former fellow of my college and the inaugural Drummond Professor of Political Economy, was working as a leading commissioner on a report that would form the basis of the New Poor Law of 1834 — arguably the most important social policy of the nineteenth century. Were Senior able to read a newspaper today, or listen to a politician like Iain Duncan Smith, I imagine he would feel immensely proud that his ideas still have a profound influence on the way we debate the welfare system.

Historical parallels are often pushed too far, and it is important to emphasise that current reforms are nowhere near as regressive as the New Poor Law: nobody is calling for workhouses. Nevertheless, the underlying principles are remarkably similar. As in 1834, the current reforms use a test of an individual’s capacity to work as a means of distinguishing between the truly deserving and the undeserving, those incapable of work and those who are simply poor and/or “lazy”. In the words of Duncan Smith “at last, no longer will a life on benefits be an option if you are capable of work”. The goal is not to alleviate material deprivation but to get people into a job — no matter how poorly paid.

This is an approach that Senior would wholeheartedly endorse. At the core of Conservative reforms is an ingrained concern that indiscriminate state relief morally degrades the recipient. According to Michael Portillo, getting “something for nothing” saps the will to make anything of one’s life. At the 2013 Conservative Party conference, Iain Duncan Smith argued that making work pay will “restore hope, raise aspiration and build self reliance once again”. That sounds awfully similar to the words of Henry Fleming, secretary of the Local Government Board, who argued in 1871 that “relief extinguishes in the mind of the labourer… every incentive to self-reliance and prudent forethought”.

It is of great concern that we tend to answer old questions in ways that our forebears would recognize. The New Poor Law still casts a long shadow over current debates and we remain trapped by its categories, making genuine reform unlikely.

The parallels are all the more worrying given that we now know that the designers of the New Poor Law got things profoundly wrong. The new consensus amongst economic historians is that the Old Poor Law, more localised and much more generous, was an effective system that blocked pathways into poverty. Gregory Clark has demonstrated that the 1834 reforms did not increase the supply of labour by “making work pay”, and my own research argues that reductions in cash benefits actually reduced household savings levels.

Nassau Senior was a pioneering economist but he was a terrible historian. In 1926 R. H. Tawney described the New Poor Law Report as “brilliant, influential and wildly unhistorical”. I see these words as a clarion call for a more historically informed approach to welfare than the one currently offered up by those in government.

Check out our other content

Most Popular Articles