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    Changing Directions of the British Welfare State
    Changing Directions of the British Welfare State
    Changing Directions of the British Welfare State
    Ebook334 pages4 hours

    Changing Directions of the British Welfare State

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    This is a unique and timely survey of the evolving priorities of the British welfare state since its inception in the late 1940s, with an emphasis on how current and future aims and features of welfare provision compare with the ambitions of its original architects. In this book, 15 commentators, including prominent academic experts in the field, and also members of think tanks, charities and campaigning organisations - with a foreword by the BBC's Huw Edwards, explore themes such as health, education, housing, gender, disability and ethnic diversity. The result of this study is a rich, critical and thought-provoking exploration of the legacy and prospects of the welfare state - worth reading by anyone with an interest in debates on how a modern society should meet the needs of its citizens.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Wales Press
    Release dateNov 15, 2012
    ISBN9781783165513
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      Book preview

      Changing Directions of the British Welfare State - Gideon Calder

      PART 1

      THE ‘FIVE GIANTS’

      1

      WANT

      ‘What the British people desire’: the rise and fall of insurance-based social security

      Peter Kenway

      Introduction: want and the welfare state

      To ask, after the passing of its sixtieth anniversary, how far the British welfare state has achieved its original aims with respect to the abolition of ‘want’ was to ask a question with acute contemporary relevance. For at the start of 1999, a still new Labour prime minister declared the goal of eliminating child poverty within a generation. The fact that Labour’s principal tool for doing this was the welfare state means that, looking back after the 2010 general election, we are in a position to offer a post-mortem on this new attempt to reach the old goal.

      This new adaptation of the play whose original script was written by Beveridge and his co-founders is both a homage to them and a challenge. It is a homage because the modern attempt to end child poverty shares the founders’ view not only that want exists and that its existence is intolerable, but also that alongside employment, a state-directed system of income transfers is the key to solving the problem. And it is a challenge not only because the fact that the adaptation is necessary at all is a sign that the old attempt had failed, but also because the rewriting itself suggests serious defects. What makes a contemporary assessment of the 60-year-old scheme of topical rather than just historical interest is that the challenge works both ways. For while the heavily revised nature of the modern attempt to end want may represent a reproach to the original, so does a coherent, vigorous original represent a standard against which the modern attempt can be measured.

      This chapter is divided into three sections. The first examines the plan for ending want as set out in the 1942 Beveridge Report (Beveridge, 1942). As well as showing what was meant by ‘want’, it explains the main features of the scheme of social insurance by which want was supposed to be abolished. It also tries to offer some insight into the feel of the report and the context in which it appeared. The second section examines how the plan was put into effect through Acts of Parliament introduced early in the life of the post-war government. Subsequent developments over the life of the welfare state are then presented using a three-period framework, corresponding to a quarter century when the ‘Beveridge consensus’ held followed by two periods of equal length, the first of which saw the breakdown of the old consensus and the second the emergence of a new consensus. Drawing on this material, the third section offers conclusions to a number of key questions about the success of the welfare state, both in its original and its new forms, in abolishing want.

      The Beveridge Report

      Social insurance and allied services

      Formally speaking, the Beveridge Report contained the findings of the Inter-departmental Committee on Social Insurance and Allied Services. Appointed in 1941, the committee was asked ‘to undertake, with special reference to the inter-relation of the schemes, a survey of the existing schemes of social insurance and allied services, including workmen’s compensation, and to make recommendations’ (Beveridge, 1942: para. 1). If these terms of reference appear mundane or prosaic, the fact that the report stood in the name of Sir William alone shows that this was far from so:

      All the members of the Committee other than the Chairman are civil servants. Many of the matters dealt with in the Report raise questions of policy, on which it would be inappropriate for any civil servant to express an opinion except on behalf of the Minister to whom he is responsible; some of these matters are so important as to call for decision by the Government as a whole. (Ibid.: para. 4)

      Yet, the fact that something so portentous as a scheme to abolish want is born within a report on insurance reform is problematic. For example, the report is certainly aimed at the abolition of want, which is defined, measured and explained. But why want should be defined as it was or why its abolition should be a proper object for public policy is barely discussed.

      The report also devotes little attention to the issue of why the method chosen for achieving this end should be a scheme of social insurance rather than something else. With hindsight, this looks like a serious weakness in view of the subsequent decline in political support for the insurance principle in favour of the alternative of means-tested assistance (to use the 1940s terminology). Yet, in a report whose very subject is the reform of insurance, such an evaluation is obviously very difficult. The report deals briskly with differences of opinion. Where such differences are reported, they are done so briefly and even-handedly, but when this happens, the report moves swiftly to accept some and reject

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