Why We Need Welfare

Collective Action for the Common Good

Alcock, Pete, Pete Alcock

• Publisher: Policy Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781447328346
• eBook ISBN: 9781447328360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What is welfare? Why is it a key part of the 'common good' for all? And how should we go about providing it?

Pete Alcock, a well-respected expert, explains the challenges that collective welfare faces, and explores the complexities involved in delivering it, including debates about who benefits from welfare and how and where it is delivered. His primary focus is on the UK, including the problems of poverty and inequality, and how recent political and economic changes have undermined public investment; but he also draws on international examples from Europe and other OECD countries, such as the impact of private health care in the USA.

Why we need welfare is a call for new forms of collective action to meet welfare needs in the 21st century. It offers a fresh perspective on the key issues involved, and is a great introduction to this important and topical debate.

1

Introduction

The importance of collective action

This book sets out the case for a renewed commitment to the provision of welfare for citizens in the twenty-first century. It is based upon the assumption that welfare is a common good and that it is the role of societies to seek to meet the common good. As social beings we all have a shared interest, and investment, in the relations that we have with our fellow citizens and the interdependencies that these produce. As Defoe’s famous novel sought to reveal, even the mythical Robinson Crusoe could not survive on his island without social support.

Our welfare is therefore dependent upon our relations with our fellow citizens. Although, as I shall explain, these relations and this dependency can, in practice, become complex and challenging. What is more, this requires us to engage in and to support collective actions to meet our shared welfare needs and to promote the common good. Despite the powerful impact of some recent ideological discourses about the freedom and responsibility we have as individuals, a moment’s reflection reveals that what we can secure for ourselves as individuals is very limited, and in practice is always dependent upon cooperation and collaboration with others. We might want to decide as individuals which newspapers and books we read, what clothes we buy and even what pension investments we make, but someone else has written and published those books, and designed and made those clothes, and decided on the costs and benefits of the different (and sometimes fairly limited) pension schemes on offer.

We also depend on others to meet our needs for welfare. The provision of welfare is intrinsically and inevitably a collective, not an individual, matter. The important questions, therefore, are what do we mean by, or understand by, welfare, and what forms of collective action are best able to deliver it? In practice these can sometimes be complex, even apparently contradictory, problems, and the answers to them are not always simple ones, as I will aim to explain. However, they do all come down to different forms of collective action, within different organisational platforms and aimed at different aspects of our social lives. We need to decide what we want from these forms and how best to work together to realise them effectively. This is a normative debate, based upon the values that we aspire to as well as the practical obstacles that we face in achieving these.

Welfare

Welfare itself is an ambiguous term – or rather it has been used ambiguously by politicians, policy makers and academics. Thus, although it is at the heart of debates about how and why we should provide support to our fellow citizens, it has become a contested concept. On the one hand, welfare is clearly a good thing. Sometimes linked to the related notion of wellbeing, it has been used by the supporters of social action to meet human needs. Thus, welfare and wellbeing are the positive outcomes of the actions we take to protect and support citizens, and the services we provide to meet individual needs so that they can lead healthy and fulfilling lives (an issue explored further in Chapter 2). Quite what this means in terms of practical action, however, soon becomes rather more complex.

Welfare has also come to be associated with the receipt of support from these public actions, and indeed our reliance on this, as opposed to independence and self-sufficiency. Here the connotation is a negative one of welfare dependency, something which we might fear and wish to discourage. This usage has also become more common in the UK in recent times, with ‘welfare’ sometimes used to refer to receipt of (or indeed dependency upon) social security benefits, especially means-tested ones, which is how welfare is also generally perceived in the USA.

Despite these contradictory connotations, however, it is the notion of welfare as the positive objective for social action that underpins the arguments developed in this book. This includes explanation of the development of the ‘welfare state’, as the organised national framework for policy actions to meet social needs, and discussion of some of the ‘welfare services’ which have been provided to deliver these. As I shall explain in Chapter 4, despite the development of the welfare state, not all welfare services are in fact delivered by public agencies. In all welfare regimes many are provided by commercial or third sector (voluntary) agencies, and the scope of these has been increasing in the UK and elsewhere in recent times.

The focus of this book, therefore, is on the provision of welfare in modern society, and why we need to promote and protect this. For the most part I will be discussing welfare provision in the UK. However, in practice many of the key features of UK welfare provision, and the challenges to this, are similar to those found in most other developed industrial countries, so in places I will draw on comparative examples from other countries – most notably those in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which collects information about policies and outcomes across its member nations.

Academic discussion of welfare provision largely focuses on the role of social policy in delivering this. Students of social policy, as an academic subject, study the planning and delivery of welfare services, and social policy is part of a broader ‘public policy’, which also includes things like transport and environmental planning. These are important aspects of our collective investment and common good, but I shall focus mainly on social policy and the provision of welfare. So this book is also about why we need social policy, and what some of the key issues informing the academic study of social policy are.

The welfare state

The collective provision of welfare services has a long history. In the UK this history can be traced back at least to the Poor Laws of Elizabethan England, first introduced in 1601, which gave discretionary local support to people who were then described as vagrants. It was in the nineteenth century, however, when more widespread public measures were introduced to meet a number of the welfare needs of a wider range of people in society. These included education in primary schools, vaccination and sanitation to promote public health, and the growth of both public and private hospitals. Not all of these early welfare services were publicly provided. Hospitals and schools were often privately founded by individuals or voluntary organisations, in particular, churches, which ran a number of the early primary schools. Local Poor Law Relief was also supplemented, or replaced, by insurance payments to unemployed workers from Friendly Societies, which collected subscriptions from members to fund support at times of need. And in the latter part of the century a national body, the Charity Organisation Society (COS), was setup to coordinate and promote the voluntary provision of welfare services.

The role of the COS in the promotion of charitable welfare provision came under particular scrutiny in the deliberations of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, established to make recommendations for the future development of welfare support at the beginning of the twentieth century. Some leading COS figures were members of the Commission and were largely behind the Majority Report, which was published in 1909 and argued that charitable provision should continue to play a central role in future development of welfare in the UK. However, these views were challenged by a Minority Report, which was largely the work of Beatrice Webb. She and her husband Sidney were leading members of the Fabian Society, which had been set up at the end of the nineteenth century to campaign for the public provision of welfare through the state, and this is just what the Minority Report argued for.

Importantly, the two reports represented rather different visions of how we should develop welfare services. One (the Majority Report) arguing for non-state providers; and the other (the Minority Report) arguing for state welfare. These disagreements ran so deep that no consensus could be reached in a single report. These are differences that continue to influence debates about the development of welfare over a hundred years later, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with support for privately provided market welfare and voluntary action through third sector organisations included in what has always, in practice, been a mixed economy of welfare. However, what was not contested within the Commission was the then need to expand and deepen the collective provision of welfare to meet the needs of a growing population, many of whom were living in or near poverty.

In the early years of the twentieth century welfare services were expanded significantly, under a reforming Liberal government led by Asquith and Lloyd George. These included an expansion of state schools, and the introduction of health insurance, Labour Exchanges, old-age pensions, and unemployment and sickness insurance. Although the insurance provision was modelled on the work of the Friendly Societies, and included them in some aspects of provision, these reforms, and most of the other changes, were based upon commitments to use the state provision and public funding to provide new welfare services. Although theirs was only the Minority Report, it was largely the Fabian Society’s support for state welfare that carried the day.

The early twentieth-century reforms introduced state welfare to the UK, and these reforms were being repeated in similar forms in most other industrial nations. Indeed, it had been the introduction of unemployment insurance by the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the late nineteenth century, that had provided the model for this across much of the rest of Europe, including the UK. However, it was the more extensive reforms made by the Labour government of Clement Attlee after the end of the Second World War, that transformed public welfare services into the welfare state.

The post-war Labour government is often credited with the creation of a welfare state in Britain, because the extensive new provisions that were introduced were all based on a commitment to the provision of comprehensive welfare services delivered by national government agencies and funded from national taxation. They included a new social security scheme (National Insurance), a major programme of new public housing, compulsory state education up to age 15 (actually introduced in 1944 by the wartime government, but with Labour support), and, perhaps most significantly, the National Health Service (NHS). This state commitment to comprehensive welfare services had been argued for during the war by the Beveridge Report of 1942, which had focused primarily on social security reform but had proposed that much wider public provision was needed to rid the country of what Sir William Beveridge called ‘five giant evils’: ignorance, squalor, idleness, disease and want. In this short and pithy list Beveridge captured much of the case for welfare intervention to meet social needs. And although the words may now seem dated, concern over these social evils still underpins the case for welfare support today.

It was Beveridge’s (1942) call for social welfare, together with the arguments of the economist Keynes (1936) that governments should seek to manage national economies to promote economic growth and employment, that created the political and ideological climate for the introduction of the welfare state in the UK. And it was a pattern that was being followed in most other advanced industrial countries in the middle of the last century. However, this proved to be something of a high water mark for public welfare provision. Although the welfare state was widely supported and further developed over the next two to three decades, in the 1970s and 1980s it came under pressure from economic changes and political attacks.

A mixed economy of welfare

Economic recession in the 1970s caused some to raise questions over whether it was possible to continue to fund, and to expand, comprehensive public welfare services for all, particularly if this threatened market-based economic growth. By the 1980s this had affected all advanced welfare regimes (Pierson, 1998). In the UK political change, under the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher, also led to questions about the desirability of state welfare for all, particularly as, it was argued, this might crowd out private market alternatives and discourage individual citizens from providing for themselves. This move away from Keynesian policies of state support for public welfare towards a belief that it is only free markets that can best meet the dual goals of economic growth and individual freedom is sometimes referred to as neoliberalism, in part because it implies a call to return to the economic liberalism (or laissez faire) of the nineteenth century, before the state began to intervene to respond to social needs and economic pressures – and I will return to discuss the challenge of neoliberalism in more detail in Chapter 7.

Neoliberalism is also associated with the anti-state reforms of the Reagan administrations in the US in the 1980s. (Reagan and Thatcher were close political allies.) But it also began to inform welfare reforms in a number of other countries that had earlier expanded state welfare. This led to cuts in spending plans in many countries (sometimes referred to as welfare retrenchment) and to moves to contract out services to private and third sector providers – further accentuating the mixed economy of welfare.

This shift towards a welfare mix could also be found in the politics and policies of the Labour governments in the UK in the 2000s. The Labour government promoted a ‘third way’ approach, between the state and the market, and championed choice and competition within public welfare services. This was taken much further by the Coalition and Conservative governments of David Cameron, however, who, in response to the economic recession of 2008, also introduced a wide-ranging programme of cuts in welfare expenditure designed to reduce dramatically public borrowing and the deficit that had grown in the public finances. Cameron referred to the government’s aim as promoting a ‘Big Society’, as an alternative to the big state of the post-war welfare regime; and the austerity measures (as they were called) were planned to reduce overall public spending as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from around 47 to 41 per cent, taking it below most comparable OECD nations.

In practice the Coalition government found it difficult to meet the public deficit reduction targets, however, not least because they also sought to protect to some extent some key areas of welfare spending, such as the NHS and education in schools. Nevertheless, the return of a Conservative government in 2015 meant that by the mid-2010s the impact of neoliberalism on the politics of welfare in the UK was clearly established, with public expenditure on welfare the main target for plans to reduce the public sector deficit by cutting spending rather than raising taxation.

In the twentieth century the key factors that underpinned the development of welfare were the Fabian arguments for comprehensive protection through the state and Beveridge’s call to use public services to rid the country of social evils; these led to the creation of a welfare state. At the beginning of the twenty-first century support for the welfare state has been challenged by a neoliberal discourse of individual choice and responsibility, and market competition. The key questions that underpin welfare development are now different: critics ask whether we can afford to maintain a welfare state to respond to ever growing and more complex welfare needs, and whether comprehensive public services are not removing individual choice and responsibility from citizens in meeting their welfare needs.

It is the contrast between these two viewpoints, and the ideological and political arguments that lie behind them, that I take up in this book. I want to revisit some of the core arguments for the provision of welfare that lie behind these different perspectives, and some of the different forms that welfare provision can take in responding to these. This is organised and developed around discussion of some of the more practical questions that flow from these broader ideological choices:

• What do we mean by welfare?

• What are the main welfare issues?

• How should we deliver welfare?

• Where should planning and delivery of welfare take place?

• Who should benefit from welfare?

• What social and economic challenges does the provision of welfare face?

• Why do we need a new approach to collective action?

The sociological imagination

I approach these questions as a social scientist. That is, with a commitment to using theoretical analysis and empirical data to make sense of the social relations that shape our societies and our experiences of living in them. Many modern social scientists cite the book The sociological imagination by the American author C. Wright Mills as an inspiration to their endeavours to understand social relations.

Wright Mills was Professor of Sociology at Columbia University in New York, and he wrote the book shortly before he died in 1959 (it has subsequently been republished in 2000) at the relatively young age of 45, after a decade in which he had produced a number of influential books on American society, offering a radical challenge to much of the then social science establishment in the US. Wright Mills wanted to promote social science, of which sociology was only one part, because it brought together the private worlds of individuals and the public worlds of social relations. He talked about these as ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues’, and argued that the job of social scientists was to show how these were, in fact, different sides of the same coin; the means for doing this was the application of the sociological imagination. ‘The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations...

Table of contents

• Coverpage
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of boxes and figures
• About the author
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What do we mean by welfare?
• 3 What are the main welfare issues?
• 4 How should we deliver welfare?
• 5 Where should planning and delivery take place?
• 6 Who benefits from welfare?
• 7 What challenges does welfare face?
• 8 A new case for collective welfare
• References