The Cabinet and Unemployment

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21179, 1 June 1934, Page 10

The Cabinet and Unemployment

It is gratifying to hear from the Prime Minister that the Cabinet is now conducting a " thorough inves- " tigation " into the unemployment situation and the measures being taken to cope with it. Such an investigation is long overdue. The present methods of unemployment relief, being the product of three years of experiment and hasty improvisation, are necessarily uncoordinated and unsystematic. The lime seems to have come to introduce more order and uniformity, to define more clearly the principles upon which unemployment relief is based. The reform most immediately necessar i£ the introduction of a uniform national seal.: of relief. At present there is an appreciably higher scale in the four metropolitan areas than in the smaller towns and country districts, a state of affairs which the Unemployment Board has admitted to be wrong and which no member of the Government has successfully defended. It should surely be the object of an enlightened unemployment policy

to prevent any drift to the large centres of population; yet the unemployment figures seem to show that the present polic is inducing such a drift. The second reform in order of urgency is ? simplification of the administrative machinery of unemployment relief. The position of the Unemployment Board is, to say the least, equivocal. Nominally, it is independent of political control. In practice, its policy seems to be subject to spasmodic interference from the Minister for Employment and from the Government ns a whole. It is seldom possible to assign responsibility for any change in unemployment policy, a situation which is unfair to the Government, to the Unemployment Board, and to the public. One of the axioms of sound administration is that the responsibility for administrative acts should be clearly located. It is also desirable that fewer government departments should be concerned with unemployment and that the Unemployment Board should acquire a larger permanent staff, both advisory and administrative. The present arrangement, whereby the work of the board is parcelled out among departments, cannot make for the greatest efficiency and means, as the National Expenditure Commission pointed out, that there can be no proper assessment of administrative costs. N' doubt the Cabinet will give attention to possible schemes for stimulating or creating employment and to the advisability of raising an internal loan to finance such schemes. But if it does this before grappling with the administrative problems we have briefly outlined, it will be putting the cart before the horse. It is much easier to draw up schemes on paper than to find the men and the administrative machinery for carrying them out.