4. The children should be dealt with by the local education authorities, the mentally deficient by the local lunacy authorities.
5. Every county or county borough (or borough or urban dis trict council with a population over 50,00o) should set up : (I) a prevention of unemployment and training committee (on the lines of the education committee, and including representatives of em ployers and trade unions) ; (2) a home assistance committee (on the lines of the education committee) to enquire into the economic circumstances of all applicants for public assistance, to supervise them, to administer all relief given in the home, to recover ex penses of maintenance, treatment, etc., and to keep a private register of all such applicants and their families and of the assis tance given.
6. County councils should appoint committees for districts or combinations of districts, to which various functions of the home assistance committee and the prevention of unemployment corn mittee would be delegated. Such district committees would consist of : (a) members of the county council; (b) borough or district councillors; (c) persons experienced in the work to be done.
7. London should have a special scheme, in which the functions would be divided between the L.C.C. and the metropolitan borough councils. The borough councils would appoint home assistance committees, and would also be responsible for vaccina tion and registration of births and deaths. The L.C.C. would, through its appropriate committees, exercise the rest of the func tions transferred. It would also appoint a central assistance committee, which would lay down a policy and rules of local administration for the home assistance committees in the metro politan boroughs.
8. Poor law officials should be transferred to the local authorities (provided both they and the local authorities agreed), and com pensated for any pecuniary loss incurred by the change.
9. The cost of all functions transferred should fall on the new authority (the county, county borough, borough or urban dis trict, and in London mainly on the county, but partly on the metropolitan borough).
Scotland was outside the committee's terms of reference. But the matter was referred for consideration to the Scottish con sultative council on local health administration. The council issued majority and minority reports, the majority declaring in favour of a Scottish scheme on the general lines of the Maclean report. This scheme was approved by the government of the day, and pledges were given that a bill to reform the poor law would be introduced as soon as opportunity offered. Nothing was done, however, either by that government or by its successors, until Neville Chamberlain, the Conservative minister of health, began to move in the matter in 1925.
In the meantime the poor law entered on a new and alarming phase. The industrial depression, which began in 192o, resulted
in a rapid and unprecedented increase of unemployment. Trade union funds and such private savings as the workpeople had were soon exhausted, and the Unemployment Insurance Act and relief works were inadequate to meet the widespread distress. Unless the government was prepared with some heroic policy, it was evident that nothing remained save the poor law. The govern ment refused to be heroic ; it actually encouraged recourse to the poor law, in order, as its critics said, to shift as much of the cost as possible from the taxes to the rates. Before long the boards of guardians in all the most heavily stricken areas were flooded with applicants. At the end of 192o there were just over half a million persons in receipt of poor relief in England and Wales. By the following October the figure was nearly a million and a half, and in the middle of June, 1922, it reached the record of 1,837,980, or I in 21 of the whole population. In certain districts the position was even worse than this. No less than thirty Unions had 1 in io, and several had 1 in 5, of their inhabitants registered as paupers. There was presently a gradual decrease, but the total in June, 1923, was still 1,270,00o. In Dec., 1925, it rose again to 1,324,00o, and in Aug., 1926, as a result of the great coal dispute, to over 2,250,000. In this month there were eight Unions with a third, and fourteen others with a quarter of their population in receipt of relief. In two Unions in particular weeks more than 50% of the population were paupers. The vast majority of those relieved in the mining areas were the wives and children of the miners, since the "Merthyr judgment" forbade relief to the men themselves. (In the case of Attorney-General v. Merthyr Tydfil Union [1900, I Ch. 516], the court of Appeal decided that poor relief may not legally be given to an able-bodied person who, by reason of a strike or otherwise, refuses work which is available for him, unless he is so reduced by privation as to be physically incapable of but that it may be given to his dependants.) In 78 Unions (cover ing 85% of the mining population of the country) there were approximately 1,507,60o persons receiving out-relief on Oct. 3o, 1926—or about three-fifths of the whole number of miners' de pendants in those areas. And for the period of the general strike and the coal dispute, i.e., from May 1 to Nov. 27, these 78 boards of guardians spent some £61 million more than they would have done if the April rate of expenditure had continued. Scotland had much the same experience. The total number of poor of all classes relieved by the Scottish parish councils was 138,071 on September 15, 1921, and 261,408 a year later. The peak figure of 382,970 was reached on Sept. 15, 1926.