Introduction

Chapters Two and Three considered in detail government responses to the needs of sick and frail elderly people in the period 1939-48. The 1948 National Assistance Act has been mentioned, but as yet no attempt has been made to outline any of the detailed negotiations which took place between civil servants, politicians, representatives of local authority associations and of pressure groups, and which helped to decide the eventual content of this legislation, in so far as it influenced local authority welfare provision for elderly people. Section 21 of the 1948 Act stated that “it shall be the duty of every local authority … to provide residential accommodation for persons who by reason of age, infirmity or any other circumstances are in need of care and attention which is not otherwise available to them”. Other sections of the Act dealt with how such residential accommodation was to be financed (exchequer contributions, charges, and so on), contributions to voluntary organisations, the registration of old people's homes and the compulsory removal of old people from the community.

Why did the legislation take this form and what alternatives were excluded? Did this legislation provide real gains for elderly people? Or should one accept the view, argued by Brown, that the welfare services in Part III of the Act “were not the product of clear thinking on the needs of the groups they were to serve so much as the almost casual outcome of the tidying-up of the social service scene after the major reorganisation had taken place’‘(Brown, 1972)?

Aneurin Bevan (Minister of Health, 1945-51) had been more positive than Brown about the 1948 National Assistance Act. He described it as “a coping stone” placed on previous legislation (Hansard, House of Commons, vol 443, 24 November 1947, col 1063). It is therefore necessary to consider in the first instance the relationship of the more ‘famous’ Acts to the 1948 Act insofar as they were also concerned with government intervention into the lives of elderly people and their families.

The 1946 National Insurance Act and the 1946 National Health Service Act

Background

There are numerous descriptive accounts (Fraser, 1973; Bruce, 1961) of the growth of social policy in Britain which chart the growth of factory and public health legislation, state education, council housing, the social security system, health service provision and the personal social services in the period prior to 1939.