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All this, of course, meant an appalling rise of the rates in the crowded industrial districts, which were hit by the trade slump in the earlier part of the period, and hit again by the general strike and the coal stoppage. On Tyneside in 1926-27 the rates were 17/5 in the £ in Wallsend, 17/6 in Tynemouth, 19/11 in Jarrow, 23/9 in Gateshead, 24/8 in Felling, 27/8 in Blaydon. The poor rate formed a large proportion of all these : in Gateshead it was i/-, which represented an increase of over 600% over the poor rate of 1913-14. Among the metropolitan boroughs Bermondsey had a rate of 18/7, Stepney 19/-, Bethnal Green 22/-, and Poplar 25/-. Other highly rated places were Sheffield (18/2), Middles brough (19/8), West Ham (24/6), Pontypridd (2o/8), Merthyr Tydfil (24/4). In some cases the ratepayers were unable to meet the strain. The guardians were compelled to borrow and thus saddle the rates with a heavy burden for the future. In 1923 the actual total indebtedness of the Unions that had raised loans was about £5+ millions. By March, 1926, it stood at over L7 millions, and in Mar0, 1927, at nearly f 12i millions. The bulk of the new borrowing in this last year was in the mining districts.
The task thus thrust on the poor law was clearly one for which it was neither intended nor equipped. And the inevitable result was confusion worse con founded, and a widespread abandonment of what was left of the principles of 1834. The prohibition of outdoor relief to the able bodied unemployed, save with the express sanction of the Minister of Health in particular cases, still remained on paper. But it be came virtually a dead letter in Unions where there was serious unemployment. Outdoor relief was given wholesale, and as a mat ter of course, to able-bodied men simply because they were out of work, and often not even the names of the recipients, but only the number of cases, were reported to the Ministry for its formal approval. The guardians of course could not fairly be blamed for this ; in the circumstances there was nothing else they could do. And the central authority was equally helpless ; it could not ad here to the letter of the law without provoking a general upheaval. It could, and indeed did, grumble and remonstrate, but in the last resort it was bound to sanction departure from the regulations. And it could not prevent the use of "scales" of relief adopted by boards of guardians and applied mechanically or in a slipshod fashion. It strove to keep the amount given in outdoor relief below the level of the wage earned by regular full-time em ployment, but even in this it was only partially successful. In the annual report of the Ministry of Health for 1923-24, the complaint is made that "it is still the fact that the scale on which relief is given is such as, in a number of Unions, to make the income of the person relieved compare very favourably with the wages of an employed person." And again in the 1926 report the warning is repeated that a scale of relief "should not be such as to challenge comparison with the earnings of the workers who are called upon, directly or indirectly, to contribute to the relief so granted." A
common scale at this period was 36/- a week for a man, wife and four children. There were maximum scales in 1924-25 of
in Cardiff, 45/6 in Burnley, 46/- in Leeds, 51/- in Poplar,
in West Ham. In Scotland the Board of Health was a little more successful in its attempts to keep down the relief to the unem ployed. In view of the critical financial position in 1926 it recom mended a maximum scale (23/- a week for man and wife; 2/- for a child under 16; 7/6d. for an adult son or daughter living in the family; I5/- for a single man or woman ; and all household income to be deducted), and it refused to sanction loans or over drafts to parish councils which did not keep within the scale. This had the effect generally of stopping poor law relief in sup plement of unemployment benefit, which had become a common practice. Nevertheless the burden was immense. In two big parishes, Glasgow and Govan, the 1926 expenditure was double that of the previous year, and in some smaller parishes it rose by over 300%.
To return to England, however—what ap peared serious in this development was that it was not merely the result of carelessness or fluster in the guardians. On the contrary, certain boards quite deliberately adopted the policy of giving out-relief on such a generous scale that there could be no pretence of making the lot of the pauper less desirable than that of the independent labourer. This policy was not entirely new; the Poplar board, dominated by a Socialist majority, had long favoured the giving of what it regarded as adequate, and its critics as extravagant, relief. But with the increase of distress that was now facing many of the poor law authorities the burden on the ratepayers became formidable, and a struggle presently began over what was known as "Poplarism." Efforts were at first made to get the Ministry of Health to devise means for alleviating this burden in the poorer districts, but in vain. The Poplar borough council (which also had a Socialist majority) then took the des perate course of refusing to collect the rates for the London county council and certain other central bodies. Legal proceedings were taken, and the high court ordered the collection of the rates. The borough council ignored the order and 29 of its members were imprisoned for contempt of court. Their imprisonment put the Government in an uncomfortable position, and forced it to concede the legislation which Poplar had been demanding. The Local Authorities (Financial Provisions) Act, 1921, provided for a large measure of equalisation of poor rates in London ; in par ticular it laid down that the cost of outdoor relief should be borne by the Metropolitan common poor fund within the limits of a scale to be fixed by the minister of health.