Parliament appointed four men to inspect 4,000 textile mills across all of Britain.
Before 1833, laws governing child labor in British factories existed on paper and nowhere else. The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802 had restricted working hours for pauper children in cotton mills, but it provided no mechanism for enforcement.1 The Cotton Mills and Factory Act of 1819 prohibited employment of children under nine, but compliance depended entirely on the goodwill of factory owners.
The breakthrough came with the Factory Act of 1833, which created a professional inspectorate for the first time. Parliament appointed four factory inspectors, responsible to the Home Office, with the legal authority to enter any textile mill in Britain and impose penalties for violations.2
The scope of the task was staggering. Four inspectors were expected to oversee roughly 4,000 mills.3 The Act prohibited employing children under nine, limited those aged nine to thirteen to eight hours of work per day and forty-eight hours per week, and required at least two hours of daily schooling for child workers.4 Factory owners routinely evaded the rules. Early inspection reports document cases of boys as young as ten working continuous shifts of thirty-four hours.
The 1844 Factory Act expanded the inspectors' mandate to include safety regulations, making it a criminal offense for dangerous machinery to be left unfenced.5 The 1847 Factory Act, known as the Ten Hours Act, finally limited the working day for women and young people to ten hours, a demand that factory workers had organized around for more than a decade. By 1867, Parliament extended inspection beyond textiles to all manufacturing workplaces, though enforcement remained uneven.
The 1891 Act raised the minimum employment age to eleven. The Workmen's Compensation Act of 1897 established that workers injured on the job could receive compensation without proving employer fault.6