§ LORD NATHAN rose to call attention to the urgent problems of welfare and resettlement which will arise in the immediate 494 post-armistice period; and to move for Papers. The noble Lord said: My Lords, the object of the Motion standing in my name is to direct the attention of your Lordships to a group of problems which will present themselves with extreme urgency as soon as the bugle sounds for the armistice. They are problems to which, so far, very little attention has been given, and yet they are problems as regards which I think it may truly be said that if we fail to have ready when the "Cease fire" sounds any solution of them, the success of all our other plans, however wise, however well laid, may be most gravely jeopardized. Instead of making orderly progress to prosperity, we may find ourselves facing unrest, disorder, and profound public discontent. No other problems will be more urgent or more immediate than these. None call more clearly for foresight and preparation.
§ I wonder whether it is recognized how drastic and far-reaching a disturbance there has been of the domestic, social, and economic life of the nation brought about by this war. It is a dislocation unparalleled in the history of this land. Not only here in London but throughout the country, homes by the thousand have been physically destroyed. Their inhabitants have been driven away from their accustomed habitations. Vast numbers have been compulsorily evacuated. There have been voluntary evacuations from danger areas on a large scale. Factories, offices, business premises, have been "blitzed." Great numbers of business concerns have transferred their offices to unfamiliar surroundings in the country.
§ But the damage already done and yet to be done by the enemy is the least part of the problem. The total mobilization of the nation for total war has effected far more far-reaching changes in the domestic life of the people than are indicated merely by physical destruction. Millions of men have been taken from their homes into the Armed Forces of the Crown and the Civil Defence Services. Other millions have been caught up into war industries, and perhaps sent off to live and work in strange places at unfamiliar tasks. Millions of women, too, have been enrolled in the Forces and in war industries, or have left their homes and taken on jobs to replace men who have gone to the war. Children by the tens of thousands have been evacuated from 495 "blitzed" or threatened towns to safer parts of the country, and so have mothers with babies and young children. It is a vast dislocation unparalleled, as I have said, in our history. When the bugle blows for the Armistice we shall have to face the vast process of disentangling all this knotted confusion into which the people of the country have been twisted. I ask, where are the plans for sorting out the jumbled mass of displaced men and women, re-sorting and reassembling them into their proper family units, and helping them with the complex personal, domestic, and economic problems which will face them when they try to resume their normal peace-time civilian life? I do not want to speak too much in generalities about people in the mass, for I am speaking to-day of what are essentially the problems of the individual, though multiplied a million-fold.
§ On previous occasions, when speaking of reconstruction and similar subjects, I have spoken to your Lordships of the problem of the ordinary man from the ordinary home in the ordinary street of our ordinary towns and villages. I have spoken to your Lordships of Tom Snooks, and I speak of Torn Snooks again to-day. He may be Able-bodied Seaman Snooks, Aircraftman Snooks, or Private Snooks. He may be Munitioneer Snooks. But, whatever he be, Snooks is at the war in the Forces or in the war factories. He is leading, during these war years of abnormal service, a life quite separate from his home and family and from his normal occupation and pursuits. But Snooks will come back from the war, and when he comes back he will demand the end of the dislocation. He will demand a return to normal conditions of living. Whilst he has been away, in whatever sphere of the war, his one abiding thought has been, "What is going to happen to me when I get home?" All his thoughts and aspirations are centred round the simple, easily-understood requirements relating to family, home, job. That is what Private Snooks has in his mind—family, home, job.
§ This demand of his that his family shall be reassembled round him, that his home shall be reconstructed, that his job shall be found, is the basis of all the reconstruction. We shall have employment and training policies to get Snooks into a job 496 that will last in the post-war years. It may not be his old jab or a job in which he can use his own skill. We shall have a building policy to build and rebuild industries, towns, schools, and hospitals. We shall have a social security policy—we may hope a Beveridge policy—to free Snooks from the fear of want for him and his family, and make him able to face the changes of post-war adjustment without too many clogging fears and anxieties. In addition, there will be all the policies relating to agriculture, education, and a host, of other matters which, when woven together into a programme, will give to the nation a new design for living. But these are problems and policies which will last for many years after the war is over. They are post-war matters of post-war Governments.
§ There is an immediate, urgent, human problem which these policies do not in themselves solve and indeed scarcely touch. It is what I call the problem of welfare. By welfare I mean not, as sometimes, the whole set-up of the Social Services, but something more human and more individual—welfare in the sense in which it is used during the war in the Services and in the war industries. It is the problem of smoothing away the difficulties of individual men and women who find themselves faced with novel, dislocated, abnormal conditions. During the hardships, disruption, and dislocation of war it has been a tremendous problem merely to find out what the difficulties and anxieties of individuals and families are, an enormous problem to make known to them what they can do about it. This problem will be more acute the moment the war ends, more acute than now, more acute than it was after the last war. The break-up of normal living has been so much worse this time; more families have been split up, more homes have been destroyed, more young people of both sexes have left home. Just as this dislocation has created during the war a welfare problem of quite unparalleled magnitude, so will the welfare problems after the war be of quite unparalleled magnitude.
§ A distinction should be drawn between the Social Services which regard these problems necessarily in the mass, and what I call human services which look at the difficulties and the anxieties of the individual. The proper function of welfare 497 in the sense in which I am using that term is to provide a link between what is done by a Department to solve these social problems in the mass and the particular wants and needs of particular people, not the wants and needs of anybody but the wants and needs of Snooks returned from the war. There must be some organization to act as a link between the programmes of the Departments and the difficulties of Snooks and his family. There must be an organization there to guide, to help, to advise, to see that Snooks knows what is being done for him and to show him how to take advantage of it, and, on the other hand, an organization is needed to keep in the minds of the Departments what it is precisely that Snooks wants and needs. There has been during the war some experience of the difficulties with which this whole problem of welfare is surrounded and of the scope which it can take. A trail has been blazed by welfare for troops; I have had some experience of it myself during the past three and a half years or so. The Army Welfare Organization deals, as is right and proper, with the problems of both the soldiers and others in the Armed Forces and their families, but the very same problems are dealt with for the generality of the population by the Citizens' Advice Bureaux. They do not exclude those who are in the Services, but their main function is to advise those who approach them drawn from the main body of the citizens of this country.
§ I was delighted the other day, in the debate here on the Beveridge Report, to hear the noble Viscount, Lord Bledisloe, pay a tribute to the work that has been done during the war by the Citizens' Advice Bureau. I have had many opportunities to come into contact with it and to admire the work that those Citizens' Advice Bureaux have done. It has left upon my mind an impression that is indelible. The same kind of work must be carried into the post-war world. But, my Lords, this work of Army welfare, these Citizens' Advice Bureaux are based entirety upon voluntary assistance. They rely upon volunteers to man them and to do their work. The great need for the kind of service that they are rendering both to the Forces and the Citizens' Advice Bureau will arise when the war comes to its close and when those now far from their homes return.