For Good

The Church and the Future of Welfare

Wells, Rook

• Éditeur: Canterbury Press
• Année: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786220257
• Sujet: Theology & Religion
• Sous-sujet: Faith & Lived Religion

It is often claimed that local churches provide a significant proportion of social care today. This important new study considers the reality of the church's involvement to offer compelling and concrete recommendations for the future. It proposes a transformational model of welfare that breaks free from the default approach of 'eradicating the five giant evils – squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease'. Instead the authors focus on fostering five assets – relationship, creativity, partnership, compassion, and joy – and empowering people to regain control of their lives.

1
A Vision for Church Social Action

Introduction

Seventy years ago a revolution took place in the United Kingdom. The state became the church. The state didn’t take over worship, preaching, prayer and Bible study; but it did assume responsibility for a lot of what the church used to do:

• educating the young
• caring for the sick
• supporting those in distress.

The churches thought this was a wonderful thing. These vital parts of the nation’s life were now in the hands of those who could pay for them sufficiently, distribute them universally and run them efficiently; and the church could get back to what it was primarily called to do. Which was what, exactly? Deprived of the outward-facing and compassionate ingredients that consistently renewed their life and diversified their make-up, the churches gradually found their purpose and membership narrowing to an increasingly introverted and self-serving agenda. By concentrating on personal faith and spirituality, the churches denied themselves the lifeblood that social engagement had long given them.

Thus the revolution, as the last 70 years have demonstrated, was not altogether great for the church. Meanwhile the new state/church filled a vast place in the popular imagination, responsible not just for order and security but for well-being and flourishing. If it is becoming apparent that the revolution was not entirely good for the church, it is ever clearer that the revolution wasn’t entirely good for the state either. Right now the state is having second thoughts and isn’t at all sure it wants to be the church any more. This creates a challenge, but also an opportunity for the churches. Seventy-five years after the Beveridge Report it’s time to wonder what a readjustment of the post-war settlement might look like.

Falling out of love

The idea that people in need should be the responsibility not just of their wider families, not simply of their local neighbourhoods, not only of churches and those who make their compassion publicly known, but of the state, is a relatively recent one. The problems people identify in the welfare state today rehearse all the reasons why its adoption was so long delayed: it’s expensive, it’s impersonal and, to the extent that it discourages thrift and diligence and encourages dishonesty and indolence, it’s counterproductive.

It took one great push and a captivating idea to create the welfare state. In the aftermath of the hungry 1930s, and amid the sacrifices of war, William Beveridge identified what he called the five great evils that a reform of social insurance would seek to eradicate. They were Want, Idleness, Ignorance, Disease and Squalor. What Beveridge was aiming for was what he called ‘co-operation between the State and the individual’.

From the outset the Church of England fell in love with the welfare state. Archbishop William Temple said of his friend William Beveridge’s report that it was ‘the first time anyone had set out to embody the whole spirit of the Christian ethic in an Act of Parliament’. The welfare state was extraordinarily popular at its foundation, and has remained so for most of its life. When, at the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics, the National Health Service was portrayed as the climax of British history, it came as a surprise but nonetheless struck a chord. It highlighted the quasi-religious place the NHS holds in the imagination of much of the population. And it indicated how crucial a role the welfare state has played in Britain’s sense of itself as a place where no one falls utterly through the safety net, and how, for the most part, Beveridge’s most basic aims have indeed been met.

Beveridge would without question be gratified to see the following:

• While economic inequality is much greater than it was 70 years ago, 1940s-scale want is rare.
• Likewise, while unemployment is significant and low-paid, unrewarding jobs are widespread, the swathes of idleness that Beveridge witnessed in the Great Depression have not been repeated.
• Again, in relation to ignorance, there is a real issue of the number of young people not in education, employment or training, and inequality skews opportunity for far too many; but the levels of educational attainment are way beyond the imagination of Rab Butler, whose 1944 Education Act coincided with the Beveridge reforms.
• As to disease, the National Health Service is not generally well equipped to address chronic complaints such as heart disease or depression, the increasing isolation of elderly people lies beyond the scope of medical solutions, and the idea that healthcare would get cheaper as people got healthier now seems an absurd pipedream; yet the health of the nation is immeasurably stronger and people live significantly longer than they did in the 1940s.
• As regards squalor, Britain remains critically short of housing, and homelessness, crime and drug addiction are widespread; but in general the living conditions of the nation are immeasurably more comfortable than those our great-grandparents knew.

Let us be clear: these are huge achievements, ones that could not have been made in any other conceivable way, and certainly ones that could never have been imagined had welfare been treated in the piecemeal, unsystematic way that preceded the 1940s reforms. The people of the United Kingdom are rightly proud of what the welfare state has achieved.

So why has Britain fallen out of love with the welfare state? The reason is that the system of benefits is based on two things we all want to do and assumes one thing we all have to do. The problem is we can’t do all three of these things simultaneously, and social changes have made that more glaringly obvious than it was in 1942.

What we all want to do and what we yet have to do

The first thing we all want to do is to target resources to those in most need. When you meet a family that’s been made homeless or you have a friend who’s debilitated by chronic illness, you think, ‘This is exactly what the welfare state is all about.’ But there are a number of problems with this. One is that working out and proving who’s in most need is a complex and laborious business. While civil servants are trying to establish whether people’s needs are genuine, those people can sink without trace. This is the territory of means-testing. Means-testing sounds like it’s fair and reasonable and economic, but in practice it becomes a discouragement to working long hours and a disincentive to being honest about your resources. The benefit culture becomes an inverse beauty parade where you hide your assets and steer away from getting on the ladder of work because, at the outset, that work may be underpaid.

Another problem with targeting those most in need is that it exacerbates a culture of dependence. Populist politicians like to talk about balancing the stick with the carrot and tend to distinguish between the deserving and undeserving poor. But that rather misses the point. The point is that if you know a safety net is there to catch you, you’re more likely to walk across a tightrope. But walking across a tightrope is actually a dangerous thing to do. By providing a safety net, the state demotivates people from making prudent and far-sighted provision for themselves, and from avoiding situations or life choices that place them, their households and their futures on a tightrope. The paradoxical result is that the larger and stronger the safety net is, the more it’s likely to be needed.

And that leads us to the second thing we all want to do, which is incentivize and reward the values the Victorians held dear – honest working, caring and saving. This was Beveridge’s central concern. The crucial words in the 1942 report were his insistence that the state ‘should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and his family’. In Galatians 6 Paul says, ‘Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfil the law of Christ.’ This is the first principle of the welfare state. But just three verses later, Paul says, ‘All must carry their own loads.’ This is the second principle. The trouble is it somewhat contradicts the first principle, in theory and in practice.

The key to this second area is the Victorian word ‘thrift’. Life has many rainy days, and the wise thing to do is to save up for them. Saving up for them is such a good thing to do it makes sense for the state to encourage the practice, and quite probably for employers to encourage the practice too, by investing in a scheme that can bail people out when they get in trouble and can continue to benefit them in retirement. This is the logic of contributory insurance. The trouble is that this changes the nature of the state from a hospital that cares for people indiscriminately when they’re wounded to a bank that they expect to reward them with interest for what they’ve put in. It turns a population of citizens inhabiting a covenant into an association of consumers asserting a contract. It’s psychologically powerful, and democratically attractive, because it affirms that the welfare state is for everyone – and so it highlights one of the primal values in our nature: fairness. But life isn’t fair. The whole starting point of the welfare state is that we want to live in a society where those whose lives go terribly (and especially economically) wrong don’t drown by falling through the net. To go through your whole life working hard and paying taxes while your neighbour with chronic problems and terrible luck pays no taxes and receives a tide of benefits may not be fair; but it may still be just, and the likelihood is you’d rather be in your own shoes than theirs.

Despite the anomalies and inconsistencies of these two desires, government policy managed until relatively recently to keep them both more or less in harness and still leave the public proud of the system they embodied. But there’s an inbuilt flaw. Advances in clinical medicine mean a huge swathe of the national budget goes on more and more sophisticated kinds of healthcare; and greater public health means people live much longer and spend an enormously increased proportion of their life drawing a pension rather than earning a wage. All of that still roughly holds together until economic stagnation and unemployment reduce the number of people paying taxes and increase the number relying on benefits.

And that brings us to the one thing our welfare system needs to do, and that is to pay for itself. The early abandonment of contributory insurance in favour of means-testing created a situation where benefits were paying out more than they were taking in. The result is that, whereas originally social security payments constituted 10 per cent of the national budget, today they have risen to 30 per cent. Instead of covering this cost by raising taxes, governments have borrowed. Today the deficit is so large that servicing it costs as much as the state spends on education. The conclusion is simple: we can’t afford to harness the two anomalous commitments of the welfare state any longer. The sick, the unemployed, the chronically disabled, the low-paid and the elderly are as needy as ever: but meeting those needs is bankrupting the whole nation.

What might the churches think and what should the churches do? It’s clearly not enough just to complain every time the government tinkers with the benefits system. It’s more appropriate to recognize that in celebrating the welfare state the churches have affirmed our moral need as a nation to care for one another. But they have underwritten an assumption that the majority of that care can be subcontracted to the state. In theory that should make that care more systematic, comprehensive and effective. But in practice it enhances a culture in which our primary connection to each other is economic and in which our bonds with one another are ones of utility, rather than of trust and tenderness. We are entitled strangers rather than grateful comrades.

It’s time for a new configuration of business, voluntary sector, claimant, wider society and state engagement with poverty and need. It’s not necessarily the church’s place to prescribe a plan or budget for welfare reform. Instead it seems more appropriate to revisit William Beveridge’s original vision. Beveridge identifies the five evils of Want, Idleness, Ignorance, Disease and Squalor. In doing so he assumes the rest of society is more or less fine, and the resources of the state should be directed to addressing the problems of those who are struggling. There are a number of things one might like to question about that starting assumption.

From deficit to asset

Beveridge starts with deficits rather than assets. In other words, he sees in people what they are not, rather than what they are. He can scarcely avoid a template of what a ‘normal’ or well-functioning person should be, and subtract from that the evils of Want, Idleness, Ignorance, Disease and Squalor. But from the churches’ point of view, people are not primarily recipients of the attentions of others or the state. They are primarily persons in their own right. The secret of life, as the churches understand it, is not to secure or amass desirable comforts or accomplishments. It is to turn disadvantage into opportunity, transform challenges into learning, glean wisdom from hardship, and build character through adversity. ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’ may be a cliché, but it has become so because it articulates that even the most distressing dimensions of life can be turned into assets that develop virtue and enhance resourcefulness. That cliché also hints at a different view of a fulfilled life: not so much one surrounded by security and contentment, but one of constant challenges, the encountering and sometimes overcoming of which constitute reward and satisfaction. Life is very seldom about arrival: it’s almost always about being on the way, and thus about the lessons learned, the friendships formed and the discoveries made while en route.

Beveridge was writing during the Second World War. Everyone longed for the war to be over. But the war showed people what they had in common, how much they needed one another, what skills and gifts from each member of the community turned out to be unexpectedly vital, what it’s like to work for a common cause, and how personal setback is transformed when swept into a larger narrative. Peace brought many blessings, but it didn’t give those things. And neither did the welfare state.

So half the problem of Beveridge, as the churches might see it, is that he builds on the sand of what isn’t there rather than the rock of what is there – the judgement of deficit rather than the appreciation of asset. The other half of the problem is that he sees Want, Idleness, Ignorance, Disease and Squalor as problems to be fixed rather than indications of a deeper social impoverishment. Fixing such problems simply turns up other problems; alongside eradicating evils, what society needs to do is to strengthen its deeper goods. In short, addressing deficits is not the same as cultivating assets. The churches can never be happy simply with eradicating deficits as a social aspiration. Want is, without question, a scar on society: but simply providing food, shelter and clothing does not itself produce fulfilment, well-being or flourishing. Idleness is desperately wasteful and deeply humiliating: but poorly paid, monotonous, unreliable work that contributes to little or no social good is far from ideal also. Ignorance is a prison: but education is about much more than knowledge transfer; it’s about unleashing the often-hidden potential of each person by inspiring their imagination, enlivening their mind, empowering their skills, drawing on their experience and disciplining their desires. Disease is a curse: but health is much more than (and not restricted to) the absence of sickness: it’s about exercising one’s full faculties and being a blessing to others. Squalor is a symptom and cause of the other evils: yet its opposite is not simply cleanliness, but pride, dignity, aspiration and hope.

The point is this: eradicating Want, Idleness, Ignorance, Disease and Squalor is a worthy aim for the state, but for the churches it cannot be the goal; it is certainly a plausible route towards the goal – but even should that task be completed, the goal may still prove elusive. For the churches, the goal surely must be flourishing (not abolishing want); fulfilment (not abolishing idleness); inspiration (not abolishing ignorance); being a blessing (not abolishing disease); hope (not abolishing squalor). The way to these aspirations often includes eradicating the corresponding evils, but eradicating the evils by no means guarantees the goods, and sometimes goods can be reached without evils being entirely eradicated – as the experience of the ‘war spirit’ showed. The churches have no particular expertise in eradicating the evils but they have profound investment in affirming, upholding and cultivating the goods. Their name for the goods is the Kingdom of God.

What attention to the goods shows is that these goods are not uniquely (nor even especially) prevalent in the circles of society largely free from Want, Idleness, Ignorance, Disease and Squalor. As the churches see it, it is the absence of such goods, more than the presence of assorted evils, that constitutes the malaise of society, such as it is. The evils will always, in some degree, be with us. But those evils need not obscure the goods, and goods can grow and be experienced even (sometimes especially) in the midst of those evils. For example, in the wake of a terrorist incident or racial attack, community and faith leaders may be stirred to assemble with one another across conventional divides and find common causes, shared projects and significant values to promote together. Likewise in the midst of a spate of burglaries, residents of a neighbourhood may gat...