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CHAPTER 7: SETTING UP THE MACHINERY The appointed days The boards first annual report described the magnitude

of the organisational task which confronted it in July 1934: The transitional payments class to be taken over on the First Appointed Day amounted to about 800,000 applicants, who with their dependants made a total of about 2 /2 million persons. It was estimated that at the Second Appointed Day a further 200,000 applicants would be taken over by the Board.
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In the fulfilment of these duties, the Board had to take over the able-bodied unemployed for whom they were responsible from about 200 Public Assistance Authorities with over 1,000 subcommittees ... The organisation of the Boards service involved the setting up of over 300 Area and District Offices, the appointment and instruction of a staff of over 6,000 persons, of whom the greater number were temporary officers employed by the Local Authorities in dealing with transitional payments, and the appointment of 130 Appeal Tribunals. It was a formidable task to bring this organization into effective operation within six months. No social service on so large a scale had been attempted in this country within such a limited period ...
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The Act provided for two appointed days, to be fixed by the Minister of Labour. On the first, the board was to begin taking over recipients of transitional payments. On the second, it would begin paying allowances to unemployed people previously dependent on public assistance. Before the first appointed day, the regulations governing the calculation of payments had to be drafted and approved by parliament, the administrative machinery set up, and the boards officers prepared to carry out their roles. The local authorities had been pressing for an early transfer of the responsibility and financial burden of outdoor relief. Having assumed though ministers insisted they had no grounds for doing so - that the take-over would begin on 1 October 1934, they considered that they should be compensated for any delay. It would be difficult to pacify them, Strohmenger warned in March 1934, if the starting date were much later, and almost impossible if it were delayed beyond 1 January 1935 which now seemed the earliest possible date. The possibility of speeding the process up, either by bringing the boards regulations into force without waiting for parliamentary approval or by appointing the board before the Unemployment Assistance Act itself became law, so that it could produce draft regulations before the summer recess, was ruled out by Chamberlain, who suggested that parliament should be recalled early after the summer recess to approve the regulations in time for a 1 November start.
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Betterton, however, was anxious not to rush things. In May 1934, he warned the cabinet of the dangers of allowing it to be said that the regulations had been produced in haste or prepared in advance and merely endorsed by the board. He also warned of the risk of the regulations becoming an issue in the November municipal elections. In July, Strohmenger (now the boards deputy chairman but, significantly, still in direct contact with his former chief) told Chamberlain that the target for the first appointed day should be 1 December. By September he had changed his mind again. A pre-Christmas start, he wrote, would mean that the board would immediately be faced with the problem of deciding how far to perpetuate the practice of some public assistance authorities of paying additional allowances at Christmas. It would also mean that allowances would have to be recalculated where the earnings of a member of the family were interrupted over Christmas. Similar problems would arise in Scotland if the board took over before the New Year. The earliest feasible date, therefore, was 7 January, just over six months after the boards appointment. This was announced on 2 October 1934, together with the second appointed day, 1 March 1935.
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Events were to show that six months were barely adequate for the board to complete its preparations. As The Times pointed out the day after the announcement, the local authorities had been given twelve months for the much less difficult task of setting up the new public assistance machinery to replace the boards of guardians in 1930. The difficulties would have been great enough if the boards draft regulations had been accepted as they stood and presented to parliament without delay. Instead, it took over a month and numerous amendments to get cabinet approval, leaving the board with hardly any time to instruct and train its staff. As was soon to become clear, it would have been prudent to risk the wrath of the local authorities by delaying the appointed days for at least a month or two longer.
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The local office network The basic shape of the boards local administration had been decided some months before the board came into being. It was clear that the ministrys employment exchanges must play an important part. Applicants must have the same access to them for job-finding purposes as those claiming insurance benefit, and assistance allowances, like insurance benefit, would be paid at the exchange by Ministry of Labour staff. This was essential, to avoid both duplication of functions and the stigma of separate treatment. Between registration at the exchange and payment of an allowance, however, the circumstances of the applicant and his or her household had to be investigated and, based on this investigation, the amount of the allowance assessed. In theory, investigation and assessment could be carried out by the same person, but in public assistance practice the two tasks were separated, investigation being regarded as a relatively low-grade function. Eadys original intention was that the investigating staff should belong to the
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Minister and not to the Board, who would have the assessing staff only, and the staff necessary in connection with the appeals work. Thus, the boards offices would be staffed by small groups of assessment officers having little contact with applicants. The ministrys director of establishments, Humbert Wolfe, went further, arguing that the whole organisation should be based on the exchanges, with insurance officers administering unemployment insurance law while assistance officers applied the boards regulations and instructions. Such an arrangement would have had profound implications for the future organisation of unemployment benefit and means-tested assistance, establishing a single administrative structure for both. But, as Wolfe recognised, his proposal ran counter to the obstinate belief in the minds of the Treasury that any scheme associated with a benefit paying organisation is likely to be expensive, because it will be based upon benefit rather than upon poor relief. It would also have conflicted with the aim of shielding the Minister of Labour from responsibility for the assistance scheme.
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Whether for these or other reasons, by July 1933 Eady had decided that the board must employ its own investigating officers, based in its own offices. Planning proceeded on this basis, the structure of headquarters, district and area offices being based broadly on that of the ministry, whose 1,185 employment exchanges were under the control of seven divisional offices. The boards area offices would be fewer in number and have larger catchment areas than the exchanges. By the beginning of 1934, a network of 15-20 district offices and about 250 area offices was envisaged, with a standard case load of five to six thousand for each area office - small enough, it was felt, to avoid a routine treatment of the cases. The district office would keep a watch on the appeal tribunals, to ensure that their decisions were broadly in line with the boards policies, and would advise the area offices on important or difficult cases; but the initial decision on each case would be issued in the name of the area officer. This was the structure eventually adopted by the board. The number of district offices actually set up was 28, enabling each to cover a relatively homogeneous area. A small number of regional officers were to provide a direct link between the boards headquarters and the district and area offices.
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Investigating clerks: the boards infantry The standard staffing complement proposed for an area office comprised the area officer, three assistance officers and 18 investigating clerks (ICs). Six of the ICs would be engaged on clerical work and the rest on outdoor work, visiting applicants and collecting information about their circumstances. Given the uncertain quality of the investigating staff whom the board, as a result of an undertaking given by Hudson to the House of Commons in April 1934, was pledged to take over from the local authorities, the ministry wanted as many as possible to be appointed on a temporary basis, but an undertaking was given that about a thousand temporary posts would be made
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permanent after a year, forming a higher grade of ICs, later designated as assistance clerks.
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It was fundamental to the whole scheme that the main point of contact with applicants should be their homes. Regular home visits to check applicants statements by direct observation were standard procedure for both outdoor relief and transitional payments. Officials in Wolfes department questioned whether this was appropriate for the board; the IC, they felt, should have all the prestige of official premises behind him. But Eadys transitional payments department did not share these doubts and planning proceeded on the assumption that only the employment exchanges need be equipped to receive members of the public in large numbers. Applicants, it was assumed, would not normally have reason to call at the boards area office, which need not, therefore, be at street level or designed for the reception of numerous callers. Unfortunately this assumption was to prove ill-founded. The result was an intractable caller problem, to which we shall return in chapter 27.
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If investigation had been a low status job under the PACs, it was to remain so under the board - the lowest form of human life, in the words of a former UAB official. The starting salaries of the temporary ICs, based on what they had been paid by the PACs, ranged from 56s. (2.80) to 75s. (3.75) per week for men and from 41s. (2.05) to 60s. (3.00) for women. For this modest reward, an IC in a densely populated area was expected to complete 125 or more home visits in the course of a week. In a small town the target was 100 or more visits, while in rural areas an IC, with the aid of a motor-cycle, was expected to visit 60-80 applicants per week. Inevitably the visits were brief and perfunctory, the detection of undisclosed household resources taking precedence over the recognition of special needs.
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Recruitment of staff Decisions on the basic questions of staffing and accommodation, as well as the agency arrangements to be made with the county councils in rural areas where the board would not have its own offices, had effectively been taken before the board met. It was obliged to endorse them so that recruitment of staff and the search for premises could proceed without delay. At its first meeting the board confirmed the appointment of nine senior officials, six of whom, as members of Strohmengers preparatory committee, had effectively acted in place of the board before it existed. They included three of the four senior officials of the transitional payments department: Wilfred Eady, George Reid and H D Hancock. Reid and Hancock were placed in charge of the two main policy divisions, Reid being responsible for the drafting of the boards regulations and the instructions to district and area offices, while Hancocks responsibilities included the setting up of appeal tribunals, negotiating agency arrangements with local authorities, and the tricky question of scope (the dividing line between the board and the public assistance authorities). Eady, Reid and Hancock were remembered many years later as a triumvirate on policy - the inner
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group, who were in almost a permanent huddle. A former official who moved to a headquarters post in 1936 described Reid as a bit of a visionary who nevertheless worried a great deal about matters of detail: as well as providing much of the vision and flair behind the setting up and development of the board, he wrote, and rewrote after the initial disasters, the whole of the original instructions to the local offices single-handed in an astonishingly short space of time.
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Two other initial appointments were of ex-Treasury officials: A E Watson as the boards director of finance, and W T Matthews to head the establishments division. N B Batterbury was brought in from the Ministry of Healths Poor Law inspectorate as chief regional officer. Sir Bertram Bircham, the Ministry of Labours solicitor, was to act for the board, though in practice most of its legal work was done by an assistant solicitor, G Stuart King, transferred from the Treasury solicitors department. He was to play an important and constructive role in the development of the boards policies, eventually (as Sir Geoffrey King) becoming secretary of the Assistance Board in succession to Reid. An open invitation to civil servants and local government officers to apply for jobs with the board was issued on 17 July 1934 and produced an overwhelming response, including thousands of applications from the general public who had not been asked to apply. The total number of posts available at headquarters was 179. At district and area office levels, there were to be about 1,180 posts in the district officer, assistant district officer, area officer and assistance officer grades, and 4,500 ICs. By the closing date, 7 August, about 90,000 application forms had been requested by government departments (the expected demand was about 10,500), including 53,000 from one department the Post Office whose non-industrial staff amounted to 166,000 in 1935. About 33,000 forms were returned, of which 24,500 were from civil servants - around 8 per cent of the entire non-industrial civil service. There were no fewer than 7,779 applications for the 179 headquarters posts, about 14,500 for the 1,180 senior district and area office posts, and 10,500 for IC and other miscellaneous posts. No doubt most of those applying for posts above the rank of IC did so in the hope of promotion and higher salaries (more than half the civil servants transferred to the board were promoted on transfer) but, in the prevailing climate of sympathy for the unemployed, many would have been motivated, at least in part, by more altruistic considerations.
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Applicants employers were asked to assess their qualifications for the available posts. Of about 18,500 applicants for posts above the rank of IC who were commended by their employers as highly qualified, the boards staff selected 2,664 for interview, about three-fifths of these being civil servants and the remainder local government officers. Both the UAB and the local authorities were represented on the interviewing boards, which classified the applicants as exceptionally well qualified (Q1), well qualified (Q2), qualified (Q3) and not qualified. There were enough in the first two categories to fill the district officer and assistant
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district officer posts but some of the area and assistance officer posts had to be filled by applicants in the Q3 category.
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Most of those appointed came from either the Ministry of Labour or the local authorities; the rest from a wide range of government departments. Table 1 shows the departmental origins of senior officers of the board in post in 1935. Table 1. Departmental origins of senior staff of the Unemployment Assistance Board, 1935 Ministry of Labour District officers 10 Assistant district officers14 Area officers 101 Assistance officers 291 UAB 20 Other central Local government authorities 13 32 106 161 6 32 118 256 Total 29 78 325 728

Source: Civil Service Clerical Association, The A.B.C. of the U.A.B., 1935[?]. There seems to have been a deliberate attempt to ensure that the district officer and his or her two assistants included at least one person from the Ministry of Labour or the Ministry of Health and one from a local authority. In the area offices, on the other hand, almost any combination of central and local government origins might be found, although there was usually at least one Ministry of Labour person. In the Nottingham district, for example, there were two area offices (Nottingham I and Mansfield) where the area officer and three assistance officers were all ex-Ministry of Labour; Ilkeston had an area officer from the Inland Revenue and two assistance officers from the Ministry of Labour and the Foreign Office; and Northampton had an area officer transferred from the county borough council, one assistance officer from the county council and another from the Ministry of Labour. Of the eight area officers in the Middlesbrough district, two were from the North Riding county council and one from each of the Ministry of Labour, the Post Office, the National Savings Committee, the County Courts Department, West Riding county council and Darlington corporation. The origins of the 22 assistance officers working under them included the Ministry of Labour (9), Post Office (2), county council (3), and one from each of the Lord Chancellors Department, the Board of Trade, Customs and Excise, the River Tees Sanitary Authority, and the local authorities of County Durham, East Lothian, York and Salford.
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Of the problems encountered in welding these disparate elements into effective teams we know little, but there were certainly interdepartmental rivalries to be overcome. A former UAB headquarters official transferred from the Inland Revenue later recalled the difference between those brought up in the Ministry of Labour and elsewhere: We elsewhere people didnt like the general scruffiness. There tended to be a conflict between the scruffy Ministry of Labour approach and
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that of other departments. The local authority recruits, on the other hand, do not seem to have had much difficulty in working with their civil service colleagues. The fact that most had direct experience of public assistance administration gave them an advantage, though it also had dangers for a body whose purpose was, ostensibly, to break away from the traditions of the Poor Law.
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The aim of having a nucleus staff at each district office by 1 November 1934 and at each area office by the first week in December, a bare month before the first appointed day, was achieved. By the first appointed day, 7 January, the district and area officers were nearly all in post, as were 624 of the 707 assistance officers; but most had arrived with very little time to acquaint themselves with the requirements of their new jobs. It was not an auspicious start.
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The appointment of ICs was even more rushed, though the process was simpler. A nucleus of about 200 permanent civil servants and local authority officials were appointed as permanent ICs, including many of those previously administering transitional payments. The main body of ICs were to be selected, under the pledge, from the local authorities temporary transitional payments clerks, practically all of whom applied. Over 4,700 were interviewed and about 3,400 were given temporary appointments. The remaining gaps were filled by about 850 clerks recruited on a casual basis through the employment exchanges. Interviewing of pledge candidates did not begin until the latter part of November. Since they had to move virtually without a break from transitional payments to unemployment assistance work, no preparatory period of training and reorientation was possible. For the most part, the board was told in mid-December, the staff will join with the work.
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The first area officer in charge of the Ipswich office, Reginald Hobbins, a former public assistance official then aged 26, later recalled his arrival at the office on 3 December 1934: It was a beautiful old house. When I opened the door, I was confronted with an avalanche of paper. Furniture and boxes of stationery were stacked in the hall. That was my first impact with the civil service. Among the masses of paper were notices of the two assistance officers I was to receive. They came about a week later and we set about allocating the rooms and the furniture. Then there was the business of taking over staff from the public assistance authorities - it was a large territory and I had to go round interviewing them. We also had to decide which of the people getting public assistance could be regarded as unemployed. We went through the casepapers and I would say Yes, well take that one or No, we cant have that one. There were wads of instructions on policy and procedure to wade through and forms to be studied. It was pretty hard graft in that first month just getting the office door open come January.
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How far the quality of the investigating staff can be said to have suffered from the preference given to pledge candidates must depend on what alternatives were available. There would have been a strong incentive to appoint existing transitional payments clerks even if no pledge had been given. While the quality of the candidates no doubt varied from area to area, there had been time since 1931 for the more efficient local authorities to weed out those who were clearly unsuitable. It is by no means certain that the average quality of ICs recruited from the lower ranks of the civil service would have been higher, and their lack of experience would have been a major drawback. Experience of transitional payments, on the other hand, was not an ideal preparation for employment by the board. It cannot have helped to convince people that unemployment assistance was a genuine departure from the Poor Law if the first, and perhaps the only, officer of the board with whom they had dealings had previously visited them from the public assistance office. The board took what comfort it could from the fact that most of the appointments were temporary and subject to a trial period of between one and three months. Wholesale sackings, however, could not be contemplated even if the facts justified them - as, in the opinion of at least one member of the board, they did. At a board meeting at the end of February 1935, when all concerned were looking for scapegoats, Hallsworth claimed that in some areas as many as 75 per cent of the temporary clerks were quite unsuitable for the work. Watson, the director of finance and establishments, replied that this was a result of the pledge; and, although the minutes of the meeting were subsequently amended to make it clear that he did not accept the figure of 75 per cent, there was no suggestion that he or anyone else present dissented from the general tenor of Hallsworths remarks. Shortly after, the board was told that the quality of the clerks taken over in areas with high standards of local authority administration was generally excellent, but that this was not the case in other areas, where the position was in course of correction by the appointment, as opportunity arises, of non-pledge investigators specially selected by the Boards own officers. This process, however, was extremely slow. Only nine ICs were recommended for dismissal at the end of their trial period, and in November 1935 about 3,300 pledge ICs were still in post - only about 100 less than the number originally appointed.
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In carrying out the undertaking to give permanent status to 1,000 of the temporary ICs, it was decided that they must be selected exclusively from the pledge ICs, since any other course would have caused major staff problems. Thus, for better or for worse, the temporary clerks taken on by the local authorities to administer the means test between 1931 and 1934 came to constitute a large section of the boards permanent staff. As well as Hallsworth, at least one other member of the board, Violet Markham, would have said it was for worse. After a visit to South Wales, where a special investigation of applicants clothing and bedding needs was in progress, she wrote:
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The standard of capacity among many investigators taken over from the Public Assistance Committees is admittedly very poor. Thanks to the efforts of District and Area Officers there has been substantial improvement in the quality of their work during the last year. But many of the elderly men I saw (formerly colliers or industrial workers) reared in the worst traditions of the Poor Law were clearly unsuited to carry out delicate personal enquiries about household clothes and bedding.
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But Miss Markham, as usual, had an axe to grind; she was trying to persuade the board to appoint some women welfare workers. In any case, the investigation of clothing and bedding needs was a very small part of an ICs day-to-day work. Moreover, while ex-miners may have lacked social work skills, their own experience of unemployment may have given them some understanding of the problems of their less fortunate neighbours. Jobs for the men The boards staff at all levels was predominantly male. The administrative grade staff at headquarters did not at first include a single woman, though later there were two: Dora Ibberson, whose initial appointment was as a district officer attached to headquarters and who worked closely and enthusiastically with Violet Markham on questions of welfare and the needs of unemployed women, and Jacqueline HopeWallace who joined the board as an area officer attached to a London district office in 1934 and remained with the board and its successors for over thirty years, attaining the rank of under-secretary in 1958. Among her post-war colleagues, Miss Hope-Wallace is remembered as a formidable defender of the boards traditions, but in 1939 she was described by Violet Markham as a great pacifist internationalist leftwinger and so on. Of the 28 district offices, 25 were headed by a male district officer and only three by a woman, while only six of the 78 assistant district officers were women. There were 23 women area officers out of a total of 325, but they were all attached to district offices; not a single area office was headed by a woman.
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The dearth of women among the boards senior staff was due in part to the fact that few women applied for these jobs. The board complained in its first annual report that, although it had been particularly anxious to secure a leaven of women with local authority experience for jobs above the rank of clerk in its local organisation, only about a hundred applied, and none at all for posts above area officer level. But while few women from local government applied, 5,250 women civil servants did more than one in five of all civil service applicants. Yet few were appointed, even at the low grade of investigating clerk. In April 1935, out of about 4,400 ICs, 106 were women. The predominance of men among the temporary ICs could be explained by the pledge; but there were also 164 permanent ICs of whom only 27 were women. Women were, in fact, blatantly discriminated against even among potential recruits from the civil service, since preference for permanent IC posts
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was to be given to the all-male S class consisting of ex-servicemen. Complaints by the National Association of Women Civil Servants met with the cynical response that if there were any women in the S class they would be considered equally with men. Even that assertion may not have been well founded: there were complaints that women with good qualifications applying for jobs for which they were eligible were not even called for interview.
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Views differed as to the desirability of appointing women ICs. Markham was convinced that it was not only desirable but necessary. In a letter written in July 1934, she deplored the fact that, under the transitional payments system, the local authority investigating staff were nearly all men: Very often, it is the roughness and rudeness of these people that has raised such bitter resentment among the unemployed over the inquiries that are necessary in assessing the needs of a family. The experience of the women rent collectors shows that properly qualified women are much better at this type of work than men.
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Even where women were appointed, there was a tendency to employ them on work for which they were considered more suitable than men: in particular, investigation of clothing and household equipment needs for which the board could make discretionary payments. In April 1935 the UAB section of the Ministry of Labour Staff Association asked the board to appoint at least one woman IC in each district (not even one per area office) for work of this kind.
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There were four districts with not a single woman IC: Durham, Middlesbrough, Norwich and Cardiff. Four others - Liverpool, Newport, Wrexham and Glasgow I - had only one each. District officers with no women ICs were asked to consider appointing some when the opportunity arose, but their reaction was hardly enthusiastic. The district officer for Durham questioned whether Durham housewives would prefer to have a woman officer poking around the house rather than a male. Special investigations under the pots and pans clause, he added, would obviously be done in the presence of the husband. The district officer for Norwich reported his area officers unanimous view that the appointment of women ICs would not be profitable since they would not be interchangeable with men for normal duties (women motor-cyclists were, it is true, a rarity), while the policy of passing pots and pans cases on to local welfare bodies meant that virtually no payments of this kind were made in the district. But it was not only the boards (male) officers who questioned the role of women ICs. A single man aged 58, living in lodgings in Derby, who was visited by a woman IC aged 50, wrote to ask
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whether you think sending a woman round visiting men on the Means Test is right. There are a number of men like myself fought for my Country in the African War & also in France. They dont like being dictated to by a woman, we want to be treated like men.
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I hope you will agree with me, its not quite the right way. Im sure it will lead to trouble if it is carried on as everyone is talking about it. The area officer explained defensively to headquarters: Whilst every endeavour is made to see that Miss Norwood is engaged in visits to women applicants and cases in which a woman officers views or supervision is necessary, it is often necessary to give her work of a more general nature in order that her time is fully occupied.
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In the face of such attitudes, it is not surprising that, at least until the war years, investigation remained almost exclusively a male preserve. Agency arrangements Public assistance authorities were asked to carry out investigation and assessment work in areas where it seemed uneconomical for the board to set up its own offices, either because of low unemployment or the scattered nature of the population. There were obvious political objections to using the machinery of the Poor Law in this way, but Neville Chamberlain was said to be strongly in favour of the adoption of agency arrangements to the greatest extent possible, and Strohmenger, who conducted the negotiations with the local authority associations before the boards appointment, presumably took the same view. In July 1934 the board was presented with a list of 61 authorities in all or part of whose areas it was proposed to make such arrangements. The total number of transitional payments being made in these areas was only about 35,000. With the boards reluctant consent, agreements were negotiated with 35 authorities in England and Wales and 23 in Scotland, covering about 2 per cent of applicants in England and Wales and nearly 9 per cent in Scotland.
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The position of the agency officers was plainly anomalous. Under the transitional payments scheme they had been required to deal with applicants in the same way as those applying for outdoor relief. Now, on the contrary, they were asked to apply two different sets of rules. The Ministry of Health was worried about the pernicious influence of the boards regulations on public assistance practice, but a more fundamental objection was the risk of conflict between the interests of the local authority and the board. One of the boards regional officers wrote:
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... it is difficult, if not dangerous, to talk freely and frankly to men who are not full-time officers of the Board and who may on some questions and in particular cases have to represent a point of view which is different from, if not hostile to, the Boards view.
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The situation was likely to be particularly difficult after the second appointed day, when the board would take over unemployed people on outdoor relief and the agency officer would have to decide in each case whether the applicant fell within the boards scope. If he decided that responsibility lay with the local authority, the authority would have a
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right of appeal; but if he decided that the board was responsible, the board would have no right of appeal against a decision made by a local authority official acting as its agent. Most of the agency arrangements did not survive long. With the exception of the Scottish highlands and islands and the Scilly Isles, they were not renewed when the initial agreements expired in 1936. The boards officials were critical of the standards of work of the agency officers, and both the local authorities and the agency officers were dissatisfied with the financial arrangements. The deciding factor on the boards side, however, was the realisation that, far from saving money, agency administration was more expensive. Except in areas of widely scattered population, therefore, the case for agency arrangements collapsed and the board set up its own offices.
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Appeal tribunals It was essential that the 138 unemployment assistance appeal tribunals should be ready to sit immediately after the first appointed day and that the chairmen, in particular, should have had time to prepare themselves for the task. The courts of referees which dealt with unemployment insurance appeals might have seemed an obvious source of recruitment for tribunal chairmen, but they were not considered ideal for two reasons. First, the chairmen of courts of referees were lawyers, and other qualifications were considered more important than legal knowledge for the tribunal chairmen. Secondly, the courts of referees were unpopular because, as well as hearing appeals, they were required to make initial decisions on questions such as availability for work or voluntary unemployment. As one official put it: Turned down by the Court of Referees has rather unpleasant associations in the [transitional payments] world: and I think the Courts are quite unreasonably regarded with some suspicion in these quarters as part of a convenient administrative arrangement for getting rid of tiresome claimants. We want to establish from the first a reputation for impartiality.
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In July 1934, Ministry of Labour divisional controllers were asked to recommend suitable candidates for appointment by the minister as tribunal chairmen. Apart from lawyers, they were told, the field of recruitment included people with experience of central or local government administration, the running of important voluntary organisations, or as magistrates. They should have a general knowledge of industrial and working class conditions in the areas for which they are to sit. People recently prominent in party politics were generally to be excluded, as were large employers and those actively connected with employers associations or trade unions, unless the regard in which they [were] held in the locality would outweigh considerations adverse to their selection.
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In all, 138 chairmen and 215 reserve chairmen were appointed, including only 22 women. It was estimated in November 1934 that
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about two out of three chairmen would be lawyers, but a search through the contemporary Law Lists shows that the proportion of lawyers among the 137 chairmen and 206 reserve chairmen listed in the Ministry of Labour Gazette for January 1935 was nearer a half: of the 294 chairmen and reserves in England and Wales, 147 were lawyers (103 solicitors and 44 barristers), while in Scotland 22 out of 49 were lawyers. There are ten doubtful cases, owing to the difficulty of identifying those with common surnames, but even if all of these are assumed to have been lawyers, the overall proportion is 52 per cent. In South Wales, where it was difficult to find suitable people willing to serve, lawyers predominated: at least 19 solicitors and three barristers out of a total of 33. In the three London districts, with a good supply of retired professional men, only 18 or 19 out of 50 were lawyers (mainly barristers); the non-lawyers included seven retired civil servants and three retired public school headmasters.
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The selection of the boards representatives on the tribunals raised questions of a different kind. Reid argued strongly for the appointment of officials of the board. I do not see, he wrote, how a person can by virtue merely of being a respectable citizen be said in any real sense to represent the Board. Eady, more concerned with the public perception of the tribunals independence, was equally strongly opposed to the idea. At an early meeting of the board, the non-official board members, including the chairman, were generally in favour of non-official tribunal members, while Strohmenger backed Reid, arguing that the tribunals could easily nullify the work of the Board in attempting a reasonable standardisation of outlook. The non-officials carried the day, though it was agreed that district officers should deputise where no suitable non-official representative was available or where there were very special reasons for ensuring that the Boards point of view in a particular case shall be put and maintained with the greatest possible official authority available.
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The divisional controllers and Ministry of Health inspectors, among others, were asked to suggest candidates who could be relied upon to appreciate and state the point of view of the board. Employers, they were told, were acceptable but workpeople and those representing them were not. Retired civil servants were regarded as a hopeful source and the establishments officers of government departments were invited to put forward names. There was no lack of candidates: a list of over 5,000 names was drawn up, from which 138 substantive representatives (one per tribunal) and 589 reserves, including the 28 district officers, were appointed. Ninety-five were women. Most, according to the boards annual report, had their main contact with social conditions in commercial or professional work, combined in most cases with experience in Local Government administration or voluntary welfare work of one kind or another.
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Finally, there were the panels of workpeoples representatives. On average each tribunal was to sit in three locations, and a panel was set up for each location. The total number of panel members was about 7,500. It is not clear whether they were selected mainly from the
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contributors representatives on courts of referees, as was at first intended, or whether an attempt was made to find people untainted by association with the courts of referees. What is clear is that the panels were relatively large - some twenty names for each place of sitting. As a result, members sat infrequently and, the 1937 annual report complained, were inevitably lacking in experience of the procedure and technique of tribunal work. When the panels were due to be reconstituted in 1937, therefore, it was decided that the numbers should be reduced to a minimum of five per venue, so that members would be called to sit between once a month and once in two months. Those with an unsatisfactory attendance record or handicapped by physical disabilities, e.g. deafness or advancing age were to be weeded out, dual membership of a tribunal and a local advisory committee was to be avoided (a point which did not arise initially since the advisory committees were not appointed until 1936), and each of the new panels was to include one or two women.
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The board and the press The question of publicity and relations with the press was raised at an early stage by Tom Jones and Violet Markham, who urged that the board should have its own press officer. Markham was influenced both by her own propensity to make use of the press for the propagation of her ideas and by the advice of a relative by marriage, Sir Stephen Tallents, then public relations officer of the Post Office and previously involved in the launching of both labour exchanges and unemployment insurance. The boards cardinal need, Tallents wrote in October 1934, apart from the issue of clear instructions to your own staff ... will be for (1) a series of clear (and, you will let me add, well, but not expensively, laid-out and printed) leaflets for different classes of the public. ... (2) someone able, with assistance, to deal continuously with the press and press agencies in London, and to advise your local staff on the conduct of their dealings with the local press. ... This is not merely a question of convenience. It will pay you many times over to secure, if you can, a favourable public opinion about your operations. If the press and the public are disposed to think that on the whole you are more likely to be doing right than wrong, you and your officers throughout the country will be relieved from a mass of individual complaints and the burden of answering them. ... You will also be relieved from a source of real wear and tear on staff.
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Eady and Strohmenger, however, were strongly opposed to the idea of a press officer. Eady explained to Jones: In the mind of the Government the Board are not creating a new first class social service of high political value whose benefits
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need to be rammed down the throats of the public. The atmosphere is indeed rather apologetic. A pressman who starts stunting cannot do us much good. Further, the points that arise fall into two groups, one group which can be dealt with satisfactorily by ordinary office routine, and the other whose handling requires not only a knowledge of the Press but of the politics of our work. I regard the politics as more important than the press technique and I should not be at all happy to see a stranger or indeed one of the less responsible officers of the Department handling important issues such as, for example, a campaign of criticism in South Wales papers. When points of that importance arise it seems to me that either the Chairman or Reid or myself must handle the press man and I should regard that sort of work as practically a first charge on our time. ...
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Jones and Markham were not convinced. They received some support from other board members and, at the end of October 1934, Eady was asked to consult the Treasury and to look for a suitable person. The possibility of borrowing a press officer from the Foreign Office was mooted but nothing was done. Unless I can find somebody whom I could trust to put a point of view to the Press with the same skill that I personally feel sure I could employ, Eady wrote, I wont take him!! As a result, during the traumatic events of January-February 1935, the board had no press officer of its own. It was only in March 1935, when the crisis had passed, that Watson approached the Treasury on the boards behalf for permission to ask for the loan of the Foreign Office press officer. The reply was that the board was not the only department which had recently asked for a press officer and not unnaturally we are anxious whither all this is leading. In the boards case it seems to have led nowhere. Since November 1934, dealing with the press had been one of the miscellaneous tasks entrusted to the chairmans private secretary, and it remained so.
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Reinventing the dole: a history of the Unemployment Assistance Board 1934-1940 by Tony Lynes is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

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