ABSTRACT
Social assistance The modern British social security system has its origins in the Elizabethan and Victorian Poor Laws (de Schweinitz 1961; George 1973; Novak 1988; Dean 1991: ch. 3; McKay and Rowlingson 1999). The underlying principle of relief under the Poor Law has provided the basis of what is now called social assistance. Poor relief was never a right. The local parish, the Poor Law Unions and the Public Assistance Committees that succeeded them were charged with responsibility for controlling vagrancy and relieving destitution. The means by which they did so was left in part to their discretion, though such discretion became subject increasingly to central government direction. Social assistance emerged from the Poor Law as a result of two developments: first, a gradual erosion of the infamous nineteenth-century workhouse test in favour of 'outrelief' (money payments to paupers in their own homes); second, the development of systematic means-testing (standardised methods of calculating relief by comparing people's subsistence needs with their assessed means).
