NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF HOUSEWORKERS (Hansard, 27 April 1951)

§ Mr. Angus Maude (Ealing, South)

The question which I am venturing to raise on the Adjournment today is the present and future position of the National Institute of Houseworkers. While I sympathise with the Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour, who has had to curtail his long weekend in order to listen to me, I hope that he will agree that it is about time that this matter was once again discussed in the House, and that we were given an opportunity of discovering from him the present position of this organisation.

The National Institute of House-workers originated as the result of the recommendations of the Markham-Hancock Report on the future of domestic service, which arose, I think, on the initiative of the late Mr. Ernest Bevin. At the time when his successor set up the Institute, Mr. Bevin sent a message, which included the following words: The Institute has two big jobs to do. It has got to show our women and girls that with proper organisation domestic work is a skilled trade which has a great contribution to make to the well-being of the nation. We have also to think of our housewives in alt sections of the community who need help to run their homes, and the Institute has to see 803 that they get this help to maintain our home life on which so much depends. Many of us who remember some of the observations of the hon. and right hon. Gentlemen who now occupy the benches opposite between the wars on the social desirability of domestic service may well have thought that a considerable change had come over their views, and that it was, on the whole, a change for the better. We have never disputed the idea that this institution is a good idea, but even the best of ideas may go astray, and from time to time it is necessary to see how they are working out in practice and whether the cost is at all commensurate with the results which are obtained.

I find that in the year ended 31st March, 1949, the Institute attracted grants from the Ministry of Labour totalling £75,637. In addition, it received loans from the Ministry of about £77,000. In the following year, ended 31st March, 1950, the grants attracted from the Ministry of Labour totalled £113,935 with, as far as I can gather from the accounts, another £22,000 by way of loans. In the course of the reports there is no indication given as to the number of students who were trained in domestic service for the expenditure of this money.

However, the activities of the Institute attracted the attention of the Public Accounts Committee last Session, and the questions and the answers will be found on page 188 onwards of this Report. From these it appears that the number of students in residence undergoing training was about 290 during the year 1949 to 1950. That means that a total of 290 students were trained for the expenditure of nearly £114,000, with the addition of some £22,000 by way of loans. It appears that the average cost per student receiving nine months' training was about £210. In 1950 there were nine training centres open, another one about to be formed and two which had already been closed down as being uneconomic.

At some stage during the Institute's existence, it ceased, as far as I can gather, primarily to pursue the task of training resident and daily domestic workers for private service. I suspect that this was largely in order to enable 804 itself to become more nearly self-supporting. It turned part of its activities to the training of daily domestic workers for the home help service run by local health authorities. It was also running a daily service of workers from the Institute itself.

The National Institute's objects are self-evident. Among the things laid down for its resident workers who go into private domestic service are certain minimum wages and trade union hours of work. The wages, I gather, have not, with the exception of one minor scale, been changed since 1946. The working hours laid down are as follows: the normal working week for resident workers is 48 hours, with a spreadover of 96 hours per fortnight by mutual agreement. Overtime will be paid at time plus a quarter for the first three hours and time plus a half thereafter.

I do not want to discuss the details of whether, in fact, domestic service can ever be carried on under strict trade union conditions of work. I have never had any doubt that the shortage of domestic labour at the beginning of the war and after the war was something for which our generation have no one but our parents and grandparents to blame. On the whole, although there were many notable exceptions, domestic workers were badly treated. It was an underpaid and overworked vocation. There was quite obviously room for some organisation which would take active steps to raise the status of domestic work and make it into something which people could be proud to follow and which they would find useful to themselves.

That is a very different thing from saying that these desirable aims can be achieved by laying down a series of maximum hours of work with scales of overtime payment. After all, the work of a household, particularly a household in which there are young children—and those are the households which normally need domestic help most—does not run according to a system which can be minutely adjusted by the clock. The sort of domestic crises which occur when the kettle boils, the front door bell rings and the baby has convulsions, all at exactly the same moment, are not in the least susceptible to the precise organisation of work on the factory floor.

805 These are questions which in my view ought to be arranged to the mutual satisfaction of employer and employee, without too much attention to the clock, bearing in mind that many of the hours which the domestic worker spends technically on duty may be spent in the seclusion of her own room, darning her stockings, reading a book, and doing no more in the way of duty than simply listening in case the baby wakes up.

I do not want to make too much of this. What I am concerned with is the actual practical results which the Institute has been able to achieve, and in this respect it is as well that certain very definite questions should be asked of the Government. I should like to know how many students altogether have been trained by the Institute at the training centres since they were set up. I find it difficult, on the whole, to believe that the primary aim of the Institute, which is to raise the status of domestic service, can be achieved by turning out some 300 trained students a year, not by any means all of whom will be going into private domestic service, when the majority of people have probably never heard of the Institute, and when the attractions of domestic service as a trade are not being widely disseminated through the good offices of the Institute.

After all, 300 students a year at a cost of over £100,000 a year is a considerable price to pay for something which may well be somewhat intangible in its results. There are times, obviously, when it may be a good investment. I wonder whether the present is one of the times when it is an investments which can altogther be afforded? I wonder whether the Parliamentary Secretary can assure us that these training centres are carried on with the maximum of efficiency and economy? Reading the Reports of the Public Accounts Committee about most training centres financed from Government money during the last two years, one gets the impression that the standards are very expensively conceived and that the results are not always very easy to measure.

I should like to know to what extent the local health authorities, who run the home help service, are benefiting from the results of the Institute's training activities. If a real and substantial benefit to the local health authorities were being obtained as a result of the Institute's work, 806 I would consider the money well spent, because the home help service, which assists people of all incomes and in all walks of life, is a social service of the greatest importance and ought to be expanded. I should like to have the latest and most up-to-date figures in this respect.

Perhaps the Parliamentary Secretary will tell us the number of students now in training, and the number coming out each year, divided, if possible, between daily workers and workers by the hour in home help services and outside; the total present cost of the service, and the cost of training per student. I should also like to know what has become of the original intention that local education authorities should progressively take over from the Institute the work of training as part of their existing organisation for crafts training. So far, the indications are that the local education authorities have not been doing this, and I should like to know the reason for their not doing so.

Has any attempt been made to find out what is the proportion of wastage among the trained students from the training centres? If so, what is the figure? How many failed to complete the course and to receive their diploma? How many of them stayed in domestic service only for such a short time that the cost of training must be considered almost entirely wasted? Of course, it can be argued that the cost of training is never entirely wasted, because the students have obtained experience which will be valuable to them when they get married. Not all of them, however, will get married. The expense—over £200—for training is a lot to spend on somebody who does not follow the trade for which she has been trained. What are the normal sources of recruitment for students? Do they come straight from school? I believe that in some areas remand homes have been a favoured source of recruitment, and I should like to know the proportion of wastage amongst students from this source.

Another thing which is most important is the type of family for which the Institute is producing trained resident domestic workers. Looking at the conditions of work laid down and judging from the cases I have had brought to my attention, I have a feeling that the people who are in fact benefiting and who are 807 taking on these expensively trained students are not at all those for whom the service was originally designed. The daily help service, of course, benefits people of all incomes in all walks of life, but the average family which can afford to employ somebody at these wages and which can afford to cut down the amount of work done to fit in with the maximum hours of work laid down is not precisely that kind of hard-pressed, harassed, overworked, professional or middle-class family which so often needs the service so badly.

I have a strong suspicion that only too often the graduates of this Institute are going to houses which already have enough service, and into families which could afford to pay for service privately-trained and not trained at public expense. There is a danger that this service will develop into an expensively subsidised method of producing domestic servants for the wealthy.

Those, then, are the questions I want to ask the Parliamentary Secretary and I must apologise for wearying the House with what may not seem a particularly important subject; but, after all, the expenditure of about £100,000 of public money a year is not an unimportant subject in these times, as I am sure the Minister will agree, and it is the right and duty of Parliament to inquire into the methods by which this sum is expended and the results obtained from it.

§ The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour (Mr. Frederick Lee)

The hon. Member for Ealing, South (Mr. Angus Maude) was quite right in attributing the birth of this service to Mr. Bevin. It is one of the smaller of those many beneficial marks that great men leave on British industry. The hon. Gentleman was not quite correct in his approach when he spoke of the things which Members of my party had said in pre-war days about conditions of employment and the fact that they then inaugurated schemes which he believed were merely to benefit richer people. The fact is, of course, that we have always argued for better conditions in industry and for better opportunities for workpeople engaged in no matter what type of industry. It is entirely consistent with 808 those principles that we as a Government should have supported in so weighty a way the National Institute of House-workers.

However, I wish to thank the hon. Member for the opportunity he has given me to tell the House a number of things about the Institute. The hon. Member and many others who comment upon the work of the Institute place far too much emphasis upon its training activities. These form only a small part of its overall work. In these days of shortage of man and woman power, and with an ageing population, the country can no longer afford to have a service as fundamental as domestic service carried on unskilled, unorganised, lacking in its proper status and therefore failing to attract the necessary numbers of new recruits, particularly in a time of full employment and competition between many attractive opportunities for young women.

The Institute has thus a far wider responsibility and is discharging this by laying down standards of pay and conditions, fixing standards of efficiency, examining women to see that they have reached those standards, giving diplomas to those who have done so, and only to a comparatively small degree by training to these standards. It is not confined in its activities to the workers' side only, but it is carrying on propaganda and educational work with housewives whose attitude to the conditions of domestic work is fundamental to this problem. I cannot stress these points too emphatically, as there has been a general tendency to weigh the whole of the Institute's work and expenditure against that proportion of its activities which has been concerned with training. The hon. Member has asked me a number of questions and, within this framework, I will try to answer as many as I can in the time at my disposal.

I take first those points which are concerned with training. The Institute has nine centres widely distributed about the country. It also runs another in conjunction with the Girl Guides' Association. Their output for a year can be taken at about 500 girls, the cost of training each of them, including the maintenance allowance, is a little over £200. No local education authorities are carrying out the full training course given by the Institute, 809 but an increasing number are giving instruction in individual subjects connected with housework, such as needlework.

With regard to the home helps service, the Institute's chief contribution has been in assisting recruitment for this service by assisting local authorities in the selection of candidates, examining them and, where they are successful, giving diplomas to experienced women. This is an important part of the Institute's work and one which it is intending to develop even further. It often results, too, in the return to domestic work, with a diploma, of a woman who has once left it. Direct placing of trainees from the Institute's centres in the home helps service of local authorities is extremely small because the girls are much too young for that type of employment at the time they leave.

As to the future of the trainees, it must be remembered that the period on which to form a judgment is still very short, as the Institute has existed for only five years. Nevertheless, the information available to us is most encouraging. It shows that some four-fifths of them are known to be still in domestic work. Relations with the local health authorities have been steadily improving, particularly as regards assisting them through the holding of examinations by the Institute for giving diplomas to women in their home helps service.

As to recruitment, girls under 18 years of age come straight from school or through the youth employment officers from other jobs. A small proportion of these are in the care of local authorities, orphanages, etc. but none have come from remand homes. Those over 18 normally come from other occupations. So much for training.

I now come to the other activities of the Institute. As to the type of household with whom trainees are placed—the hon. Gentleman made a point of this—placing is by the Institute, Youth Employment Officers, and placing officers of the Ministry of Labour, and care is taken that there shall not be a subsidised service for the rich employer. It is significant that the girls themselves show no inclination to be placed in that way. The statistics show that the vast majority go to "special" households, such as those of doctors, farmers, invalids, the aged and those with a number of children. 810 Another indication is that the average weekly payment by households supplied with part-time help at 2s. 6d. per hour is only 14s. 6d. That does seem to indicate that the labour is widely spread and is not in the employment of the wealthy classes.

On the question of whether the primary aim of the Institute—to raise the status of domestic service as a trade—is being achieved, there are numerous indications that that is the case. There have been 1,200 diplomas given to non-trainees, and this has resulted in many women who had left domestic service coming back to it. There is a growing interest in the work of the Institute and liaison with it on the part of hospital authorities, local education authorities, local health authorities, and so on. Furthermore, information about the Institute's work is being constantly spread by all those who have come into touch with it in one way or another—as employers of trainees or other diploma holders, through attending conferences or other meetings, through visiting the centres or even in helping in the administration.

This is a most difficult field in which war-time experience showed the necessity for trying to take all possible steps. The Ministry of Labour are satisfied that the National Institute has made reasonable and useful progress in this difficult field. I have every hope that, as members of the board and their staff and all others concerned gain more experience, the rate of progress will continue to increase. We believe, therefore, that in comparison with the not too distant past, when, as the hon. Gentleman indicated, domestic work was low-paid drudgery with no proper standards, the status of domestic work is improving and we must continue with the work of the Institute. They have done an admirable job.

I have had the opportunity of visiting many of the centres. I went to one some time ago to present diplomas. I was most heartened by the way in which the girls had taken to the training and by the general spirit which prevailed among them. Having anticipated my visit they had actually baked a cake, which I was able to take away, and which I thoroughly enjoyed. That cake was to me an excellent guarantee of the quality of their efforts.

811 I hope that the hon. Gentleman is satisfied that I have covered, in the short time at my disposal, as many points as possible, and that the House will take a constructive interest in the work of the Institute, which is bringing new hope in a field in which in days gone by girls never had the opportunity to get decent, lucrative employment. So far as the future of the girls is concerned, I am sure that they have never before had the 812 opportunity to rise to such heights and be so proud of the work that they are doing.