Indenturing Pauper Boys. (Hansard, 2 April 1913)

§ Mr. WEDGWOOD

asked the President of the Local Government Board, (1) with reference to the Portsmouth scheme for training and indenturing pauper boys, whether the Local Government Board, before sanctioning the scheme, will take into account the fact that such State-regulated contract labour will compete injuriously with the labour of independent youths not under Poor Law control; and what precautions he proposes to take to prevent those indentured labourers being used as strike-breakers in trade disputes; (2) with reference to the Portsmouth scheme for indenturing paupers, whether there is any limit to the age up to which the guardians are or may be able to keep paupers in this form of unfree labour and to appropriate their wages for their keep; and, if not, whether the Board contemplate eventually the organisation of the whole of the Poor Law unemployed into a body of efficient hired artisans, living in compounds under the control of the guardians or other central State Department; (3) whether his 401W attention has been called to a scheme of the Portsmouth guardians, in which it is proposed to obtain the consent of the Local Government Board to keeping pauper boys under the guardians' control until the age of eighteen, and, with the view of preventing them from drifting into blind alley employment, to apprentice them after school age to some useful trade in the town, keeping them meantime in a specially provided home and appropriating the wages they earn to the cost of their board and lodging in that home, but allowing them some fraction of their earnings as pocket money; and whether this scheme has yet come before the Board for approval; (4) with reference to the Portsmouth scheme of indentured pauper labour, whether his Department will fix what proportion of their wages the labourers are to receive as pocket money; and whether the pauper boys themselves are to be in any way consulted as to giving their consent to becoming workers on the arranged terms?