Preliminary Programme

At the top of child poverty leagueare Denmark and Finnland with child poverty rates of less than 3 per cent. At the bottom are the USA and Mexiko, with child poverty rates of more than 20 per cent.
Over than the last 10 years period for weich comperable data are available, the proportion of children living in poverty has risen in 17 out of OECD countries.
Higher goverment spending on family and social benefits is clearly associated with lower child poverty rates.
Four out of 13 OECD countries for which 1990s data are avialable saw a decline in earnings for the lowest –paid 25 per cent of farthers. Seven countries saw a decline in earnings for the lowest- paid 10 per cent.
On average, government interventions reduce by 40 per cent the rates of child poverty that would theoretically result from market forces being left to themselves.
Government in countries with the world’s lowest level of child poverty reduce market poverty by 80 per cent or more. Governments in the countries with world’s highest poverty rates reduce market poverty by only 0 per cent to 15 per cent.
Variation in govenrment policy appears to account for the most of variation in child poverty levels between OECD countries.
Int he most countries , increases in social spending over the decade of the 1990s appear to have been allocated mainly to pensions and to health care.
Poverty levels are result of complex and sometimes difficult- to-predict interplay between government policy, family efforts, labour market conditions, and the wider forces of social change. It is therefore essential to have an up-to-date and evidence- based awareness of how government policy plays out int he real world.
Over the last two centuries, much progress have been made towards the idea that every child ought to have the chance to be all that he or she could be, and that the opportunities of life ought not to be determined by the circumstances of birth.
But the evidence of both social statistics and everyday experience indicates that those who grow up in poverty are at the marked and measurable disadvantage. No-one would suggest that this is in some way the fault of children concerned. High rates of child poverty are therefore an unambiguous contradiction of equality and opportunity. (Show less)

In all theories that have sought to explain the causal factors responsible for major outbreaks of popular protest in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain, poverty and the policies deployed to alleviate and/or eliminate it achieve top billing. Conversely, the historiography of the impact of popular protests upon social policy formation and subsequent experiences of poverty is virtually non existent, save for several analyses of the impact of the 1795 national wave of food riots on poor relief policies (Wells, 1988). This paper seeks to begin address this imbalance through an examination of the impact of the quasi-insurrectionary ‘Swing Riots’ of 1830-1, a series of overt and covert protests which after starting in rural East Kent in the summer of 1830 spread throughout the rural south, Midlands and East Anglia in November and December. It will be shown that not only were rapid – and often pre-emptive – revisions made to parochial policy but that the response to Swing was both innovative and, despite the importance of local precedents, wide-ranging. It will also be shown that these local innovations were, in part, responsible for several key legislative developments in rural social policy before the imposition of the New Poor Law between 1835 and 1836. (Show less)

During the last twenty years historians of social policy have increasingly been concerned with attempts to examine the history of welfare provision from the standpoint of welfare recipients. However, such studies have focused overwhelmingly upon twentieth-century welfare with few studies examining the pivotal poor laws of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century (though see Lees 1998). Building on previous work (Shave 2005), this paper will examine the importance of the agency through the frames of both the supposedly homogenous ‘poor’ and the individual before considering the archival possibilities in attempts to glean insights into the experiences of welfare recipients during the poor laws. The paper will then reconstruct the biographies of eight parishioners from the Dorset parish of Motcombe for which detailed archives have survived. By systematically tracing the lives of individuals, this examination will not only reveal the diverse range of experiences of ‘the poor’ but will also highlight the complex fluctuations produced through the negotiation between individuals, families and the parish throughout the different stages of their life-course(s).


References

Lees, L.H. (1998), The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Shave, S. A. (2005), The Spaces of Individual Experience: Labouring Lives and the Poor Laws in Rural Dorset, 1790-c.1840 (Undergraduate Dissertation, School of Geography, University of Southampton). (Show less)