When Kitchener realized that a traditional warfare style would not work against the Boers, he began initiating plans to destroy their farms and detain them that would later cause much controversy among the British public.

According to historian Thomas Pakenham, in early March of 1901, Lord Kitchener initiated a series of systematic drives to kill, capture, and wound Boers, organized like a shooting sport with success defined by a weekly 'bag' of casualties.

[12] The inadequate shelter, poor diet, bad hygiene, and overcrowding led to malnutrition and endemic contagious diseases such as measles, typhoid, and dysentery, to which the children were particularly vulnerable.

[15] Emily Hobhouse, a delegate of the South African Women and Children's Distress Fund, visited some of the camps in the Orange Free State from January 1901.

Alfred Milner, High Commissioner in South Africa, also boarded the Saxon for holiday in England but, unfortunately for both the camp internees and the British government, he had no time for Miss Hobhouse, regarding her as a Boer sympathizer and "trouble maker".

[17] St John Brodrick, the Conservative Secretary of State for War, first defended the government's policy by arguing that the camps were purely "voluntary" and that the interned Boers were "contented and comfortable".

[citation needed] Hobhouse published a report in June 1901[18] that contradicted Brodrick's claim, and Lloyd George then openly accused the government of "a policy of extermination" directed against the Boer population.

By August 1901, it was clear to government and opposition alike that Miss Hobhouse's worst fears were being confirmed – 93,940 Boers and 24,457 black Africans were reported to be in "camps of refuge" and the crisis was becoming a catastrophe as the death rates appeared very high, especially among the children.

The Commission insisted that rations should be increased and that additional nurses be sent out immediately and included a long list of other practical measures designed to improve conditions in the camp.

The main decisions (or their absence) had been left to the soldiers, to whom the life or death of the 154,000 Boer and African civilians in the camps rated as an abysmally low priority.

[It was only] ... ten months after the subject had first been raised in Parliament ... [and after public outcry and after the Fawcett Commission that remedial action was taken and] ... the terrible mortality figures were at last declining.

[24] Scottish historian Niall Ferguson has also argued that "Kitchener no more desired the deaths of women and children in the camps than of the wounded Dervishes after Omdurman, or of his own soldiers in the typhoid-stricken hospitals of Bloemfontein.

"[25] However, to Lord Kitchener and British High Command "the life or death of the 154,000 Boer and African civilians in the camps rated as an abysmally low priority" against military objectives.

[citation needed] As the Fawcett Commission was delivering its recommendations, Kitchener wrote to St John Brodrick defending his policy of sweeps, and emphasised that no new Boer families were being brought in unless they were in danger of facing starvation.

This was disingenuous as the countryside had by then been devastated under the "Scorched Earth" policy; recommendations in the Fawcett Commission commented that: "to turn 100,000 people now being held in the concentration camps out on the field to take care of themselves would be cruelty".

[citation needed] Now that the New Model counter-insurgency tactics were in full swing, it made little sense to leave Boer families by themselves in desperate conditions in the countryside.