¹ Thomson, D.Workhouse to nursing home: residential care of the elderly people in England since 1840. Ageing and Society, 3 (1983), 43–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

² e.g. Townsend, P.Poverty in the United Kingdom. Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979, 788–9.Google Scholar

³ This breakdown of the English Poor Law system is discussed more fully in Part II of Thomson, D., ‘Provision for the Elderly in England, 1830–1908’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1980.Google Scholar

⁴ Calculated from a selection of relief lists, held in various English County Record Offices, in which are recorded the age and sex of each Poor Law beneficiary alongside the amounts of money given week by week.

⁵ Expenditure of the Poor Rates is detailed in the Annual Reports of the central Poor Law authorities – the Poor Law Commissioners (1835–1847), the Poor Law Board (1847–1871), and the Local Government Board (from 1871). These reports were tabled in Parliament, and appear in the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP).

⁶ All references to money in the period prior to 1945 are given in the old notation of pounds, shillings and pence, while the new decimal pounds and pence are employed in discussion of the years since 1945.

⁷ Reworking of the original published materials necessitated the making of a few estimates and assumptions in some instances in order to fill gaps in the data. It has not been possible to detail these in a paper of this length, and it is hoped to expand upon the methods devised here in a future publication.

⁸ e.g. Dr Edward Smith (Source E in the Appendix) treated all persons over the age of 10 as full adults, all under 10 as half-adults, while A. L. Bowley (Source K) considered children to have demands which averaged 0.55 of those of an adult.

⁹ In 1966, e.g. rents paid by the SBC on behalf of persons ‘of pensionable age’ averaged £1.50, at a time when the Retirement Pension was £4: Ministry of Social Security, Report… for the year 1966, Cmd 3338, HMSO, London, 1967, pp. 54–6.Google Scholar

In November 1978 rent payments made on behalf of elderly beneficiaries averaged £6 a week when the Retirement Pension was £17.50 a week single: Supplementary Benefits Commission, Annual Report for the year ending 31 December 1978, Cmd 7725, HMSO, London, 1979, p. 101.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Wroe, D. C. L. ‘The elderly’, Social Trends for the year 1973, HMSO, London, Vol. 4, p. 32.Google Scholar

¹¹ Wroe’s figures for 1971–2 show average expenditure at about 25% of Retirement Pension.

¹² Health expenditure upon elderly persons is calculated from Department of Health and Social Security figures which appear in Social Trends for the year 1982, HMSO, London, Vol. 12, p. 142.Google Scholar An allowance for welfare expenditure has been made in line with Wroe’s estimates for 1971–2.

¹³ Calculated from Pauper Application and Report Books, Ampthill Union: Bedfordshire County Record Office class PUAR.

¹⁴ Out-Relief Application and Report Books, Bedford Union: Bedfordshire County Record Office class PUBR.

¹⁵ Relief Order Books, Cambridge Union: Cambridgeshire County Record Office class G/C/RA.

¹⁶ The Household Survey cards generated during the survey of London, one card of detail from each household visited, are preserved in the Library of the London School of Economics, and it was an analysis of these which showed that elderly persons living alone regularly received 6s a week from the Poor Law in addition to the 10s Old Age Pension.

¹⁷ Thomson, , ‘Provision for the elderly’, op. cit. Pt I.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Calculated from the tables on the sources of income of the households in which the majority of the elderly lived – that is, households consisting of one or two elderly persons only.

¹⁹ Figures on the numbers of school pupils by age and on public expenditure upon various aspects of education in 1979 are given in Social Trends for the year 1982, HMSO, London, Vol. 12, Chapter 3, and an estimate of spending per child was made from these.

²⁰ Social Trends for the year 1982, ibid. p. 142.

²¹ The FES does not detail social security incomes by numbers of children. The figure of £2.25 a week has been estimated by comparing the social security incomes of households consisting of a man and woman alone, and a man, woman and three children: the assumption made is that the differences are the result of the presence of children.

²² The FES details the income and expenditure of a set of households which are ranged according to their gross incomes. The numbers of elderly persons in the households of each income group are also recorded, so that it is possible to calculate how elderly persons, their incomes and their expenditures, are dispersed across the whole range of households in any year.

²³ Expenditure-plus-savings was chosen because it appears to give the most accurate representation of the actual resources of British households. ‘Savings’ here includes all the items of ‘Other payments recorded’ which appear to be of a savings nature – e.g. life assurance and pension fund contributions, sickness and accident insurance, subscriptions to Friendly Societies, and ‘savings and investments’.

²⁴ e.g. Fiegehen, G. C. et al. Poverty and Progress in Britain, 1953–73. Cambridge, 1977Google Scholar; McClements, L. D.The Economics of Social Security. Heinemann, London, 1978.Google Scholar

²⁵ Various indices of the current resources of the nation exist, each having been devised for different purposes and each incorporating its own set of limitations. A single one of these, the Gross National Product at market prices, has been chosen here in this illustration of the main features of a complex argument which is being outlined in brief. No special claim is being made for the appropriateness of this index before all others. Payments to the elderly have been calculated from the detail of social security expenditure which is recorded annually in the Annual Abstract of Statistics: GNP figures are drawn from the annual series National Income and Expenditure.

²⁶ The Phillips Committee of 1954 reported health and welfare expenditure upon the elderly to amount to £50m per annum: Report of the Committee on the Economic and Financial Problems of Provision for Old Age, 1954, p. 13. This figure of £50m, amounting to 0.2% of GNP, seems suspiciously low in view of the fact that by the early 1960s other official estimates of spending upon the health and welfare services for the elderly put the amount at about 1.0% of GNP: see Wroe, , op. cit.Google Scholar

²⁷ Calculated by multiplying the average health expenditure per elderly person, as reported by the DHSS for 1979, by the number of persons of pensionable age: Social Trends, Vol. 12, 1982, p. 142. To this figure was added an estimate of the portion of all welfare expenditure which was directed towards services for the elderly. The total figure for the spending on welfare services by the local authorities was drawn from the Annual Abstract of Statistics: the portion of this due to the elderly was calculated along the lines suggested by Wroe’s findings, although allowances were also made for the increase in the size of the elderly population between the date of Wroe’s study (1971–2) and 1979.