HC Deb 05 May 1920 vol 128 cc2186-98
Mr. KILEY

I beg to move: That this House considers that the further equalisation of rates in the county of London is a matter which should receive the early attention of His Majesty's Government. This is not a new proposition. In the Majority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, issued in the year 1909, it was recommended that Poor Law expenditure in London should be a uniform charge over London according to its rateable value. Although Presidents of the Local Government Board have appeared and disappeared, no effective action has been taken to bring this very desirable reform into force. If it was necessary in the year 1909 that some share of the burden of the poor should be equally distributed, it will be apparent from some figures I am about to give that such a change is much more necessary to-day. In the last set of figures I have been able to obtain, those for the year 1912–13, London spent on its poor the sum of £3,815,000, and that would represent a rate on the rateable value of London on an equal charge of 1s. 9d. in the £. In the present year I find that the expenditure in the borough of Stepney alone on Poor Law will amount to £432,000, and in 1912 the amount spent for that purpose in that borough was £156,000. That means the increase of a poor rate from 1s. 9d. in 1912 to something like 5s. 9d. in the present year. The reason why the rate has varied to that extent cannot be traced, in my judgment, to an increase in the number of paupers, because the number of paupers in London has decreased in the periods which I have mentioned by something like one-third. In 1913 the total number of paupers who received relief from the rates in London was 99,000, and in the year 1919 that figure had decreased to something like 54,000. In order to effectively look after the interests of those 54,000 there are something like 44 Poor Law authorities, and the result is that there is a considerable amount of overlapping and diversity in the methods of the different Boards.

In one board of guardians they set their face very determinedly against what is known as outdoor relief, whilst the adjoining district do quite the opposite and endeavour to keep people out of poor law institutions by giving them generous assistance. That works out in this way, that you may get in one street one authority working on one principle, and on the other side of the street you get the reverse. Although efforts have been continuously made—I think even the county council themselves have repeatedly passed resolutions in favour of some definite action being taken so as to equalise the burden of the poor—those efforts up to the present have not resulted in any satisfactory action being taken. To show how very unjustly the present system operates, one has only to look at what is the effect of a penny rate in different districts. If you take a district like Bethnal Green, you will find that a penny rate represents a sum of £2,216, in Marylebone a penny rate represents £9,269, and in Westminster a penny rate produces something like £29,216; yet, owing to the system which has too long prevailed in London of having these forty different bodies each levying its rates in its own area, the poorer the place is the greater are their obligations, and that shows the very urgent need there is for the Ministry to permit of no further delay in dealing with the problem.

The Minister of Health might, I think, throw some light upon the reasons for this terrific increase in the cost of the poor law. We are quite prepared to expect, in consequence of the increased cost of commodities, that there should be an increase, and yet, with a steady decline in the number of people who need assistance from 99,000 in 1913 to 64,000 now, the cost has mounted up to a colossal figure. In addition, there are all the other bodies who are now butting in for contributions. For instance, in my own borough, the Minister of Health has thought it advisable to provide a large sum of money for seeing that expectant mothers and very poor children should have the necessary nourishment, and as a result in the borough of Stepney we are preparing now to spend something like £50,000 during the coming year on supplying milk to expectant mothers and very poor children. The Minister has undertaken to provide half the sum, but I mention it as an evidence of the additional sums that are required from the different boroughs. There are a number of other organisations now at work. The county council are feeding necessitous children; they are also having medical inspection for the purpose of providing treatment; there are local consumptive dispensaries, in which the local councils and the county council are interested; there is the Metropolitan Asylums Board, who are also doing some part of this work; and I think, if the real truth of the matter could be located, it would be found that this vast and ever-increasing expenditure is not due so much to the benefits which the poor people in need receive, as it is to waste and over-lapping and the setting up of so many different bodies. In view of the great amount of assistance which is now forthcoming in the way of old age pensions, health insurance, and so forth, One would expect our charges not to remain stationary, but to decrease, yet when we look at our rates we find year by year that there is a constant and colossal increase. I think the House will be well justified in asking the Ministry not to allow any further delay in this very urgent matter.

Mr. GILBERT

I beg to second the Motion. I notice that my hon. Friend has specially moved it to make it apply only to the poor-rates of London. The question of rates in London is one which is always a puzzle to the person who does not live in London, and it is also a very great puzzle to the person who pays the rates, because there are so many rating authorities in London that the ordinary ratepayer in London really does not know what he is paying the rates for. I think country Members who have been connected with municipal authorities in the country, where they practically have one area for local purposes and one rating authority for that area rating for all purposes, would, if they studied the question of rating in London, be very much surprised by the number of rates and rating authorities we have in this great county of London. We have dealings with central rates. We have a County Council which is responsible for the rates for all common purposes, including education, and in addition there are other central rates, like the police rate, which the London ratepayer has to pay and over which he has no control except through Members in this House, who can criticise the matter on the Home Office Vote. In addition, the London ratepayer has to pay a deficiency at the present time on the working of the Metropolitan Water Board, and the only control he has over that kind of charge is the indirect representation which he has on the Board, which is elected by the local authorities, not only in London, but also outside the county of London. Then we have the local borough councils, who rate for purposes in their own particular areas, and in addition to that we have the Guardians' rate, which is the poor-rate. The poor-rate in London in a way has a kind of common fund. There is the common poor-law fund, which for certain purposes is common to the whole of the Boards of Guardians of London, and the expenses of certain duties which are thrown upon the Guardians are pooled in that fund. The expenses for such things as lunatics, insane poor, persons suffering from fever or smallpox, medicine, medical and surgical appliances, salaries of poor-law officers, rations of poor-law officers, registration of births and deaths, vaccination fees and expenses, maintenance of pauper children, expenses under the Housing and Poor Law Acts, a grant which is given to Boards of Guardians for indoor paupers of 5d. per day per head, ambulances and ambulance stations and some other small items dealing with administration. The whole of these charges are an equal charge on the common Poor Fund, but the expenditure which is made by the guardians above those charges which they have the right to make on the common Poor Fund are met by a rate which varies in different parts of London.

If I may quote a few figures of the varying rates in London, I think hon. Members will see how difficult this question is in the administration of Local Government in London. For instance, the last Poor Rate figures I have been able to obtain are the figures for 1918–19. The Poor Rate for Bermondsey was 1s. 11.07d., Bethnal Green 1s. 1.94d., Camberwell 1s. 7.20d. When you come to some of the Central Boroughs like Finsbury, it is only 5.16d. Fulham is 9.21d. Coming to some of the richer Boroughs, the rate for Hampstead is l.54d. In Holborn, the charge for Poor Law administration is charged on the parishes, and it varies from 4.83d. in the Parish of Furnival's Inn to 1s. 4.54d. in the Parish of Lincoln's Inn. Taking some other large districts, Islington is 10.78d., Lambeth 11.50d., Poplar 3s. 3.39d., Marylebone 4.31d., St. Pancras 1s. 0.54d. Stepney has also a number of parishes varying from 10.77d. in Aldgate to 2s. 11.60d. in St. George's-in-the-East. In Westminster, another rich parish, which also consists of a number of other parishes, it varies from 2.76d. in St. Anne's to 3.25d. in St. Paul, Covent Garden. If you average all those varying rates for the whole of London it is 8.85d.

Those of us who have been connected with London's government for some years, and who have followed the various questions with which London is faced, think that, not only should there be more equalisation of rates from a Poor Law point of view, but also from other points of view. I do respectfully suggest that, in dealing with the poor of the great County of London, the poor should be regarded as belonging to the whole of the County, and that the charge for aining them should be an equal charge all over the County, that there should not be one small charge for the rich parishes, where they have practically few poor and where, under the present system, they are mainly responsible for their own poor, while the poor parishes, in the East End particularly, where people have been driven, largely because of improvements in the central part of London, and the rebuilding of houses into business premises, warehouses and factories, are made to bear the whole of the cost of the poor who live in these districts. There is another very great grievance in regard to this Common Poor Fund at the present moment. Under the Local Government (Emergency Provisions) Act, 1916, it has been fixed that the amount granted shall be based on the amount which was granted in the year 1914, the year when the War broke out. Bearing in mind the great increase of cost, anybody will see that fixing the amount according to practically pre-War times is very unfair, and acts very disadvantageously to the Poor Law districts of London.

When the present Minister of Health was Minister of Reconstruction he appointed a Committee to consider this question of the functions of Poor Law Authorities, and there is a very long Report from that Committee, of which the right hon. Gentleman, the Member for Peebles (Sir D. Maclean), was Chairman. I think it is known as the Maclean Report. They brought forward a very strong representation that there should be an alteration in the system of Poor Law government in London as it exists now. That Report was made, I believe, in 1918, and those of us who have been connected with the government of London are very anxious to know what decision the Government are going to take upon the Report of that Committee. We think it would be a very great reform if the proposals of the Committee were carried out, and it would make a very great difference with regard to Poor Law Administration in London. I hope the House will adopt the Resolution. This has been a crying grievance in London for a great many years. I think we have practically an unanswerable case when we have these varying rates in London for the same purpose, and anything the Government can do which will help to equalise the Poor Rate for London will, I am sure, be greatly appreciated by the ratepayers of London.

Major GRAY

I listened with some interest to the speech made by the Mover of the Resolution. I know that he expressed considerable dissatisfaction with the inequality and a desire for equalisation, but I did not find any indication as to how it was to be done. Those of us who have had opportunities in the past of going into this question have quite realised the inequality and the desire for some equalisation, but the crux of the whole question is the method by which it shall be accomplished, and on that we have had no enlightenment whatever. I venture to submit that it means one of two things—either central administration, the abolition of the whole of the local boards of guardians, which is a big question, or what, in my judgment, is much preferable, namely, the complete reform of the Poor Law on the lines of the Maclean Report. I did not hear any suggestion that the House should at once take that report into consideration, and that the Government should be induced to put the recommendations into force. If it simply means that you shall take from certain areas of London a larger amount of money than the 6d. paid now, and transfer that to another area, I say that that is a wrong principle altogether. It is a direct encouragement to extravagant administration, because this inequality does not depend entirely upon the number of poor found in the district; it does depend in a very large measure upon the method of administration adopted in the district. I gather my hon. Friend assents to that. It is perfectly obvious that if one board of guardians, say, is disposed to deal liberally with the demands made upon its funds, if it realises that a large part of the money will not be found in its own district, but from another, a direct incentive to extravagance will be given, or there will be a want of the necessary care.

We are therefore driven to one of two alternatives. You must either centralise the administration and place the whole power in the hands of a single authority —and if I were to advocate that this evening, I should be told it was an evidence of county council megalomania; it is not because I dare not suggest it, though I am perfectly certain the county council does not in the least want to take over this business—if you have one central authority, then I am bound to say whenever you bring that reform into existence the whole question of organisation, and of Poor Law reform will have to be taken into consideration. This will include the establishment and methods of Care Committees, dealing with children, the treatment of those who are now treated as indoor paupers, the methods of outdoor relief—the whole of this will have to come under review. If the hon. Member who moved this Resolution had put his Resolution in the form that it was urgently necessary that the whole question of the reform of the Poor Law should be taken into the consideration of this House, I for one would have joined him most cordially. But when this Resolution simply means the transfer of funds from one district to another, and the maintenance of existing organisations, it will be a ruinous procedure and an encouragement to extravagance. As one interested in local administration, the Resolution is one which I cannot for a moment support. Therefore, though I realise and appreciate the difficulties which arise through these inequalities, I for one cannot vote for the Resolution.

Mr. LORDEN

I am very much in sympathy with the last speaker. I feel that the whole question of Poor Law administration wants overhauling from top to bottom. We have had a Royal Commission, which issued an important Report. My feeling is that we ought certainly to have some of its recommendations put into force, and not deal with the matter in this tinkering sort of manner. The suggestion put forward that you should equalise the rates, as shown by the last speaker in a very able way, is simply moving the burden from one part of London to another. Not only that, but it is an encouragement to the utmost extravagance, because there will be no incentive to economy and no real check upon the various boards of guardians. I hope sincerely that when we hear the Minister of Health he will give us some hope that there is to be some alteration in Poor Law administration, because there is a necessity for something to be done. No one at present, or very few, takes any interest in the work of the boards of guardians. That work is very necessary and should have an interest taken in it. I trust we shall have some inkling of what is going to happen, because it is extremely important that this all-important question should be dealt with, not in the way suggested by the hon. Member opposite, but by dealing with the whole matter from top to bottom.

The MINISTER of HEALTH (Dr. Addison)

It cannot be controverted that the hon. Member for Whitechapel (Mr. Kiley) has well represented the case of a well-worn grievance. I myself have no disposition to complain of the very moderate and fair way in which he stated his case. It is quite the proper thing that those of us who represent London constituencies should not fail to have brought to our attention once more, especially in view of the rapid increase of rates which is now taking place, the importance of this question. My hon. Friend has pointed out how Poor Law expenditure has gone up. As the House knows very well, the poor-rate includes a great many things—far too many. Therefore we must not readily conclude that because expenditure, which normally includes various things under the heading of the poor-rate, has increased, it is all due to maintenance of the poor. It is not. It is due to many other services of which we are well aware. One of the chief items in every district at present is the increase in salaries and similar outgoings. Then there are in some places other items included in varying quantities of which my hon. Friend gave illustrations, and as to which I may say a word. The hon. Member for North St. Pancras, who spoke last, and the hon. Member for Accrington, who preceded him, drew attention to the fact that an incentive to local economy was found in the local rate being placed upon those in the locality. To a certain extent that is clearly so. At the same time I think the chief failing of London local government has been that we have had no spirit of citizenship. The inhabitants, say, of Paddington have no interest in the well-being of the inhabitants of Wandsworth. London is not looked upon as one great city, but merely a congeries of places. It is a great loss to London development and administration that the solidarity of the place has been so ill developed from time to time. To digress for a moment, I have found this spirit, the lack of the proper spirit, one of the biggest handicaps in raising the money for housing in the county area, and because there is not that local patriotism for London as a whole which you find in provincial cities.

While I recognise the validity of the objection of my hon. Friends, I say it should not carry us too far, because it is merely the expression of that unnatural sub-division of interest which is one of the greatest drawbacks to London life. I was speaking to a gentleman the other day, and I was putting to him the necessity of launching this campaign with reference to local housing bonds, and he put the very question which is in my mind. He said, " Why should I who live in Paddington help to find money for houses in Southwark?" I will not tell hon. Members the answer which I gave him, but it is that kind of thing which is largely responsible for the difficulties of London Government. We have never had solidarity. If we had, we should never have had the decisions of guardians elections and borough council elections determined by a mere handful of voters. I may upon another occasion have something to say as to the expenditure upon the items which the hon. Gentleman opposite has mentioned. With regard to the expenditure upon milk at Stepney, that is a matter of inquiry by my Department. It has been pointed out that there is a difference of 6s. in the £ between different boroughs in regard to expenditure on practically the same services. In my view, it is utterly inequitable that the poorer districts should have to bear the whole burden of their poor, and that is the main complaint which my hon. Friend rightly brings to our notice once more. I could make various suggestions as to modifications which might, to some extent, meet the case in regard to the equalisation of rates, and I might make certain comments upon the contributions and arrangements made in connection with the Metropolitan common Poor Fund, but, in my opinion, these are mere trivialities.

The hon. Member for Central Southwark (Mr. Gilbert) referred to the Maclean Report, and he wants to know what we are going to do about it. It will be remembered that some time ago there was an explicit and deliberate expression of opinion with regard to the principal recom mendations of that Committee, and we proposed to give effect to them as soon as we could. But this distinguished Com- mittee, like many others, formulated very general propositions, and when it came to solving the administrative difficulties which stood in the way of their application, we did not find their Report so clear and constructive as it was with regard to their general propositions. Of course, this was entirely excusable, because they were confronted with the biggest problem of local government that stands before this country. We have a number of people dealing with various sections of this matter, and it was our intention and our hope that a Bill founded upon their findings would have been available very soon, because we fully mean business on this matter. Wherever you begin to deal with our poor law system, you find yourselves confronted not with one set but with many difficulties, and it is rather like a jig-saw puzzle, if you take out one thing everything else falls to pieces.

You might think that the recommendations of the Maclean Report were fairly simple to carry out, but it really involves the whole fabric of the poor law system. For example, the health services are manifold. There is the domiciliary work and the maintenance of the hospitals. Now, it is clear that any authority responsible for domiciliary work is not the proper authority to deal with the hospitals, which affect a much bigger area When you come to deal with the hospital side of the question, you find yourselves confronted with a lot of minor questions affecting the services which should be attached to a hospital, and they affect the interests, not only of a county, but sometimes of a group of counties.

9.0 P.M.

In regard to the poor law, certain rates are levied to meet the cost. Directly you begin to consider the taking out of any service administered at present by the poor law, you are confronted by the question: What are you to do with respect to the rates that go to pay for that service? You have assessment authorities, assessing rates on all sorts of bases, and you cannot take out any of these services without dealing with the manner in which those funds are raised. Therefore, as an essential part of the poor law question, however simple it may seem in regard to certain services, you will find immediately that you are arrayed against all sorts of other questions. I confess that the administrative difficulties which have to be overcome and disentangled in this matter go far beyond the general recom- mendations made by the Committee presided over by my right hon. Friend the Member for Peebles (Sir D. Maclean). What applies to the assessment authorities applies equally to the very complex question of grants. There are all manner of grants-in-aid. There are grants of varying percentages. There is whisky money here and money from something else there. You have a complex hotchpotch system of grants-in-aid. Directly you take out any service for which grants are made, you have to deal with the whole complex question of grants. We are not in a position to make any proposals at present. There are at least four divisions of the subject which go together. There are the health services of various kinds. There are the services relating to able-bodied paupers, including the children. There are questions relating to assessment and assessment authorities. It is no use tinkering with questions of this kind. The demand has been made that there should be a common service for all. We have had all manner of areas, we have had services overlapping, areas overlapping, and costs overlapping. But we cannot get rid of these inequalities without dealing with the system altogether. We have to carry out in the main the general principles of the recommendations of this Committee with which the Government has expressed its concurrence. I am offering no objection to the Resolution. It has given some of us an opportunity of going into the subject, of the importance of which there can be no question. It is particularly important from the point of view of the present rise in rates all over the country. London represents, perhaps, the most difficult side of the problem, but similar problems have arisen elsewhere than in London. One of the problems which will have to be dealt with at an early date relates to the basis of assessment, which is very serious and very difficult all over the country. Its inequalities and the misunderstandings that have arisen on the subject are provocative of much hardship. I hope my hon. Friend will not ask me to say more than that I sympathise with the object of his Resolution. For a long time past we have had a number of officers outside specially working on the problems he has raised, with a view to making good our pledge to the country that we would, as soon as we could, give effect to the general recommendations of the Report to which reference has been made. I hope my hon. Friend will be content with that assurance.

Mr. KILEY

I cannot but express profound disappointment with the statement we have just had from the Minister, in view of the fact that a Royal Commission in the year 1909 made a recommendation that action should be taken on the lines indicated in my Resolution. To find ourselves now, after waiting ten years getting such a disappointing reply—a reply which leaves us where we were in the year 1909—is I must frankly say most discouraging. I would like to refer to a statement made by an hon. Friend on the question of control. For years I had the privilege of serving on a local council, and nothing was more irritating than when the board of guardians put in a demand for £50,000 or £100,000, and we had no option but to pay it. It is true that the expenditure was confined to the locality, but there was no control over it because the people who spent the money were not those who raised it. I would like to call attention again to the difference which prevails in the rating. In St. George's-in-the-East at the present moment the rates amount to 19s. 4d. in the pound, while in St. George's-in-the-West the rate is only 10s. 2d. With these facts before us, I think the Minister will realise that the position which Members like myself, especially interested in the East of London, are in when we get figures of that nature justify us in entertaining the feeling of very great disappointment with his reply. I hope even now the right hon. Gentleman will give further consideration to the subject, and that he may be able to assure us that, on one matter at all events, the levying of the poor rate in London, the obtaining of uniformity will not be delayed very much more than the present year.

Resolved, That this House considers that the further equalisation of rates in the county of London is a matter which should receive the early attention of His Majesty's Government.