Social Welfare Law

There is a certain vagueness about the meaning to be given to ‘social welfare’, particularly in relation to developing countries. We can attempt to define the term, although there appears to be no definition that meets with universal agreement. Perhaps the most widely accepted is the United Nations’ description (U.N., 1963), of social welfare as a wide range of socially sponsored activities and programmes directed towards community and individual well-being. ‘Social Services’ are then identified as a more limited specific functional area within this broad grouping. ‘Social work’ describes the professional activity primarily concerned with social service functions. One could employ several hundred words in either explaining these definitions or in challenging their adequacy. The most serious contention is that they do not describe any distinctive quality or activity essential to the fulfilment of the economic and social objectives of national planning. A current expression of this attitude in one developing country is the insistence of the Secretary for Planning that all the measures directed to development are purposive to social welfare, which has no valid meaning as a specialized activity or a special professional discipline. In this particular country, the statutory and private social welfare agencies, and the Schools for Social Work Training, are engaged in a tense argument with a key government department which barely accepts their right to existence. For one or another reason, in national affairs and at the level of international organization, social welfare as a concept and a practice is widely misunderstood, sometimes rejected, and occasionally accorded no more than a peripheral role in the determination of planning objectives.

What then is the important contribution that social welfare organization and practice may make to both the definition and satisfaction of human need? Among the many possible ways of answering this question, perhaps the use of illustration is the best starting point. For this purpose we may take four categories of people with whom social welfare is commonly concerned: children, delinquents, the disabled, women.

Indisputably, many of the issues that determine the fate of a child in any society are essentially economic: the financial resources of his parents; the health and educational facilities available to him; the later prospects of employment. But, as the present experience of many countries can show, there is no absolute connection between a society’s degree of affluence and the state of its children’s well-being. Visitors from developing countries who spend any length of time in the wealthier societies are increasingly puzzled by the contradictions they find within them, not least as regards their treatment of children. The prevalence of the battered-baby syndrome is the more dramatic occasion of their concern.

Amid the desperate poverty of some lands, those who plan for a brighter future see in the increase of personal wealth and the improvement of educational and health opportunities a guarantee of greater well-being for the children of the nation. In the wealthier countries, whose citizens enjoy a level of economic sufficiency unobtainable by most of the world’s population, there is growing concern, and official action in response to it, about the incidence of child neglect and other forms of cruelty to children. Governments have been obliged to appoint Commissions of Inquiry, introduce special professional training programmes, erect new buildings or enlarge old ones, and outlay large sums of money in an endeavour to understand and treat a serious social problem. Visitors from developing countries are often naive in their expectations of what wealth will bring. What they see of child problems in an affluent society must lead to a disturbing reappraisal of the possible developments in their own societies. It would be overstating a thesis to pretend that economic issues were irrelevant to an explanation of why an advanced society ill-treats so many of its children. However, the evidence emerging from many enquiries in developed countries suggests that the reasons for the ill-treatment of children are rooted as much in forms of personal and social maladjustment as they are in factors of economic deprivation. There is substantial support for the conviction that the remedies for this ill-treatment of children will be found primarily through the provision of personal counselling and community care services. This is the stuff of social welfare, and any country which underestimates its importance risks, on the one hand the contraction of the potential talent available for nation building, and on the other a growing incidence of unhappiness and sense of frustration among its population.

As noted earlier, debates regarding the nature of welfare cut across a number of different divides, but this in turn leads to an automatic debate about how best to satisfy those needs. Figure 2.2 illustrates what the foregoing has argued. The market was initially left to provide for people’s welfare needs, but as processes of industrialisation significantly changed the socioeconomic life of whole populations, there was a growing awareness that markets could not adequately address those needs. Nor could markets respond to broader societal needs, because they were focused upon individual preferences. There was therefore a reluctant acceptance of the need for the state, and the identification of certain deficiencies in market practices that limited the market’s potential to satisfy welfare. Early arguments that the price mechanism facilitated welfare satisfaction, and a concern that state provision would intrude into people’s lives and foster a dictatorial government, gave way to new philosophical debates. These debates suggested a need for state intervention to strengthen common humanity, which unites us all. Need, citizenship, equality, empowerment and freedom then became concepts that came to define and justify state intervention. These concepts are explored and challenged in subsequent chapters; as noted earlier, they shape how we define welfare. The remaining focus of this chapter is how this justification for state provision of welfare was generated around claims regarding social and human rights. It is through these rights that other concepts associated with welfare were articulated.

Despite the breadth of analysis regarding the meaning of welfare, it was possible to argue that the central state needed to be involved in its provision. This was articulated through a sense of common humanity encapsulated in the idea of social rights. These rights sought to encapsulate both a definition of welfare and how this justified state provision of welfare support. Such rights, and how they are defined, shape the entitlement of citizens to secure access to welfare support at appropriate moments in their lives. Thus, the study of Social Policy requires an understanding of social rights. However, I wish to start with the more contemporary focus on human rights. While this breaks with the previous historical focus, human rights offer an easier route into the following discussions, and emphasise the common humanity that underpins welfare debates. Social rights, as we will see, are rights that are specifically associated with particular nations; human rights exist across these national boundaries.

Freeman (2011:7) suggests that rights are ‘not mysterious things that have the puzzling quality of not existing, but just claims or entitlements that derive from moral and/or legal rules’ (emphasis in the original). Equal treatment within the law, the ability to vote and the ability to marry are all examples of rights that can be found in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR). Such rights must be universal (they apply to everyone), inalienable (they cannot be taken away) and indivisible and interdependent

From the perspective of the UK, the existence of welfare services seems at times to be under threat. The welfare state which was founded in the post-war period was supposedly built on principles of universality, with a strong focus on provision by the state. The model which traditionally opposed this was the model of the old Poor Law: the provision of welfare as a public burden, on a residual basis, offered at the lowest level possible, with the normal expectation being that people would provide through the private sector to meet their needs, rather than relying on the state. The constellation of views which this represents has led to a strong association of residualism with inadequate benefits and penal attitudes to the poor. The effect of moving to private services, and the residualisation of key services such as public housing and income maintenance,is seen by many as a sign of the end of the welfare state. Certainly, the acceptance of the principle that old people would be required to contribute to long-stay residential care was represented in the British press as ‘the end of the welfare state’, an abandonment of the promise that welfare would be provided ‘from cradle to grave’.39