CHAPTER 28: LEAVING HOME

The incentive to leave home The effect of the household means test in breaking up families under the transitional payments scheme in 1931-34 was discussed in chapter 2. Both the government and the board were aware of the importance of ensuring that the unemployment assistance regulations could not be accused of causing widespread disruption of family life by making unreasonable demands on the earning members of a household, especially where their relationship to the applicant was not close. The evolution of the earnings rules in the boards regulations was described in earlier chapters. The underlying assumption was that, if a household means test was to have any reality, parents and unmarried children at least must be expected to support each other to a substantial extent. Under the 1934 regulations, if the father was unemployed, earning sons and daughters were allowed to retain an amount sufficient for their own minimum needs plus an allowance for personal requirements of one-third of the first 20s. of earnings and a quarter of the excess, the remainder being deducted from the fathers allowance. Thus, a son aged 18-20 earning 24s. a week was expected to hand over 8s.4d. as a contribution to the needs of the household, as well as paying for his own upkeep, leaving only 7s.8d. for his personal requirements. If he moved out, he might have to pay more for board and lodging but would be able to keep the rest of his earnings. The financial advantage of leaving home was much greater if the son was earning, say, 40s. a week, out of which, so long as he remained at home, 20s.4d. was assumed to be available for the needs of the rest of the family - far more than the additional cost of living away from home. If the roles were reversed and it was the son who was unemployed and dependent on the earnings of his father, mother, brother or sister, he could, similarly, attempt to escape from this situation by moving into lodgings and applying to the board as a single person. The 1936 regulations brought a substantial relaxation of the treatment of sons and daughters earnings, details of which are given in chapter 16. In the circumstances described above, a son aged 18-20 and earning 24s. a week would be expected to contribute only 4s. instead of 8s.4d. to the family budget, over and above his basic needs; and out of earnings of 40s. he would be expected to contribute 12s. instead of 20s.4d. The incentive to move out was thus materially reduced. For an unemployed son or daughter, on the other hand, even under the 1936 regulations, the fathers earnings could easily eliminate any entitlement to an allowance. Where this was the case, the incentive to leave home remained undiminished.

The constructive household

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The evidence from the boards files and annual reports as to the extent to which unemployed people or wage-earners either moved out or claimed to have done so as a result of the means test is summarised below. Though fragmentary and at times anecdotal, it shows that in some parts of the country significant numbers of households were affected. At first, no written guidance was issued to the boards officers on the treatment of these cases. To include such guidance in the main body of instructions published in the January 1935 white paper would have been seen as evidence that the means test was expected to cause family breakdown, and the boards officials were no doubt reluctant to issue a supplementary unpublished instruction, in view of the embarrassment that would result if it were leaked. District and area officers were presumably expected to be aware of the line taken by the Ministry of Labour in 1932, set out in chapter 2, and to proceed accordingly, treating an applicant as independent only if the act of leaving home was satisfactorily explained on grounds other than to support an application for relief which would not otherwise be obtained. District officers who raised the matter were advised accordingly.
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The 1932 policy referred only to applicants themselves leaving home. Where the person leaving home was not the applicant but an earning member of the household, it was more difficult to justify an assumption that his or her resources were still available to the household. A son or daughter, for example, could not be compelled either to return home or to contribute to the household while no longer a member of it. In some areas, however, the boards officers adopted a robust approach. The Durham district officer, Pearce, informed headquarters in September 1935 that, in many cases where earning sons had left home, either the allowance had continued unchanged (ignoring the loss of the earners contribution) or an assumed contribution had been taken into account, and that a high proportion of these determinations had been confirmed or only slightly increased by the appeal tribunals. Two months later he told a district officers conference that only 20 per cent of the 200 departures up to that point had been considered justifiable. Concerned as to the legality of the action taken, Reid told the conference that a contribution should be assumed from an absent earner only if there were reasonable grounds, supported by evidence, for believing that the earner was in fact still contributing. The Durham area officers subsequent reaction to this guidance was that it was only in exceptional cases that evidence sufficient to satisfy a tribunal could be produced and that, unless a strong line was taken, the numbers would multiply. Pearce was inclined to agree but insisted that the ruling must be complied with.
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Strict compliance would have meant that, in most cases where, for example, an earning son left with the intention of increasing the allowance payable to his unemployed father, the boards officers would have been obliged to accept the new situation and reassess the fathers allowance on that basis, however strongly they might disapprove of the sons action. Inevitably the policy was flouted in many cases, the fact
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that the earner either was or ought to be making a contribution to the household being treated as a special circumstance justifying a discretionary reduction in the allowance. The average reduction was said to be between 5s. and 10s. a week in 1936.
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Where the person claiming to have left home was the unemployed applicant rather than a wage-earner, the boards officers were faced with a number of difficult questions. Was the move genuine? If so, was it voluntary; and, if so, was there a justifiable motive other than that of claiming an allowance from the board? If the move was genuine but the motives suspect, were there grounds for treating the applicant as if he or she had access to the households resources? And, if so, what provisions of the act or regulations could be invoked to justify such treatment? To the last question, there was no simple answer. To take into account the resources of a household of which the applicant was no longer a member was incompatible with the principle of a household means test. The board, therefore, increasingly favoured an alternative solution: the constructive household doctrine, explained by Ernest Brown in reply to a parliamentary question in December 1936: ... cases occasionally arise in which as a merely colourable arrangement a single man leaves or purports to leave his home for the purpose of obtaining an allowance at a higher rate than would otherwise be payable ... ... in such cases the Boards officer may make an assessment on the basis that the applicants home is still in fact open to him and that he is constructively a member of it.
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The policy was belatedly promulgated in writing in a lengthy circular letter to district offices, dated 21 October 1938. The first paragraph revealed the anxiety to avoid public disclosure of the policy:
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While the problem is relatively small it is one which obviously requires cautious handling. We do not think it desirable to issue general instructions to Area Officers on the subject, nor do we wish that the subject-matter of this letter should be conveyed to Area Officers through a formal District Office Instruction. We think it is essentially a subject which should be handled by way of verbal communication, and discussion at Area Officers Conferences. The emergence of the problem and the method of dealing with cases as they arise are matters which should always be kept under the close oversight and control of the District Offices ... The circular stressed the need for investigating clerks to record the reasons given for leaving home, and urged vigilance to detect dodges and pretences in the small minority of cases in which attempts of this kind are made. If the applicant had left home and there was good reason to believe that the home was still open to him and that he had done so under an arrangement with an earning member (generally the
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father) designed primarily to secure an increased allowance and not for reasons connected with prospective employment, there would be a strong presumption of collusion. Mere suspicion was not enough, however; action must be justified by such evidence as would be reasonably acceptable to impartial persons. Where a wage-earning member of the household had left, the initial presumption would be that the new situation was bona fide. Even if the reason for leaving was unwillingness to contribute what was expected of him, this would not in itself justify treating the move as a dodge. If, on the other hand, there were grounds for thinking that the applicant had been a party to the move and could if he wished restore the status quo, and particularly where the earner had moved into lodgings nearby, possibly with relatives, there would be a presumption that the arrangement was not bona fide - the more so if the earner was in the habit of returning home when unemployed. The action to be taken where it was decided that collusion had occurred would normally be based on the constructive household doctrine: that, as the circular put it, a person is constructively a member of the household even though not physically present. Justifying this at a district officers conference in March 1938, Fieldhouse pointed out that the board took a liberal view of situations where it was to the applicants advantage to ignore the temporary absence of a member of the household. It was therefore not unreasonable to treat an absent earner as still present if there was good reason to believe that his departure was merely an expedient to secure a higher allowance. The October 1938 circular recognised that there would be some cases of applicants leaving home in which the constructive household basis was difficult to explain or clearly inapplicable - for example where the home is not actually open to him but he nevertheless derives advantage from continued contact with some member of it, e.g. his mother. In such cases, special circumstance deductions could be made in recognition of the help received. But the circular made it clear that such action would be exceptional:
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From the legal point of view, which is the direction from which attack has come in the past, the doctrine of the constructive household is the only one suitable for general use in earner cases and in the majority of applicant cases. Whether the constructive household or the special circumstance method was used, the applicant was to be encouraged to make use of the appeal machinery and, if the separation continued, the situation was to be reviewed at least monthly to decide whether and when it must be accepted as genuine and the allowance increased accordingly. The constructive household doctrine had important advantages from the boards point of view. It enabled officers to take into account the resources of earning members of the household without having to demonstrate either that the leaving home was a mere pretence or that the applicant was actually receiving a contribution from the earner. It avoided the awkwardness and possible illegality of using the boards
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discretionary powers to take into account resources which would otherwise be excluded by the regulations. And it provided a simple and uniform basis for dealing with leaving home cases, whether the leaver was an unemployed applicant or a wage-earner. Whether the doctrine was as legally watertight as the board seems to have assumed may be open to question, but it served its purpose. As always, it was one thing to issue guidance to officers and another to ensure that it was followed. The fact that in this case the guidance was not only unpublished but was not even to be conveyed in writing to area offices cannot have helped to ensure its observance. There is evidence that, at least in one district, it was greeted with some scepticism. At a conference in Newport at which the guidance was explained to area officers, the emphasis placed on the need for adequate evidence was noted but the opinion was expressed that, in view of the size of the problem in the district, any relaxation of the practice of refusing to accept as genuine any case where there was evidence to the contrary would result in almost wholesale removals. To obtain anything like actual proof, even in the case of a person falsely claiming to have left home, would, it was argued, be almost impossible without using detective methods which are undesirable and which in any event take up more time than can be spared. The district officer, Anderson, replied that, in view of the facts (not borne out by the figures quoted below) that in a large proportion of cases there was no appeal and that only half the appeals succeeded, the present practice could continue, provided that, in cases not accepted as genuine, officers were prepared to produce specific grounds for their action.
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Numbers leaving home - and why they left No systematic survey was carried out by the board to ascertain the extent of the problem of applicants or earners leaving home and the reasons why they did so. The district officers reports published in the boards first annual report played down the significance of the problem, implying that the numbers were small and that those leaving home generally did so for reasons other than the means test. Combining the evidence in these reports with other information in the boards files, however, it is clear that substantial numbers of households were broken up. Most of the evidence, especially for the first year, comes from the northern counties of England. In Liverpool, by July 1935, the district office had dealt with about 200 cases of applicants leaving home and stringent checks had been introduced, including interviews with parents to confirm that they would not allow their son or daughter to return home. The Manchester I district officer reported in October 1935 that there had been 74 cases where applicants leaving home had been refused any increase in their allowances, six of these decisions being reversed on appeal. Information on 42 of the other 68 showed that 24 had returned home, ten had obtained work and only eight were known to be still in lodgings. In the annual report, however, he admitted that
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it was generally extremely difficult, and often impossible to prove that the removal has been a matter of collusion with other members of the family. In the Durham district, it was reported in November 1935 that 160 applicants had left home, 60 per cent of them with no justification. The annual report put the number for the whole year in that district at approximately 250, with a similar number of wage-earners leaving (all of them, in both categories, were said to be sons). It is common experience, the district officer wrote, to find that the new lodgings are only accommodation addresses, leaving a strong presumption that for all practical purposes the son is still living at home. The Middlesbrough district officer admitted in the annual report that the problem of homes alleged to have been broken up had created a certain amount of difficulty. About 100 earning sons and daughters had left home during the year, some for personal reasons but others for the purpose of increasing their parents allowances, and a number of applicants had also left home. The November 1935 district officers conference was told of 46 cases of sons leaving home in the Sheffield district and many cases of wage earners going next door in the Bristol district. In general, there were fewer reports of leaving home in the south of England, where the cost of obtaining board and lodging away from home was higher. As the London II district officer wrote in the boards 1935 annual report:
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Although it is often said by applicants that the Boards assessments will result in the break-up of the home, there are very few instances of this having happened in fact, as in practice, unless the earner is getting a high wage, he cannot expect to find lodgings with the amenities and privileges he would get at home for much less than the amount he should be contributing to the household.
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The evidence from the annual reports from 1936 onwards is more scanty, the district officers reports being replaced by regional officers reports which placed less emphasis on the details of administration. None of the regional officers reports for 1936 or 1937 made any reference to applicants leaving home. The regional officers for the Midlands and East Anglia and for Wales both mentioned the subject in the 1938 report, but both stated that the number of applicants leaving home was small and that, if households were being broken up, it was mainly a result of wage-earners leaving. The regional officer for Wales wrote in the boards 1938 annual report, on the subject of earners leaving home in South Wales: Most of these earning members are sons who, when interviewed by the Boards officers, show a disregard of the position of their parents strangely in contrast to normal working-class practice. Not only is there a disinclination to support, wholly or in part, an unemployed parent but an unwillingness to pay into the household purse a sum which would certainly be expected by a stranger.
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He cited the example of a family with a child at school and three working sons earning in total 8 10s. a week, resulting in a nil determination for the unemployed father. The sons bluntly refused to pay more than 12s. a week each for board and lodging and left home, with the result that the father was now in receipt of a full allowance for the rest of the family. In a similar case, a Yorkshire family with two sons and a daughter all working, one of the sons moved into lodgings with his brother-in-law in the same town in August 1935 because he cannot afford to buy himself clothes and has had no pocket money during the Bank Holiday. As a result, the fathers allowance was increased by 9s.6d. a week. From the point of view of the boards officers, such conduct may have seemed irresponsible, but from the familys point of view it was entirely rational.
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A note prepared for a parliamentary debate in May 1938, referring to both applicants and earners leaving home, inferred that the problem was strictly local, occurring only sporadically in about 20 of the boards 28 districts, that even in the other districts the cases were exceptional, and that since the introduction of the revised regulations the scale of the problem was even smaller. Figures were given for Durham, one of the Districts in which the question arises most frequently, showing that there had been 460 cases where it was suspected that the leaving might be due to causes connected with the Boards allowance in 1936 but only 267 in 1937. It is not clear whether these figures included applicants leaving home or only wage-earners, but figures from a different source show 58 applicants and 98 earners leaving home in the Durham district in the six months to October 1936.

20

More detailed information was provided for the year to June 1939 in a report from the Newport district office. In all, 564 persons had reportedly left home, including 176 applicants and 383 members of applicants households. In 113 cases the move was not accepted as genuine and in another 81 the person was treated as a member of the household despite having left, making a total of 194 cases in which the allowance was not increased. In 158 of these the applicants appealed, 80 successfully. Thus, out of the 564 cases, 114 got no increase. The commonest reasons given for leaving were the refusal of an earning son or daughter to contribute as much as the Board expected (126), the refusal of a parent to keep his son or daughter on the amount the Boards allowance enabled them to give him (99), family quarrel (90) and the turning out of the house of an earning member by the applicant because of the effect of the earnings on the latters allowance (53).
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The evidence, fragmentary as it is, leaves no room for doubt that, over the whole of Great Britain, thousands of families were broken up. The problem was perceived as significant in only a minority of districts, mainly in Lancashire, north-east England and parts of Scotland and south Wales. Even if this perception was correct, however, it remains true that in some of the larger cities several hundred families were broken up each year, at least partly through the effects of the household means test.

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Leaving home was the visible tip of an iceberg of discontent caused by the means test. For every family that broke up, whether amicably or not, there were hundreds in which relationships were strained without reaching breaking point. But it was the political pressure generated by concern for the minority of families which did break up, together with wartime administrative problems, that was to lead to the virtual abolition of the household means test by the Determination of Needs Act 1941.

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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