ABSTRACT
The household means test is a direct inheritance from the Poor Law and was not discarded when those already under it on transitional payments were transferred to the Unemployment Assistance Board. Its persistence is an acknowledgment of the fact that unemployment assistance is analogous to relief. There is no doubt at all that the household means test should be abolished. The fact of the Minority Report's emphatic opposition to any form of means test is not relevant to-day. For, as has already been argued, the situation was entirely different before the UAB existed. There was no possibility then, as there is now, of allowances being increased, consequent on the operation of the means test. To many people the means test is completely identified with the investigating officer. As has been said, much of the original hostility to the household means test was "caused by the method of administration rather than by the idea of the test itself".
