A cornerstone of 19th century welfare reform, the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, had a devastating impact on child health and rural life expectancy in England and Wales, says a new study. The authors ...

As the Budget approaches, Labour must consign notions of the ‘undeserving’ poor to history. History, as the saying goes, doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. As we approach the Labour ...

When then-President Clinton signed the 1996 welfare reform act, most people–regardless of whether they thought it was a godsend or a disaster–believed it signaled “the end of welfare as we know it.” ...

The new poor laws could create just such an outcome. In this respect, they are exactly like the old poor laws — even down to small particulars. Last fall, fusion mayor Rudolph Giuliani declared war on ...

During the colonial times, vagrancy laws were widely enacted in many European colonies, including the British Raj. In the erstwhile Bengal, the Raj enacted the Vagrancy Act, 1943 (Bengal Act), which ...