The earlier form of poor relief was typically through the parish. Landowners, "rate payers", would pay a tax. That money would be used to pay for the housing and feeding of the destitute, and there would be someone from the Anglican Church involved in administering it. It could be a periodic dole of bread from a door of the church, or administering a poor house. That poor relief was, essentially, unrestricted- anyone could show up at the church, ask for food, help.

As the Industrial Revolution got underway, some parishes increased more in population than rate-payers, got more poor people than the rate-payers would/could support. So, it was thought that numerous small poor houses could be combined into one big poor house, to save money. It was also felt ( especially by people like Jeremy Bentham) that simply offering food and lodging was encouraging people to be lazy. To that end, the big poor houses were re-concieved as work houses: all the destitute would be then set to work for their sustenance and lodging. And moved outside of the authority of the Anglican Church, with the notions of free Christian charity and mercy done away with. So, when Scrooge is asked for a donation, and replies, "are there no workhouses?", he's showing himself to be a modern man.

Likewise, when he talks about the poor dying to 'reduce the surplus population", he is echoing Thomas Malthus, who had concluded that population grew exponentially but food production only arithmetically, so human populations would tend to run out of food. Not the last time that someone would say being a cold, callous, businessman is just being "scientific", not selfish.

It would be discovered that the large work houses had problems. First, the most common reason people were appealing for poor relief was that they were incapable of working in the first place: they were damaged , crippled, too old- and so it was hard to use them as a source of labor, to make the work house pay for itself. They usually were set to picking oakum. Tons of old rope, too worn to be safe for use on ships as cordage, would be unraveled into fibers which could be then tarred and/or greased and used for caulking. And it should not have been surprising that gathering a very large number of elderly or infirm people under one roof , making them work in a badly-heated space and with poor food and sanitation, spread disease. The death rate in work houses was high.

I confess that I don't really know the attitude of all Dissenting sects to poor relief- what Presbyterians and Methodists thought about it. But there would be Quaker businessmen , like Abraham Darby, George Cadbury and Joseph Rowntree, who would be very paternalistic with their workforce, who very much felt themselves to be responsible for the health and well-being of their employees. It's pretty safe to say that, whatever denomination Scrooge represents ( if any) , he would not have been thought a Quaker.