A New Development in Concern for the Family

Beginning on the sixth of August 1946, two and a half million mothers in Britain will have the right to claim from the British Government financial assistance at the rate of five shillings weekly for each of them, in view of their care of four and a half million children. On that day the family allowances law, which the British Parliament enacted in June 1945, comes into force.

This law provides that every family in Britain has the right to receive a weekly grant of five shillings for each child still under school age, except the firstborn or an only child, regardless of the family's financial position. What the country will spend annually to this end is estimated at about 57 million pounds sterling, in addition to another two million pounds to meet the costs of administering the scheme. The State Treasury will bear all these expenses, unlike the case in the other schemes—such as the social insurance scheme and the scheme for employment insurance and public health—whose resources are fed from the British insurance fund and from the deductions imposed upon workers and employers. In other words, the expenses will be a new burden upon the shoulders of the British taxpayer.

Further assistance will be secured to families when the work of providing meals and milk for children in the schools is extended more widely than at present, for the authorities are considering giving this kind of assistance to all children in schools that receive financial aid from the Government. The cost of this will be about 60 million pounds a year, also to be paid by the State Treasury.

The essential purpose behind these financial grants is that the family as a whole should reap abundant benefit from them, not that the sum of five shillings a week should be spent upon the child on whose account the grant is paid. A child, as this law defines him, is one whose age is under the upper limit of the compulsory school age, or one who is above that limit but is still receiving full-time instruction in a school, or is in the course of vocational training, until the thirty-first of July following his sixteenth birthday.

This means, for example, that if there are four children aged 17, 13, 11, and 9 years respectively, the child who is seventeen years old is not taken into account; there remain three children who meet the conditions the law lays down, and two of them receive the grants—for by "the first child" is meant not the firstborn but the eldest among those under the age limit, and he therefore has no right to take the grant. His two younger brothers take it, on the understanding that it is to be used for the benefit of the family as a whole. And when the elder of the two younger brothers reaches the upper limit of the legal age, the youngest alone becomes entitled to the grant.

Every family in Britain has the right to receive these grants for its children under the legal age, on condition that the husband is a British subject born in the United Kingdom. But the Minister of National Insurance, the authority responsible for administering the scheme and executing the law, has the right to widen the scope of the scheme so that the other families living in Britain may benefit from it regardless of their nationalities. If, for example, a lady born in London marries a man born in South Africa and the couple lives in Britain, she has the right to take these financial grants for each of her children who are under the legal age. British subjects born outside the United Kingdom—an Australian family, for example—become entitled to take these grants after one year's residence in Britain. An American family has the right to take the grants after three years' residence in Britain. And British women who have lost their nationality by marriage to foreign husbands have the right to enjoy this law as well, just as if they were still British.

The law provides other terms for the benefit of families in special circumstances. If the head of the family is out of work and receives a financial grant because of illness or because there is no work for him, his first child, who would be excluded in ordinary cases, has the right to take the grant.

This family grant is the mother's right; but for ease of execution and for the convenience of the parents, either the father or the mother may draw the sum from any post office. These grants can be paid on the Tuesday of every week, and they can also be claimed by means of a special book of weekly orders that serves for a period of six months.

The important point in the matter is that the family allowances law was enacted by the Coalition Government; and moreover, throughout the last thirty years during which it was discussed [...]

and raised several times in Parliament, meeting supporters and opponents, it was never once a subject of dispute between the parties, for it met supporters and opponents from all the political parties represented in Parliament. But the name of Eleanor Rathbone will remain forever linked with this law in the register of British laws—she, the champion of all causes, the small among them and the great.

It was she who in 1918 called a small group of workers in the social field to a meeting at which they demanded that woman must be made equal with man in wages and work, and said that this could not be achieved unless society considered itself partly responsible for the rearing of children. And it was she who, as one of the independent Members of Parliament, the deputies for the union of the English universities, fought for the cause without interruption or weariness, because she believed sincerely in its rightness. Eleanor Rathbone died at the beginning of this year, and her adversaries and opponents in the realization of this scheme were at ease, thanking Divine Providence for having granted her life until she saw the work that absorbed her lifetime fulfilled at the last.