Social Welfare in Britain 1885-1985

Rex Pope, Alan Prat, Bernard Hoyle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780709940357
• eBook ISBN: 9781135785413
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This collection of documents follows the same format as Pope and Hoyle's British Economic Performance (1984), to provide a survey of the main developments in social welfare. Students of economic and social history and of social policy and administration are being required to do more and more work with original documents, and this collection is tailored to meet their needs.

The primary sources are presented in two sections, covering the periods 1885-c. 1940 and c. 1940 to 1985. During the former, ideas on, and the scope of, welfare provision, broadened greatly. There was a sense of progress. Developments though were piecemeal. There was no conception of a 'Welfare State'. The second period begins with the changes associated with the assumption that Britain was establishing a Welfare State. But the hopes of 1940 have not been fulfilled, and there has been growing speculation about the value of such an organisation of society.

The extracts reflect these changes. They are grouped under the headings to facilitate reference. Students at all levels, especially A-level, first degree and professional training courses, will find the book a valuable resource. Materials included are drawn from minutes of evidence, newspapers, political party publications and professional bodies and groups.

SECTION B: 1940–85

Introduction

In writing about social policy in the 1940s, one always risks lapsing into cliché. Thus it could be held that these years saw a clear change in direction from previous practice as, under Beveridge, public opinion came to recognise the wisdom of a coherent social policy which succeeded in reconciling the state's obligation to guarantee a subsistence level of living to all its citizens as of right with the preservation of a largely free-market economy in which profit and work incentives were recognised as central and crucial by all parties. Driven on by the social cohesion generated in the first instance by the exigencies of total war, the coalition government entered into a commitment that there would be no return to inter-war normalcy. A society distinguished by universality in social service provision, underpinned by Keynesian economic theory, could hardly be less like one characterised by the selective degradation of the household means test and neo-classical economic dogmatism.

It is tempting in retrospect to conclude that the forging of this new dominant orthodoxy was inevitable, that there were no serious alternatives to social insurance, and that the liberalism and Liberalism of Beveridge and Keynes enjoyed a relatively uncontested triumph. That there was opposition, though, is attested to by the unease of some Conservatives during the three-day debate on the Beveridge Report held in February 1943, especially by Conservative members of the government, while a small though not insignificant minority within the Labour Party felt that flat-rate social insurance and managed capitalism hardly constituted the dawn of the socialist millennium.

Space does not allow us to illustrate these contrary opinions and the extracts included under the heading ‘The 1940s’, with one exception, illustrate the historical triumph of this new world view. The single exception is Evan Durbin's warning to his fellow socialists that the economic base had to be given first priority (B1). Of the extracts included under this heading, a strong argument can be advanced that the most significant are B2 and B3, which outline the principles and assumptions on which Beveridge's entire schema were based, and B5, the announcement of the government's plans for the creation and maintenance of a high and stable level of employment. Children's Allowances both attacked family poverty and allowed for the preservation and augmentation of work incentives. A National Health Service would reduce claims on the insurance fund and make a major contribution to effective labour supply. The commitment to full employment would guarantee economic growth and prevent the benefit system from buckling under the strain of mass, chronic, involuntary unemployment as its predecessors had in the inter-war period. Beveridge and Keynes made the world safe for social democracy but only for so long as the conditions they prescribed continued to obtain.

The institutional structure of the modern welfare state was established by the 1944 Education Act, based on the Educational Reconstruction White Paper (B4), the Family Allowances Act of 1945, the National Insurance Acts of 1946, the National Health Service Act of 1946 (see B7) and the National Assistance Act of 1948. The Simon extract (B6) indicates the importance of housing provision as an element of policy. Legislation here, however, was more obviously a continuation of pre-war policy. Since 1948, each service has experienced a number of changes in administration, nature and structure but, in spite of these changes, the model itself remains. Developments have tended to be of an ad hoc, incremental nature. Until the return of the Conservative Government headed by Margaret Thatcher in 1979 there has been little evidence of a determined attempt to implement an overall vision of social policy of the same order of magnitude as that engendered by Beveridge and the social reformers of the 1940s.

The changes that have occurred have been born out of a growing awareness by governments of all parties of the constraints within which they operate. The most fundamental of these constraints is that of scarce resources and this is the dominant theme of those extracts included under the heading ‘General Issues in Social Policy’. The first two of these were produced by the Central Policy Review Staff, the ‘think tank’ established by Edward Heath in 1971 as part of his attempt to reform the machinery of government and, in the process, to set up an organisation free of departmental pressures and capable of offering reasonably objective advice on any issue submitted to it. A Joint Framework for Social Policies (B8) remains one of the most interesting and important documents in post-war social policy because of its plea for the creation of a rational and coherent framework for the analysis of public policy, capable of taking into account resource availability and the whole range of government commitments. Sadly, its influence has been minimal. The observations on population and the social services (B9) highlight one of the most fundamental factors in policy development and, ironically, one of the most ignored. Anyone concerned about rationality and the long-term view in the making of social policy cannot but be saddened by the Thatcher Government's abolition of the CPRS.

Social policy is now more than ever dominated by whatever happens to be the prevailing Treasury view. ‘Public Expenditure: Future Prospects, 1984’ (B11) is a clear manifestation of this reality. It is essential reading if we are to understand the probable future development of social policy, certainly for as long as the present government remains in office wedded to its current philosophy, and perhaps for even longer. The identification of what is regarded as excessive public expenditure and of consequential high rates of direct taxation as the most important causes of Britain's economic decline has profound implications for the Welfare State. The Green Paper published in June 1985 ‘Reform of Social Security’, from the first volume of which (Cmnd 9517) extracts B10 and B37 are taken, can be seen as a product of this conviction.

Governments have always been sensitive to the public expenditure requirements of a complex and comprehensive system of social provision. This is one of the persistent themes to emerge from the extracts included in the section ‘Politics and Social Policy’. The Conservative Party has made the cost of welfare a major concern from the earliest days of the post-war settlement as can be seen in The Right Road for Britain (B12) and One Nation (B13). The Labour Party was also clearly aware of the potential conflict inherent in the struggle between competing claimants for scarce resources. The Welfare State (B14) makes the need for a clear and conscious prioritisation a major requirement. The document also identifies certain characteristics of public social policy as potentially unattractive to large numbers of citizens. The presence of an impersonal bureaucracy, standardisation, the need to preserve an element of localism and democratic accountability are features which have a modern ring about them.

The substance of the political consensus surrounding the Welfare State until the early 1970s is described in the articles by Sir Richard Clarke (B18) and by Gould and Roweth (B19).

In a number of ways, the Conservative Party's approach to welfare issues is of more interest than that of Labour during this period. Several extracts demonstrate the omnipresent tensions within the party between more or less official pronouncements and those relatively independent ones from influential individuals and groupings. This conflict is clearly evident in the different positions adopted in two almost contemporary publications. The Right Road for Britain (B12) is an official source and One Nation (B13) represents the collective thoughts of spokesmen of what has been called ‘opportunity state Conservatism’. Some members of the latter group, including Heath, Powell and Macleod, were to become major figures in the political life of the party and the nation. The growth of liberal Conservatism is demonstrated further in the extracts from Goldman (B16) and Powell (B17).

In the early post-war years, one of the clear divisions between Conservative and Labour Parties centred around the conditions on which services were to be provided. In general, the Labour Party followed Beveridge in his advocacy of universality as the proper philosophical and administrative basis of service delivery while the Conservative Party was largely convinced that universality wasted scarce resources by providing benefit for those who did not need them. The extracts under the heading ‘Principles and Techniques of Resource Allocation’ give some indication of the nature of the debate. One of the key figures is Richard Titmuss, who did so much to shape social policy and administration as an intellectual discipline and who exercised a major influence on the development of the Labour Party's social philosophy in the post-war period. In his official history of social policy during the Second World War, Problems of Social Policy (HMSO, 1950), Titmuss appeared a committed universalist, but over the years his position changed considerably. In B21, he calls for a fusion of the best elements of both the universalist and selectivist approaches and, in so doing, leaves himself open to scathing rebuke from Arthur Seldon (B22). Seldon is the most persistent and influential writer from the selectivist camp and was very active in the creation of the Institute of Economic Affairs in 1957, an organisation which has done much to advance the virtues of the market and consumer choice. Pinker appears as an ideologue of the ‘common sensical’ centre (B23). For him the debate at best is a reminder that issues of principle are at stake in social provision, whilst at worst the two positions are over-simplified irrelevancies with no place in the modern world. The public record would seem to indicate that on this issue the Labour Party has moved much closer to the traditional position of the Conservative Party.

As we noted earlier, universality was a key feature of the Beveridge Report. The giant ‘want’ was to be attacked by a system of social insurance providing subsistence level benefits as of right. Social assistance was to be a residual, vestigial element designed to fade away as the insurance scheme matured. One of the great tragedies of modern British social security has been the failure to translate this intent into reality. The combined value of means-tested social assistance payments and the allowance for actual housing costs has always exceeded insurance scale rates. Successive governments have failed to treat poverty via the approved medium, universal, subsistence level social insurance benefits.

The depth and extent of this failure is demonstrated in the extracts presented under the heading ‘Social Policy and Poverty’. Full employment, economic growth, rising real personal disposable income and the achievement of the Welfare State provided a context within which an understandable complacency took root. It was difficult to dispel this complacency, supported as it seemed to be by empirical evidence from investigations such as Rowntree's third survey of York, Poverty and the Welfare State, but eventually a more critical perspective did begin to emerge. Pivotal figures in this reassessment were Titmuss, Townsend and Abel-Smith. Titmuss's book Income Distribution and Social Change (B24) has been described as one of the most important texts to have emerged from the study of the British Welfare State largely because of the systematic way he undermined the statistical and methodological basis of the traditional view that poverty had ceased to be a major social problem. The appearance of the book The Poor and the Poorest in 1965 (B25) finally shattered the illusion of Britain as a prosperous society in which all were sharing. The evidence deployed by Abel-Smith and Townsend has never been seriously challenged and their definition of a ‘poverty line’ as 140 per cent of the basic assistance scale rates has become a model for a host of subsequent investigations. More than any other British social scientist, Townsend has developed the concept of poverty as relative deprivation and although his approach (B27) has been challenged by some (B29) it remains a classic example of an attempt to marry political commitment with scholarly objectivity. Townsend's political commitment is at least matched by Sir Keith Joseph's, whose espousal of the idea of transmitted deprivation was tested by a series of research projects funded by the Social Science Research Council (at Sir Keith's behest). Madge and Rutter's observations (B26) are an interesting assessment of the status of this controversial and influential concept. The conclusions from the Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth (B28) provide some insights into the relationship between poverty and certain contingency experiences.

The modern Welfare State grew to maturity in an environment of full employment, economic growth and rising real incomes. In what were arguably the most successful three decades in Britain's economic history, the issues which had been so intractable during the inter-war years seemed to have faded from the political scene. In so far as Britain had an economic problem, it was the apparent inability to match the growth rates of our major industrial competitors. The Welfare State itself was secure and governments’ only real concern lay in meeting the population's expectation of rising standards of provision. The political economy of social democracy formed the dominant intellectual paradigm within which debate was conducted.

However, what had seemed so secure for so long was proved to be resting on shallow foundations as the economies of the Western industrial world, and that of Britain in particular, reeled under the shock of the energy crisis of the early 1970s. As the previously unknown combination of rapid inflation and rising levels of unemployment came to form the backcloth of political discussion, social democracy's hegemony was shattered and replaced by a modern reformulation of old ideas, the recrudescence of liberal conservatism. Advocates of neo-classical political economy and the minimal state had never completely disappeared (as the Institute of Economic Affairs, Enoch Powell and Hayek exemplify) but their position in political life had been marginal at best. At first sight, the relatively easy advance, in recent years, of these ideas is surprising but it becomes more understandable if one accepts that the devotees of collective social provision had grown lazy and intellectually flabby. They rarely, if ever, asked what would happen to the Welfare State if the economic growth they took for granted disappeared. The harsher economic climate of the last ten years has caught defenders of the Welfare State totally unprepared to meet the onslaught of the so-called ‘New Right’ of which ‘Thatcherism’ is a particularly vivid example. Social democracy's classical political text is Anthony Crosland's The Future of Socialism (B20) which first appeared in 1956; nothing of the same quality has appeared from the labour movement since then. Indeed, the Left's record is appalling. No representative of the Labour Party's left wing has produced anything remotely comparable to Crosla...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Section A: 1885–1940
• Section B: 1940–85
• Section C: Statistics
• Some Further Reading
• Index