Arguments for Welfare

The Welfare State and Social Policy

Paul Spicker

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786603012
• eBook ISBN: 9781786603036
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book makes the case for the welfare state. Nearly every government in the developed world offers some form of social protection, and measures to improve the social and economic well-being of its citizens. However, the provision of welfare is under attack. The critics argue that welfare states are illegitimate, that things are best left to the market, and that welfare has bad effects on the people who receive it. If we need to be reminded why we ought to have welfare, it is because so many people have come think that we should not.

Arguments for Welfare is a short, accessible guide to the arguments. Looking at the common ideas and reoccurring traits of welfare policy across the world it discusses:

·The Meaning of the 'Welfare State'

·The Moral Basis of Social Policy

·Social Responsibility

·The Limits of Markets

·Public Service Provision

·The Role of Government

With examples from around the world, the book explains why social welfare services should be provided and explores how the principles are applied. Most importantly, it argues for the welfare state's continued value to society. Arguments for Welfare is an ideal primer for practitioners keen to get to grips with the fundamentals of social policy and students of social policy, social work, sociology and politics.

Chapter One

Understanding the Welfare State

Some arguments are so obvious that no-one makes them. There is not much discussion about whether people should live in families, whether children should be educated, whether people should be able to buy food or whether there should be laws. There may be those who take a different view, but they are on the fringes. Their positions will be reviewed in passing, discussed in academic circles and occasionally someone experiments with alternatives, but the alternatives are not taken very seriously. The world we live in is taken for granted.

The provision of social welfare is different. On one hand, nearly every developed society is engaged to some degree with the issues of social protection. There are commonly occurring patterns of social need, and there is a constellation of benefits and services, typically covering old age, ill health and the interruption of earnings. Many independent groups and organisations have made arrangements for the provision of welfare, and in general there are complex, overlapping networks through which services are delivered. Beyond that, in every democratic society, government has also come to play a role in provision, sometimes providing services directly, but almost invariably recognising that it has some responsibility for the direction of welfare policy.

On the other hand, and despite the very generality of these arrangements, there is a chorus of dissent. The main focus of criticism has been about the idea that government should be involved at all. Many of the basic precepts of economic theory seem to argue against collective provision and distribution of goods. Arguments made against state welfare for hundreds of years – that people who receive welfare are a burden on others, that welfare encourages idleness, that it is wasteful – are frequently repeated, usually with the claim that even if welfare worked in the past, this time it’s different. Often welfare systems are deeply resented. If we need to be reminded why we ought to have welfare, it is because so many people have come to think that we should not.

THE WELFARE STATE

There are some widespread misconceptions about welfare, but it will be difficult even to discuss the issue without at least a shared vocabulary. The first problem lies with the term ‘welfare’ itself. Economists use the term to refer generally to people’s well-being, but that is not the main subject here. Part of the general argument for a welfare state is an argument for making things better. However, lots of things make people’s lives better – music, comedy, open countryside, books, gardening, shopping, dancing or messing around in boats – and welfare states do not have much to do with any of them. There are publicly funded activities in many countries which help people do some of these things – public broadcasters, parks, sports grounds, libraries and community theatres – and they are almost certainly better places to live because of it, because then people have choices for a good life that they would not otherwise have. This is not, however, the stuff that welfare states are made of. The main use of the word ‘welfare’ refers instead to the provision of a conventional range of services – systems that have been developed to safeguard vulnerable people in a range of contingencies. The activities of welfare states are typically concerned with health, social security, housing, education, employment support and social care. The people who are being supported, typically pensioners, children, people with disabilities and those who are unemployed, are people who have been identified as having needs that ought to be met through collective social arrangements.

Even within that discourse, people understand the terms differently. The dominant use of the term ‘welfare’ in the United States is focused on a relatively narrow group of services, mainly concerned with people of working age on very low incomes. That sense was hardly used in Europe fifteen or twenty years ago, but it has become more and more prevalent, especially in Britain. The most obvious difference in definitions is that the broader sense of the term includes provision for medical care, pensions, education, housing support and social care. It is not difficult to defend welfare in the narrow sense as well as in a broader sense, but quite apart from the arbitrariness of the definition, the restriction of the argument has had some pernicious effects. One is the deliberate separation of arguments for welfare where the legitimacy of public provision is generally accepted from others where it is not: publicly funded schooling is usually approved of, support for low-income families with children often is not. A second example is the distinction drawn between arguments for pensions and arguments for support for younger people who are unable to work, often presented as a difference between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’. There are few arguments for offering people a pension at sixty-five that cannot be made for supporting unemployed people aged fifty-eight. These distinctions create problems for practice too. Services which are confined to residual, stigmatised groups tend equally to be stigma-tised, complex and expensive, and treated as a ‘public burden’, and arguments against ‘welfare’ in these terms tend to be self-fulfilling.

The idea of the ‘welfare state’ is no clearer. Titmuss complained that it was an “indefinable abstraction”.¹ At times, the idea seems to be used to describe any arrangements that happen to be made. If all modern states are welfare states, Veit-Wilson complains, the word ‘welfare’ is not saying anything – “the term ‘welfare’ becomes redundant and mystifying noise.”²

The idea of the welfare state originated in Bismarck’s Germany. The German system after Bismarck was a scheme of insurance for people who worked, and it hardly concerned itself with the poorest at all. The Beveridge report in the United Kingdom,³ although it was mainly concerned with the development of a national insurance scheme, was taken to represent an ideal system of government⁴ where people were provided for as a right of citizenship⁵ and covered ‘from the cradle to the grave’. The French system, sometimes thought of as a fusion of principles from Bismarck and Beveridge,⁶ actually did something quite different: aiming to include as many people as possible in solidaristic and mutualist schemes, but tending to leave out those at the bottom, the ‘excluded’, until the system was reformed in the 1980s. The Swedish system, which for many has become paradigmatic of what a welfare state could achieve, used mutualist and occupational structures to pursue objectives of solidarity and social equality.

The academic literature on welfare states often describes them in terms of normative models. The best-known example, though there are lots of others, is the work of Gøsta Esping-Andersen. Esping-Andersen classifies three main types of ‘welfare régime’. The ‘liberal’ regimes, including the United States and the United Kingdom, are market-oriented and offer welfare on a residual basis, as a safety net, in the assumption that most people will deal with issues through their own resources. The corporatist regimes, such as Germany and France, have pressed welfare into the service of the economy, organising its delivery through integrating it with representations of employers, trades unions and other key agencies. The social democratic regimes, exemplified by the Scandinavian countries, have ‘decommodified’ services, organising them institutionally in terms that depend on public provision rather than markets.⁷

There are many problems with this approach.⁸ The field is littered with ‘black swans’ – exceptions to the confident generalisations that régime analysis depends on. Australia is not ‘liberal’ in the sense of restricting social intervention, but ‘radically redistributive’.⁹ If Britain is ‘liberal’, the universal health service does not fit the mould. France is not just a cross between other systems; it has a distinctive model in its own right.¹⁰ Several writers have tried to expand the number of models to take into account the bewildering number of exceptions. The attempt is doomed to failure; there are simply too many variations to be fitted into the boxes available. Welfare systems are not a unified whole: ‘welfare’ is a catch-all term that may or may not include education, pensions or, depending on whether it is done publicly or privately, health care. Talking about ‘welfare states’ is no reason to suppose that the same principles will apply across all these fields at the same time.¹¹ The neat categorisations collapse when the reality is examined: “the devil is in the detail.”¹²

It is probably more helpful to think of welfare states in terms of their ‘family resemblance’. In a family, there are often strong likenesses, but people can resemble each other in different ways, and the more distant relatives may not resemble each other directly at all. The United Kingdom is more like Sweden when it emphasises rights to health care and more like Australia when it deals with unemployment. France is more like Germany when it emphasises occupational status and more like Spain in its handling of education. And once we are resigned to think of welfare states as a broad cluster of approaches, it becomes possible to think in general terms about some of the characteristics that welfare states share.

These characteristics are not really what might be expected from the label of the welfare state, because they are not necessarily about the ‘state’ at all. The assumption made in many discussions is that the provision of welfare is the same thing as provision by government. In most countries, that is just not true. The normal pattern of welfare provision is a ‘mixed economy’, in which welfare is delivered through a combination of government, independent non-profit and mutualist services. The European welfare states depended heavily on the services provided by employers, trades unions and voluntary associations, and in many cases the ‘state’ came late to the party. The welfare states are characterised, first, by the processes that have led to the establishment of systems of mutual support; second, by the complexity of the range of supportive networks and the interplay among them; and third, by the issues and problems faced by governments in adapting to such systems. Social policy is a combination of policies, practices and institutional approaches developed by a wide range of actors, not only by government; and a welfare state is not so much a pattern of government provision as a complex set of social arrangements – a welfare system.

WHAT WELFARE STATES DO

Although there is no single model of the welfare state, there are some recurring themes: that welfare provision is intended to meet people’s needs, that it should offer social protection or that it should serve some other kinds of social purpose. The kinds of needs that are commonly met in welfare states include

•low income, especially through the interruption of earnings

•social care for older people and those with disabilities

•education for children, and sometimes for young adults

•medical care, primarily of the kind given in hospitals (provision for primary care and medical goods is more uneven), and

•provisions relating to public health, including drainage, sanitation and basic housing quality.

It is possible to see these as providing for ‘essentials’, but if so there is some arbitrariness in defining what is essential and what is not. The list does not include basic items like food, clothing or fuel – it tends to assume that if people need those things, they will be able to buy them. There are other things which are vitally important to people but have little to do with welfare provision – for example, love, friendship and emotional support. The activities are best understood as the product of conventional practice and policy transfer; countries have learned from each other what is expected.

There are some common understandings of problems across welfare states – retirement in old age is commonplace, and a lot of work has been done to arrive at international definitions of ‘unemployment’ – but other terms like ‘family policy’, exclusion, disability or homelessness mean different things in different places. It is broadly true that the largest and most important group identified in most welfare states ...

Table of contents

• 1 Understanding the Welfare State
• 2 The Moral Basis of Social Policy
• 3 Benefitting Other People
• 4 Individualism and Self-Interest
• 5 The Limits of the Market
• 6 Providing Public Services
• 7 The Role of Government
• 8 Welfare as a Way of Realising Other Values
• 9 Policy for Society
• 10 Does Welfare Have Bad Consequences?
• 11 Why Welfare?
• Bibliography
• About the Author