Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 in the context of "Thomas Malthus"

In English and British history, poor relief refers to government and ecclesiastical action to relieve poverty, particularly before the Liberal welfare reforms beginning in 1906. Beginning in 1551, the Parliaments of England and of Great Britain and the United Kingdom made legal provision for government and ecclesiastical funds to be used to alleviate extreme poverty. The Poor Relief Act 1601 established the system that would operate without major changes until the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, which reorganized the system, aiming to curb abuses and cut overall spending on relief.

Beginning in the late 19th century, changing attitudes to poverty and the widening of the franchise to include at first some and then all working-class people through a series of Representation of the People Acts led to the development of the first predecessors of the modern welfare state. Between 1906 and 1914, the Liberal Party created a suite of basic welfare programs that reduced dependence on the Poor Law system but did not abolish it. The vestiges of the system remained until 1948 with the passage of the Attlee ministry’s National Assistance Act, which transferred non-National Insurance poor relief efforts to the new National Assistance programme. Today, Income Support provides financial resources for those with little or no income.

In Britain and Ireland, a workhouse (Welsh: tloty, lit. "poor-house") was a total institution where those unable to support themselves financially were offered accommodation and employment. In Scotland, they were usually known as poorhouses. The earliest known use of the term workhouse is from 1631, in an account by the mayor of Abingdon reporting that "we have erected within our borough a workhouse to set poorer people to work".

The origins of the workhouse can be traced to the Statute of Cambridge 1388, which attempted to address the labour shortages following the Black Death in England by restricting the movement of labourers, and ultimately led to the state becoming responsible for the support of the poor. However, mass unemployment following the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the introduction of new technology to replace agricultural workers in particular, and a series of bad harvests, meant that by the early 1830s the established system of poor relief was proving to be unsustainable. The New Poor Law of 1834 attempted to reverse the economic trend by discouraging the provision of relief to anyone who refused to enter a workhouse. Some Poor Law authorities hoped to run workhouses at a profit by utilising the free labour of their inmates. Most were employed on tasks such as breaking stones, crushing bones to produce fertiliser, or picking oakum using a large metal nail known as a spike.

A poor law union was a geographical territory, and early local government unit, in Great Britain and Ireland.

Poor law unions existed in England and Wales from 1834 to 1930 for the administration of poor relief. Prior to the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 the administration of the English Poor Laws was the responsibility of the vestries of individual parishes, which varied widely in their size, populations, financial resources, rateable values and requirements. From 1834 the parishes were grouped into unions, jointly responsible for the administration of poor relief in their areas and each governed by a board of guardians. A parish large enough to operate independently of a union was known as a poor law parish. Collectively, poor law unions and poor law parishes were known as poor law districts. The grouping of the parishes into unions caused larger centralised workhouses to be built to replace smaller facilities in each parish. Poor law unions were later used as a basis for the delivery of registration from 1837, and sanitation outside urban areas from 1875. Poor law unions were abolished by the Local Government Act 1929, which transferred responsibility for public assistance to county and county borough councils.