Complusory Billeting

Because of the heavy bombing raids in urban cities and the threat of invasion, in 1938, Britain instated a policy called compulsory billeting, or the evacuation of a group of people from one area to another. So to protect the people of Britain, Sir John Anderson came up with a policy that divided the country into three areas: the areas where people would be leaving, neutral areas, and the areas people would be moving to. Anderson decided that the children from urban cities should move to rural areas, and then made the people of the rural areas house these evacuees. Many of the officials that regulated this evacuation were volunteers and were not paid, and the billetors, or the people that housed the evacuees, were paid just a small amount for every child they took in. Although housing was not expensive because of this, the evacuees had to get their own food.
But life in the rural areas was very different from life in the cities, and the people had to get used to each other. The urban children had lice and other infections that arose from living so close to one another, and many of them were not used to the luxuries available in the more spacious rural homes. It was a new world for them. To the billetors, these urban children were unhygienic and completely appalling.
While this billeting was a good idea, it had a few flaws. The government shouldn't have made it compulsory. People should neither be forced to leave their homes, nor should they be forced to take people in especially in a democratic country. They should have just instated the policy and let people choose whether they would rather risk their chances in an urban city or move to a safer area. It is like a natural disaster warning today; if you are warned of an approaching hurricane, you can either choose to evacuate or stay. Even though evacuating would be safer, no one can make you leave. Also, if the government was going to force this policy on people, they should have been more supportive of it. More money should have been left to this program. The billetors were paid little, and they could do little more than provide the people with housing. But the people had also left behind their jobs, and they needed some way of earning money so they could buy food and other necessities. The lack of these necessities caused a lot of problems between billetors and evacuees, and if the government had backed the program with more money, it would have worked much more smoothly.
To learn more about how this evacuation affected children's education go to this post.
To read another opinion concerning the enforcement of laws and government power click here.