Has Poor Relief Declined in Jamaica? a Preliminary Investigation

HAS POOR RELIEF DECLINED IN JAMAICA? A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION Philip D. Osei Abstract This paper studied the changing fortunes of Poor Relief, a prototype social security benefit that was officially instituted in Jamaica in 1886, and managed by the local authorities. It was discovered that although a number of public inquiries have been conducted into the conditions in which poor people lived, in general, and into the management of poor relief in particular, management of the policy did not keep abreast with developments in modern management. Poor relief has been surpassed by other politically visible modern programmes of poverty reduction. A general deterioration in economic fortunes of the country has also had a negative impact on the supply and real value of public investments in poor relief. Poor relief as a public programme, therefore, requires a serious review. INTRODUCTION Poor relief is a prototype social security benefit that is paid to eligible persons under the law in Jamaica. It was administered as part of the institutions of local government transplanted by the British colonialists from the metropolis to the Caribbean. In spite of its presence in the region for over a century, there is a paucity of academic research on the subject. The most important academic research on poor relief is that done by L P Fletcher (1992) on the system inherited from nineteenth century Barbados, tracing the evolution and administration of the policy from 1900 to 1969. For Jamaica too, poor relief has been an important plank of social and local governance policies for over one and a quarter centuries. It enjoyed a glorified status under the Elizabethan parochial system of vestry and justices, but today it has become very unpopular although poverty reduction, per se, has assumed a new importance in national and international development policy. In reaction to changing international perspectives on poverty as a social ill that needs to be eradicated, the Jamaican government has made some policy responses by enacting a National Poverty Eradication Programme in 1997. This paper looks at the changing circumstances of the institution of poor relief, its stagnation and its supersedence by modem programmes of poverty reduction. The term 'decline' will be defined in terms of deterioration or depreciation in the value of national budgetary allocations to poor relief, as well as an increase in the number of recipients over one accounting period (normally one year). There have been changing international attitudes towards poverty, whereas local responses towards poor relief have continued to be ambivalent and, to some extent, hostile. Ministerial pronouncements, especially the one by Arnold Bertram, the Jamaican Minister of Local Government, Youth and Community Development, at a recent UNDP- Habitat-sponsored Regional Seminar on Innovative Approaches to Local Development and Management, held in Montego Bay September 3-6,2000, have been highly critical of local government capabilities based on their limited resources. Bertram's speech was almost negative in its stance towards poor relief, but somehow positive on a better approach to poverty eradication. Bertram decried the welfarist policies of the local authorities and encouraged the parishes to adopt a developmental policy approach to local governance. Later on in November 2000 he revealed that were it not for the loans the government provided to fix roads in St Thomas, for example, council revenues would not be able to fix one single road. Other parishes, including St Mary and Portland, were also noted as lacking the economic activity to pay the kind of rates to maintain a local authority (Daily Observer, November 23,2000: 1&3). For local authorities that are struggling to provide basic services, huge increases in the welfare bill are highly likely to pose an undesirable burden for such poor parishes. It is important to find out how widely the minister's perspective on poor relief is shared by the public. This research investigates the reasons for disillusionment with poor relief and assesses how effective the management and impact of poor relief have been historically. It also examined how regime changes and shifts in development ideology affected the volume of relief given since the country's adoption of the neo-liberal Structural Adjustment Programmes in the 1980s. It investigates why poor relief, of the type delivered through the Parish Councils, has fallen out of favour although other poverty reduction strategies and enhanced human welfare reforms have remained high on the agenda locally, and also on the international development agenda. Finally, the research examines what, if any, plausible alternative policies are being planned to replace the increasingly unpopular poor relief as delivered by local government authorities fi-om a central government standpoint. 2 CARIBBEAN AND INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES ON POVERTY Poverty is a complex problem that is in part, at least, a product of the impact of political processes and policy development. This is Pete Alcock's view of the poverty problematic. Poverty is described as a political or moral concept in which case it requires public action (Alcock 1997: 6). According to Henry George, the American social reformer of the nineteenth century, there is in nature no justification for poverty (1 885). Poverty is, therefore, a prescriptive concept that suggests an unacceptable state of affairs that requires policy action. Poverty has been defined in different ways by both academics and policy makers. For example, it has been broadly defined to encompass the broader notion of relative deprivation within a society of changing norms and customs (Alcock 1997: 8; Townsend 1979). In deed, the World Bank (1994) believed that poverty declined in countries that pursued a two-part strategy. The first relates to the promotion of broad- based growth and the use of intensive labour, the asset that the poor have in abundance. The second strategy involves using public expenditure and institutions to offer education, health care, and other social services to the poor. The bank believed that a poverty reduction strategy for Jamaica needed to do both, paying particular attention to promoting labour-intensive growth. This suggestion was made because growth had been "so slow in the past two decades" (World Bank 1994: 14). Patrick Watt of Oxfam Great Britain (2000) believes that by delivering growth with equity, countries and the international community would be making the right responses towards eradicating poverty. Watt's book, entitled bbSocialInvestment and Economic growth: A Strategy to Eradicate Poverty", in concert with this lie of thought, therefore makes three main recommendations: 1. To achieve rapid and substantial poverty eradication, public investment in good- quality basic universal social provision was crucial. 2. Governments should make judicious use of all available resources - both local and foreign - to promote pro-poor labour-intensive growth and, 3. Pro-poor rural development policies should be promoted by ensuring investment in physical and communications infrastructure, stable prices for basic foodstuffs, access to credit and savings facilities and access to relevant technologies (Watt 2000: 9-10). Similarly, several attempts have been made to theorise poverty according to its perceived causes. There is an 'underclass model' that is generally discussed in the context of a broader pathological approach to deprivation (Murray 1990, 1994). The underclass thesis is a pathological model of social causation that sees poverty as the product of individual weakness or fecklessness. In line with the belief that informs it the underclass model posits a policy response that looks at the individual and tries to change attitudes (Alcock 1997: 36). Diametrically opposed to this view, is the structuralist perspective that sees poverty as the product of dynamic social forces. Some structuralist theorists believe that the development of capitalism occasioned the phenomenon of poverty. Capitalism and the great enclosures of centuries ago in Britain that excluded peasants fiom the land have been considered as the forces that triggered off poverty. At the practical level, and based on these explanations of the probable causes of poverty, policy responses have been pursued in various countries to combat it. For example, as far as public policy is concerned, Britain had its poor relief and the present welfare state benefits, and Jamaica has its poor relief programmes that cost the tax-paying public millions of hard-earned dollars every financial year. This does not mean, however, that it is only this definition that has informed practice in these countries. Other competing perspectives have prevailed depending on which party is in power. Reference is being made to alternating regimes of social democratic and conservative ideologies that have imposed their own idiosyncratic interpretations of poverty. If poverty persists despite all these efforts, and if the victims are not to blame, then the failings of antipoverty policies must be sought in the backyard of agencies and institutions responsible for making them work (Alcock 1997: 39). The structuralist view does not focus on individuals as victims of their own fortunes, but on the structural forces that shape those fortunes. Ferge and Millar (1987) refer to the 'dynamics of deprivation', a term that draws attention to the changing context in which poverty or deprivation is experienced. There are also the relativist

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