Relief Work and its Results:

In 1887 20,000 men were generally out of work at some time or another during the winter.In 1893 ... 102,000 heads of families, half of them skilled, half unskilled, were out of employment, as well as 150,000 young men and women. ... In 1906, a year of prosperity, some 20,000 men were actually employed on relief works in London, while the number of applicants was well over 45,000, i.e., in 20 years the numbers of enemployed had doubled. [Why?].

Evidence by W.A.Bailward before the Poor Law Commission of 1905:
The natural result was that befor long 'a day from the Vestry' came to be looked upon as a matter of right and its refusal as injustice. Crowds gathered round the Vestry every winter waiting for work and gradually losing their hold upon the open labour market, At a meeting of the Vestry in 1895 a young man complained that 'he had been up every day for 10 weeks, but had not been taken on once', and he was one of many. Almost every man capable of work who applied to the Charity Organisation Society or the Guardians had had one or more days from the Vestry, and a generation has grown up which has learned to look upon it as a right.

Evidence of the Bishop of Stepney:
This is a plan which obviously rather creates a class of unemployed. ... In several boroughs there is, or until recently was, a real danger of a class of permanently unemployed expecting winter by winter to subsist on doles of municipal work.

SW 331-332.