The Maintenance of Pauper Lunatics

Abstract

The President of the Local Government Board received a deputation from the County Councils Association in reference to the growing burden imposed upon the rates by the increase of the number of persons confined in lunatic asylums. The deputation consisted of Sir John Hibbert, Lord Thring, Mr. Hobhouse, M.P., Sir E. Edgeumbe (Dorset), Mr. M. F. Blackiston (Clerk to the Staffordshire County Council), Mr. F. C. Hulton (Clerk to the Lancashire County Council), Mr. C. B. Hodgson (Clerk to the Cumberland County Council), Mr. Trevor Edwards (Solicitor to the West Riding County Council), and the Rev C. Royds, Mr. J. Brierley, Mr. B. Carver, and Mr. T. Scholfield, members of the Lancashire Asylums Board. The deputation recommended that the grant of 4s. a week at present given to Boards of Guardians to pay for pauper lunatics in County Asylums, Registered Hospitals, and Licensed Houses should also be given for chronic pauper lunatics (whom they defined as harmless lunatics), who are maintained in workhouse wards under special regulations and to the satisfaction of the Commissioners in Lunacy; that, as it is not desirable that idiots (idiots and imbeciles from birth or early age) should be treated in a lunatic asylum, the 4s. grant should, wherever idiots are kept at the public expense, be payable in regard to such idiots to the authority maintaining them to the satisfaction of the Commissioners in Lunacy; that each County Council should be required to appoint visitors of those idiots in respect of whom the 4s. grant is made, and who are kept in places other than lunatic asylums; and that it is not desirable to express an opinion on the question of extending the 4s. grant to idiots boarded out or maintained at home. Mr. Chaplin, in reply, said he was not prepared to give a definite answer as to whether he could advise the Government to bring in a Bill to give effect to the recommendations. He required time to consider the matter more fully, and especially to enquire how the Boards of Guardians throughout the country would be affected if the proposals of the County Councils Association became law.