As part of the swingeing austerity package of 1931, which also raised contributions while cutting benefits, unemployment benefit could in future only be drawn as of right for six months: after that, those still out of work and requiring support had to apply for ‘transitional payments’ paid through the Labour Exchange. Before this was granted, they had to undergo a household means test carried out by the local PAC. The Committee would inform the Labour Exchange of the applicant’s circumstances, and the rate of relief he should receive was assessed. In arriving at this figure all forms of household income were taken into consideration. These included any pensions or savings, any money coming into the house from a working son or daughter, even household possessions. The maximum amount which an adult male could receive before losing his entitlement to benefit was 15s.3d a week.
The fact that the total income of a family was assessed led to much bitterness, and sometimes family break-up. ‘The Act drove many more young men and women away from home than anything else, because if you had a son working, and the father was out of work, the son was made to keep him,’ explained a Welsh miner. ‘It was one of the reasons why so many left [the Valleys] for London or the Midlands.’
Various ruses were thought up to get round this deprivation: a working child might leave home and go to live with a relative or in lodgings so that the parent would qualify for benefit. Or he or she might remain at home, but cram into an outhouse or a shed on the allotment when the Public Assistance officer was expected. Stanley Iveson, a mill worker in Nelson in Lancashire, a textile town with high unemployment, recalls the effect of the Means Test there: ‘In 1931 when people were being knocked off the dole, there was a big building across [the street] … it was a model lodging house. And … lads used to go and sleep there, during the week … It was a shilling a night. So they were able to draw the dole. But they went home for their meals. And it broke up homes in those days.’
In Dowlais in South Wales Beatrice Wood’s father was an unemployed miner, but her brother had a job. The Means Test
meant that everybody working had to keep their parents … there was a lot of friction between fathers and sons because the boys resented keeping their parents. We tried to live an honest life, we really tried, but … the Government was making honest people dishonest because of their rules. The Means Test man would come often, asking the same question. So we devised a plan with the help of my mother’s friend. We would say my brother was living with them. It didn’t matter to them because her husband was working. My mother didn’t like doing it, but we had to in order to live — if you could call it living. There was a lot of people doing it. The trouble was, my brother couldn’t be seen in our house because he wasn’t supposed to be living there. The Means Test man came when you least expected him. Sometimes he would call just as my brother had come in from work. He would be eating his food and if there would be a knock on the door there would be one mad rush to get the food off the table (because we only had one room) before we opened the door, and my brother would have to hide in the pantry … and stay there until [the Means Test man] had gone. The Means Test man came one day when my brother was bathing in front of the fire in a tub. Well. My brother jumped out of the tub wet and naked and went into the pantry to hide. We didn’t have time to take the tub out, so my mother, resilient as ever, caught hold of our dog and plunged him into the tub, pretending she was bathing the dog. My brother was freezing in the pantry. When we opened the door to let the Means Test man in, the dog jumped out of the tub and shook himself all over the Means Test man. It took all my powers not to laugh, because it was like a comic strip if it wasn’t so serious … Those Means Test men were horrible men, and very arrogant. They would sometimes lift up the latch and just walk in. So my mother went one better — she kept the door locked. They weren’t above looking through your window. I was always told that your home was your castle. But not us — we might as well be living in a field: we had no privacy — this was the dreaded nineteen thirties. How people suffered.
If a father was considered to have sufficient means to support an unemployed son or daughter, his or her benefit would be stopped. Donald Kear, an unemployed machine attendant from the Forest of Dean, remembered: ‘Any family unlucky enough to have one of their number unemployed were forced to accept a lower standard of living because they had a passenger to carry. In our house I became the passenger. My benefit was immediately cut to 5/- a week. My father [a miner] was paid on production at the coal face. When his earnings rose a little the benefit was correspondingly reduced. The Means Test man went regularly to the office at the mine to find out how much my father was earning so these adjustments could be made.’ Occasionally this inquisition meant that a son or daughter without work would find themselves without a home either, as they would be thrown out so as not to be a ‘parasite’ on the family; this probably happened more when a step-parent was involved.
Any entitlement to benefit passed after six months: after that it was a question of cash handouts at the minimum possible level to keep the unemployed from destitution. The dispensation felt like an act of charity, as the Fabian socialist writer G.D.H. Cole saw it. ‘It is therefore — for charity begins at home — to be strictly limited to the smallest sum that will keep the unemployed from dying or becoming unduly troublesome; and their relations as far as possible to be made to bear the cost of maintaining them in order to save the pockets of the tax payers. Behind this system is the notion that unemployment is somehow the fault of the unemployed, from which they are to be deterred if possible; and an attempt is made to persuade their relations to help in deterring them, because they will be made to contribute to their support.’
The ex-Labour MP Fenner Brockway, now an ILP member, attempted to conjure up the effects of the Means Test for those Southerners who could not envisage it, urging them to imagine the Royal Albert Hall ‘filled three times over. That would represent the workers on the Means Test in Newcastle. Imagine it filled twelve times over. That would represent their families. It is beyond imagination to realise the anxiety and despair and suffering they would represent.’
In a number of Labour-controlled authorities, PACs were in fundamental opposition to the Means Test, and subverted its operation by always allowing the maximum possible centrally specified benefit, regardless of an applicant’s circumstances. County Durham (where an estimated 40,000 people had to face the Means Test), Glamorgan County (where the number was around 27,000), Monmouth, Rotherham and Barnsley were among those warned by the Ministry of Labour against ‘illegal payments’. If they persistently refused to conform, as Rotherham and County Durham did, the PACs were suspended and replaced by commissioners from London to ‘do the dirty work’. Other authorities felt it was better to submit to the regulations, but to mitigate them wherever possible, as a statement from the London East End borough of West Ham explained: ‘We were threatened with supercession, and in face of that threat we prefer to keep our poor under our own care and do what we can for them rather than hand them over to an arbitrary Commissioner from whom they could expect little humanity.’
For workers who had regarded unemployment benefit as a right, earned while they were in work and to be drawn when, through no fault of their own, they were out of it, the Means Test was not only harsh in its effects, it was degrading and humiliating in its association with destitution and the Poor Law, violating the privacy of homes they had worked hard to scrape together, prying into family matters, letting the neighbours witness their shame as their furniture was carted off to be sold.
‘If somebody had a decent home, the man from the Means Test came and made a list of what you had. Then you were told to sell a wardrobe this week, some chairs next week, some pictures the week after, until you perhaps you only had your bed, two chairs and a table left. Only then would you be able to claim something off the Public Assistance,’ recalled Kenneth Maher. Not all officers were brutal: some clearly felt disquiet at the job they were obliged to perform, and were as respectful and thoughtful as the brutal and inquisitorial system