The Student's Companion to Social Policy

Pete Alcock, Tina Haux, Margaret May, Sharon Wright, Pete Alcock, Tina Haux, Margaret May, Sharon Wright

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781118965948
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This fully updated and expanded edition of the bestselling Student's Companion to Social Policy charts the latest developments, research, challenges, and controversies in the field in a concise, authoritative format.

• Provides students with the analytical base from which to investigate and evaluate key concepts, perspectives, policies, and outcomes at national and international levels
• Features a new section on devolution and social policy in the UK; enhanced discussion of international and comparative issues; and new coverage of 'nudge'-based policies, austerity politics, sustainable welfare, working age conditionality, social movements, policy learning and transfer, and social policy in the BRIC countries
• Offers essential information for anyone studying social policy, from undergraduates on introductory courses to those pursuing postgraduate or professional programmes
• Accompanied by updated online resources to support independent learning and skill development with chapter overviews, study questions, guides to key sourcesand career opportunities, a key term glossary, and more
• Written by a team of experts working at the forefront of social policy

Part I
Concepts and Approaches

1
What is Social Policy?

Pete Alcock

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Overview

• Social policy is the use of policy measures to promote the welfare of citizens and social well-being.
• It is also the term for the academic study of these measures, having changed its name from ‘social administration’ to reflect a broadening concern with the theory as well as the practice of welfare arrangements.
• The welfare reforms in the UK in the period following the Second World War were critical in establishing the context for subsequent policy development.
• Social policy analysts adopt a range of theoretical perspectives, leading to varying conclusions about the viability and desirability of different measures and interventions
• Much social policy has been developed by national governments, but the role of international and global agencies has become more important, as have moves to shift policy to local and community levels.

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The Subject of Social Policy

Social policy has a dual meaning. It is used to refer to the actions taken by politicians and policymakers to introduce or amend provisions aimed at promoting individual welfare and social well-being. Social policy is what societies do to promote welfare. However, it is also used to refer to the academic study of these policy actions and their outcomes. Students study social policy as an academic subject, perhaps in a single honours degree, or perhaps alongside other social science subjects such as sociology or politics, or as part of professional training for social work or nursing and a wide range of careers in public, commercial and voluntary organisations. In essence, social policy is both social action and the study of it.

The later chapters in this book explore in more detail some of the key concepts and perspectives that have underpinned the study of social policy, the major issues that inform policy development and the main areas of policy practice. Much social policy analysis concerns the actions of national governments; and most of the chapters focus on the national context of the UK. However, as is discussed in Part IV, since the turn of the century much policymaking in the UK has been devolved to the separate administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; and the national programmes pursued by the parliaments and assemblies there are increasingly different to the policies developed for England by the UK parliament at Westminster.

Social policy is not just a UK phenomenon, however. Most countries across the world have developed measures to promote the welfare of their citizens. Some, particularly in the developed West, follow similar patterns of public support to that found in the UK, although the organisational forms and political priorities differ significantly. In the global South and in East Asia, however, social policy often takes a very different form. The study of social policy includes the comparative analysis of these differences (and similarities) and the varying histories of policy development in countries across the world; and the chapters in Part X of this book take up some examples of this comparative and international research

This does not just involve exploring and comparing the different models of policy developed in different countries – sometimes referred to as welfare regimes. Comparative scholars also use statistical data gathered across different countries to analyse international trends in welfare arrangements. Such data are gathered by international bodies such as the Office for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and in Europe by the Commission of the European Union (EU); and have been used to explore to what extent social policies may be ‘converging’ on a common model, or to what extent economic pressures may be leading to reduced commitments to policy action – sometimes referred to as welfare ‘retrenchment’.

An introduction to some of these aspects of international and comparative analysis is provided in Chapter 63. And Chapter 64 explores another dimension of international policy development, the extent to which comparative analysis of different welfare regimes can be used to inform policy development in others, through ‘policy transfer’. International bodies like the OCED and EU do not just gather comparative data about social policy action, however. In the case of the EU, the Commission has the power to introduce policy measures that apply across all member states, as highlighted in Chapters 46 and 65. There are other international bodies seeking to influence policy developments on a global scale, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF); and, as discussed in Chapter 71, these agencies have become more powerful and influential in shaping social policy on an international scale.

The study of social policy therefore includes not just the actions of national governments and their impacts on the citizens living in their jurisdictions, but also the comparative analysis of different welfare regimes across the world, their influences on each other, and the role of international agencies seeking to shape policy development on a global scale. Although many of the chapters in this book focus on the UK, and in many cases England only, students of social policy will need to address the wider international dimensions introduced in the later chapters. The study of social policy in the UK, however, also needs to take account of both the history of policy development in this country and changes in its analysis, for to some extent current issues and current practices are a product of that historical journey.

The Development of Social Policy

Social policy action has a long history in the UK; for instance, the first Poor Laws were introduced in 1601 at the time of Elizabeth I (see Chapter 16). However, much recent policy development, in particular, public policy, has its roots in the political and policy debates of the early twentieth century and the reforms that followed from these.

At the centre of the arguments for public action at this time was the Fabian Society, established in 1884 to campaign for state intervention to tackle the social problems and economic inequalities which its members argued had failed to be addressed by the capitalist markets of nineteenth-century Britain. Leading members of the Society were Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Sidney was a civil servant who later became a Labour MP, and Beatrice served on the Poor Law Commission discussed below. The Fabians used research evidence, such as the pioneering work by Booth and Rowntree, whose research revealed that the extent and depth of poverty in the UK at the end of the nineteenth century were both serious and widespread. This challenged conservative political assumption that markets could meet the welfare needs of all; and the Fabians used it to promote policy intervention through the state to protect people where the market had failed them.

As Sidney Webb's role as a Labour MP revealed, however, the Fabians' academic arguments were closely linked to the establishment and growth of the Labour Party as the political vehicle through which policy innovation and reform through the state could be achieved. In fact, it was some time before the Labour Party gained political power, and it was the Liberal governments of the early twentieth century who introduced some of the first major state measures for social policy.

These early reforms to social policy were informed by the recommendations of a Royal Commission established in 1905 to review the Poor Laws, the mainstay of nineteenth-century welfare policy. The commissioners themselves could not agree on the right way forward and so they produced two separate reports:

• a Minority Report, which was largely the work of Beatrice Webb; and
• a Majority Report, which was largely the work of Helen Bosanquet, who, with her husband Bernard, was a leading figure in the Charity Organisation Society (COS), a body which coordinated voluntary action to relieve poverty.

Both reports stressed the need for reforms to improve welfare provision; but, whilst the Minority Fabian report saw the public provision of state services as the means of achieving this, the Majority COS report envisaged a continuing central role for voluntary and philanthropic activity. This debate about the balance between state and non-state provision of welfare continued to influence the development of social policy throughout the twentieth century, as the chapters in Part III reveal; and, as is discussed in subsequent chapters, the issue of securing the appropriate mix between public and other provision remains a key element in social policy planning.

In practice, however, it was the Fabian arguments of the Minority Report that largely won the day in the development of social policy in the early twentieth century. The Liberal government of Asquith and Lloyd George in the early twentieth century introduced a range of measures to provide public resources through the state to tackle the social and economic problems identified by the Fabian researchers (as is discussed in Chapter 17). What is more, academic study and research evidence were expanded to support this, in particular, by the establishment by the Webbs of the London School of Economics (LSE) and the incorporation within it of the COS's School of Sociology to form a new Department of Social Sciences and Administration. This was the first major academic base for the study of social policy. Its first new lecturer was Clement Attlee, who became prime minister in the reforming Labour government after the Second World War; and it remains a major centre for teaching and research on social policy today.

The Welfare State and the Welfare Consensus

The welfare reforms of the early twentieth century were followed in the middle of the century by what was probably the most important period of policy reform in the UK. As mentioned, a Labour government under the leadership of At...