Under this Law parishes were no longer to be involved in administering the Poor Law except in the collection of Poor rates that were to finance it. All administration was to be centrally controlled by a Poor Law Commission of three full-time members, who had the power to group parishes into Unions and to supervise the actions of the Boards of Guardians that would administer these Unions. A workhouse test was to be applied by which the able-bodied paupers could be refused outdoor relief and force to enter the Union workhouse, where men, women and children all lived in separate wards, wives separated from their husbands and both from their children. In fact the Bill as finally passed represented a whittling-down of the very strict and wide-reaching powers proposed for the central authority by the Commission’s most vigorous members: Nassau Senior, first holder of the Chair of Political Economy at Oxford, and Edwin Chadwick, a Manchester-born lawyer. Nevertheless, it was attacked by the ageing Radical, William Cobbett, as a “Poor Man’s Robbery Bill”. The workhouses “would be so many military stations” and the Commissioners’ instructions “would possibly be an attempt to reconcile the people to potatoes and sea-weed as diet.” The Times, too, attacked the Bill but because of the centralised system of control it proposed. “Whether this bill will pass into law we cannot tell,” wrote its editor. “We know that, should it be carried, it will disgrace the statute-book which contains the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights.”

Most newspapers, however, supported the Bill; so did both Houses of Parliament; and so, probably, did a large majority of the population. Poverty had grown into a national disgrace. It had to be alleviated, not only for humanitarian reasons but from fear of what the Poor would do if nothing was done for them. Under the Old Poor Law, however, the alleviation had been carried out at the parish level, face-to-face between giver and receiver, generating personal relationships of bitterness and hatred as well as appreciation and thankfulness. Ratepayers no longer wanted to know to whom and why they were giving Public Charity through their payment of the Poor Rate. Leaving aside considerations of cost, it was preferable that Relief should be administered somewhere out-of-sight, as it is today, by someone paid to do it. This person would enjoy the power given him over others less fortunate than himself, whilst rubbing shoulders with misery would merely callous the skin of his own inhumanity. So Oliver Twist’s Mr. Bumble was created; but since most people rarely met him, this did not matter; and if it cost less money, so much the better for everyone, except, the Poor.