Liberal Reform 1906 1914
Liberal reform 1906-1914 The huge scale of the Liberal partys victory in the 1906 general election guaranteed many new faces among the ranks of Liberal MPs, in favour of change in the field of social welfare. Between the years 1906 and 1914, the Liberals took steps to improve the health standards and the living and working conditions of the lower class. ... The effectiveness of Liberal rule on these matters is not clear, as much of the legislation introduced to solve poverty problems, can be argued to be unsuccessful at what it was intended to achieve. The first task undertaken by the new Liberal government was the welfare of children. The issue of malnourished children had increasingly surfaced since the extension of rate aid to all schools and creation of Local Education Authorities in 1902, so the issue of children too hungry or generally debilitated was well documented by 1906. ... To solve this problem the government introduced the Education Act of 1906. ... By 1911, less than a third of all education authorities were using rates to support school meal provision and it had taken until 1914 for the Board of Education to make such provision compulsory. ... The attempts made to improve child welfare were eventually successful, but the time taken to enforce all the legislation means the laws passed only helped improve conditions for some children during the period from 1906 to1914. ... By 1914 there were 970 000 claimants, costing the Exchequer £3. ... Nevertheless, it can be argued that they were very slow to reform, as the first payments were not made until the summer of 1912 for unemployment and the beginning of 1913 for health. ... The explosion of trade union activity from 1910-1914 reflects the failure of the Liberals to deal with contemporary social problems. In the whole, working people were unimpressed by Liberal reforms; the decline of wages and the increase in job insecurity seemed to outweigh the benefits of any welfare legislation. ... The fact that there were huge exclusions to Liberal legislation adds to the idea that Liberal rule was not successful with dealing with poverty and need. ... Therefore, Liberal legislation was successful on a small scale considering it did not effectively improve the poverty levels of the whole nation. Lastly, it can be argued that the Liberal rule was very successful in terms of the scale of task with which the new government was faced. The fact that the House of Lords was mainly Conservative meant that the Liberal legislation programme was regularly opposed, because Conservatives regarded Liberal policies as confiscation to property rights and a threat to any idea of individual responsibility. ... Liberal legislation between the years of 1906 to 1914 laid the foundations of a welfare state.