The Role of Voluntary Organisations in Social Welfare

Hugh W Mellor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429880650
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1985 The Role of Voluntary Organisations in Social Welfare considers the voluntary sector as a provider of social welfare. The book asks the fundamental questions for those involved in social welfare: what should the role of this voluntary sector be, and what should its relationship be with the government sector? Reporting on extensive original research undertaken for the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust, the study examines the functions, staffing, funding and control of voluntary organisations. It looks at the relationship with the government sector, explores the increasingly important questions of accountability and discusses future prospects.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

The context of this book is social welfare, and the assumption is that the state must play a large part in its provision. What is the future for voluntary organisations in this context? Before the matter is examined it is important that the meanings of the terms ‘welfare state’ and ‘voluntary organisation’, as used by the author, are understood by the reader. To do this, and to explain the nature of the study which follows, are the purposes of this chapter.

THE WELFARE STATE

There is no unanimity about the concept of the welfare state. Many dislike the very name, but it has come to be widely used. Many books have been written about its philosophy and its history. According to the writer’s philosophy so will his history be. Thus Fraser can write: ‘In 1536 parishes were authorised to collect money to support the impotent poor who would thus no longer need to beg. The state thus acknowledged some minimum community responsibility for those who were unable to work’ (1). For him the seed was sown in the 16th Century and grew powerfully in the 19th with the developments in the Poor Law, Public Health and Education which took place in the middle years of that century.

Another writer dates the birth of the welfare state precisely as 15th February 1881, when Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany proposed to the Reichstag that social insurance be introduced to protect industrial workers against the loss of income resulting from accidents and old age (2). King is not alone in associating the welfare state with the initiation of social insurance: it is common to find it said that the concept was born in Britain with the Liberal government of 1906–14, which introduced old-age pensions, health and unemployment insurance. ‘From these modest beginnings,’ writes Robson:

the principle emerged that the state should eliminate the worst causes of poverty by fixing minimum standards of subsistence, medical care, education, housing and nutrition by means of the social services, minimum wage legislation, social insurance and government regulation. These minimum standards were established to provide a floor below which it was assumed no one would be allowed to sink. The minimum standards were progressively raised as resources increased and confidence grew in the new methods.(3)

The man-in-the-street today would I believe not go so far back. With a little thought he would say that the welfare state began after the Second World War: he would associate it with the Beveridge Report, the National Health Service and a new education system. As Clegg puts it:

Starting with the Butler Education Act passed by the Coalition Government in 1944, the social services took on a completely new look in the period up to 1950 and what we call “the welfare state” dates from that time although it was built on earlier foundations. The overriding principle was that services should be universal, i.e available to all as of right and paid for through the general rates and taxes or insurance contributions. The condition of receiving help should be need (e.g. of secondary education or a doctor) and not ability to pay fees. (4)

It is in this sense that I use the term ‘welfare state’ in this book. I was young in the 1940s. I was inspired by Beveridge’s call to tackle the ‘giants’ of disease, ignorance, squalor, idleness and want. I believed then, as I still do, that government has to play a major part in tackling them. The essence of the welfare state approach as I see it is that certain needs will be met, irrespective of ability to pay, and that a duty is laid upon the state to guarantee this. With ‘the overriding principle’ that services should be universal, I concur, for without it we shall be in danger of lapsing again into the ‘two nations’ situation of pre-1939, with relatively good facilities for the well-to-do, and second best for those who do not have the means to pay for them. Many of us felt that we had seen the demise of that situation in the years following the war and do not want to see it return. As Titmuss wrote in his ‘Study about the Role of Altruism in Modern Society’, The Gift Relationship:

One of the principles of the National Blood Transfusion Service and National Health Service is to provide services on the basis of common human needs; there must be no allocation of resources which could create a sense of separateness between people. It is the explicit or implicit institutionalisation of separateness, whether categorised in terms of income, class, race, colour or religion, rather than the recognition of the similarities between people and their needs which causes much of the world’s suffering.

On the other hand the economics of today may make it sensible for there to be a limited degree of ‘selectivity’, whereby people pay something for certain services if they can afford it, and do not receive certain public services if they could afford to buy them elsewhere. To quote Titmuss again:

The challenge that faces us is not the choice between universalist and selective social services. The real challenge lies in the question: what particular infrastructure of universalist services is needed in order to provide a framework of values and opportunity bases within and around which can be developed socially acceptable selective services aiming to discriminate positively, with the minimum risk of stigma, in favour of those whose needs are greatest. (5)

No government, of whatever political persuasion, appears to have met this challenge: no positive philosopy is anywhere apparent, and one is long overdue. Controversy will no doubt continue on this subject of universalism v selectivity for many years yet, and it is one of the aims of this book to take the discussion a little further.

There is another controversy that needs to be mentioned at this point. It is between those who have the ‘institutional’ and those who have the ‘residual’ conceptions of social welfare. The view of the former is that social welfare is as necessary to modern industrial society as are roads or a public water supply. Social and economic ‘institutions’ such as the national insurance scheme or National Health Service, designed to provide social security or care in times of sickness, are essential. Those who take the other view assume that the needs of individuals are normally met by the family and the market economy, but that the state has a ‘residual’ function to prevent destitution and to care for the sick only if, in the last resort, their families cannot do so; but there will be strict tests of ‘eligibility’, and an implied assumption that it is less worthy to use public resources than to use private. My approach to my subject will assume that certain substantial responsibilities in welfare must remain with the state, and to that extent, I am of the ‘institutional’ viewpoint; but that there is much scope for discussion about what services and facilities rightly fall within the scope of the state no one will deny, and this again is a discussion to which my study may make some contribution.

My standpoint on the welfare state is therefore that I assume that the British Government will continue to accept responsibility for certain major ‘welfare’ services, the word in this context including social insurance, a national health service, public housing, education and employment services, as well as the personal social services to which the definition of welfare is sometimes confined. I assume that in the main these services will be provided to all who need them, irrespective of their financial circumstances. I make these assumptions despite the unhappy restrictions which the Conservative government which took office in 1979 felt it necessary to make on economic grounds; and despite certain ‘sniping’ which has been going on, not so much against the concept of welfare as against the place of the state in its provision. As to the restrictions due to the economic situation, I am optimistic enough to think that improvements both in the economy and in our national order of priorities will rectify them before very long. To the ‘sniping’ I must now give a little more attention.

It comes from three related though different perspectives. The first arises from a number of social studies which have shown that care, in its broadest sense, of individuals in need, comes even today largely from relatives and friends and only to a modest degree, quantitatively speaking, from the health and social services. To politicians anxious to play down the significance of the cuts in public services, this has been a source of comfort. In the context of my present exercise it is irrelevant. The need for public services remains, they came into existence because informal welfare practices were in themselves inadequate, and if there are people who read into current sociological findings that suddenly the informal is totally capable and the public services marginal or unnecessary, I am not one of them.

The second source of ‘sniping’ comes from the self-help movement. During the last twenty years the number of organisations whose memberships offer mutual aid with particular problems has grown enormously. They include Alcoholics Anonymous and the Back Pain Association, the National Schizophrenia Fellowship and Cruse – the National Organisation for the Widowed and their Children. As one directory of such organisations puts it, they are:

designed to help people to help themselves by providing contact with others who have similar problems and by providing access to sources of information. People with problems often become expert in practical means of coping with them. They have the advantage, over professionals, of firsthand experience (6).

Some enthusiasts for self-help have gone on to imply that professional assistance is no longer needed. For my part, and with the majority of those who have the utmost respect for these groups, I see them as partners with, but by no means as replacements for, the public health and welfare services, and therefore in no way invalidating my basic assumptions.

The third of the questioning approaches I have in mind comes from the practitioners of community work. They emphasise the importance of the local context, and aim to mobilise informal and intensely local effort to deal with social needs. They may provide information or advice, stimulate self-help groups, or mobilise resources to press for changed policies or improved services. For some of these practitioners, as Professor Pinker relates in his book The Idea of Welfare,

this new commitment to localised social action and the nurturing of informal modes of welfare practice is often associated with a hostility towards the administrative ethos of both central and local government,

in contrast to the views of

the arch-apostles of this administrative tradition … the Webbs who … believed that enlightened administrators were the most reliable interpreters of what constituted the best interests of the general public.

Here again, whatever the value of community work, it cannot be seen as a total alternative to central or local government responsibility. The community worker needs specialist back-up, whether for information or advice or for specialist intervention; somebody must appoint (and pay) him/her; and the central or local government department will continue to have responsibility for ensuring a satisfactory level and quality of provision, and for sharing and spreading identified good practice. The welfare state continues to have its place whatever the developments in community work.

It will have been clear from what has already been said that I do not see the welfare state as comprehensive in its provision of services to meet human needs, nor as having a monopoly in the areas in which it does operate. It has an essential and major role in certain fields, but it must always be limited at some point by the resources which it can properly call upon, and at this point in these fields there may still be needs to be met by other agencies. It is inappropriate for the state to undertake some services, and it should never be given a monopoly in any service, lest new initiatives be stultified or the individual be in danger of being sacrificed to the bureaucracy. These considerations bring us to some of the classic arguments for ‘pluralism’, one of the in-words of the present time. Pluralists maintain that a democratic system requires a multitude of independent voluntary, non-government associations as buffers between the individual and the state. Beveridge himself had a deeply held belief in the importance of voluntary effort, which he thought would, in the society of the future, have a rich variety directed especially at ‘the special needs of untypical distressed minorities’. He saw voluntary bodies giving ‘dynamic individuals with social conscience’ scope for expression of their ideals and so enabling them to take the place of those with large personal means and leisure, who were the pioneers of the past.

Others have pointed out that voluntary associations have kept the individual from feeling isolated, protected him from the state, met needs that could not be filled by the government, and preserved a degree of choice for him, This brings me to the second part of my discussion of the assumptions and definitions that lie behind this study, to the subject of voluntary bodies.

VOLUNTARY ORGANISATIONS

It is astonishing that as late as 1972 Smith and Freedman, in their valuable survey of the literature on voluntary associations, felt it necessary to state: ‘With the exception of a few analysts, most of the advocates of voluntarism fail even to make the fundamental distinction between volunteering and the voluntary association.’ (7) In Britain today such confusion is still to be found, and for this reason I must make it immediately plain that for my part I am only incidentally concerned with those individuals who offer their unpaid services, whether to statutory or other organisations. I am primarily concerned with what Blau and Scott call ‘formal organisations’, but I must give this concept a more precise definition. Smith and Freedman defined their interest as being in:

structured, formally organised, relatively permanent, secondary groupings as opposed to less structured, informal, ephemeral, or primary gro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• National Voluntary Organisations interviewed
• Other abbreviations occasionally used
• Acknowledgements
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. SAMPLING AND FIRST IMPRESSIONS
• 3. ROLES AND RESOURCES
• 4. COMMITTEES
• 5. PARTNERS OR RIVALS
• 6. ACCOUNTABILITY
• 7. FUTURE PROSPECTS
• APPENDICES
• B. Objects of the Associations in the Sample
• C. Letter to Chief Executive Officers of Sample Organisations
• D. Information Requested before Interview
• E. Interview Guide – Chief Executive Officers
• F. Comparative Expenditure on Administration
• G. Organisations Working in the Same or Overlapping Fields
• H. Bodies to which Organisations in the Sample are Affiliated
• J. Fund-Raising Appeals
• INDEX