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When Children
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Thirty years ago, we were talking 'welfare rights'. Now, 'welfare reform' is all the rage. But what does it mean for the UK to import the notion of 'welfare' - with whatever suffix - when the word has such a different meaning in the USA? I raise that question from the perspective of having served on CPAG's first welfare rights stall in 1968 and of having reflected often since then, with both British and American students, on the perpetual problems of US 'welfare'. So I am pleased to have been given the space in this foreword not just to extend an enthusiastic welcome to a well-researched book warning us against thoughtlessly importing 'welfare reform', but to unpack both of these words. If we are to address the muddle and confusion, in this regard, that the Blair Government has generated, we need to ask ourselves three questions:
We might use inverted commas, in anticipation of quibbles as to the boundaries of this 'welfare state', but there appeared to be consensus enough that it signalled a comprehensive provision - the more so, of course, if we endorsed the Titmussian [footnote 1] notion that two additional forms of 'welfare' were available to some through taxation and the workplace. True, 'welfare' did have another, less embracing, meaning. At the local level of personal social service delivery, we had Welfare Departments; and Karen Lyons recalls how front-line workers in other services were also perceived as 'the welfare'. Although this might mean that the narrow, departmental meaning could detract from the wider concept, [footnote 2] it seemed legitimate, nevertheless, to talk of 'welfare' both generically and in a particular area of service provision. Americans, meanwhile, were using the term to refer to the public assistance benefits discussed in Chapter 2 below. They might refer to 'social welfare' when they wanted to embrace other benefits and services of what we would call a 'welfare state', but their 'welfare', plain and simple, was what we called 'assistance'. And that was the sense in which we carelessly adopted, in the late 1960s, the language of 'welfare rights'. When I say 'we', I include myself [footnote 3] among those who followed Tony Lynes [footnote 4] down the road of using an American term as if it made sense in a British context. The National Welfare Rights Organisation (NWRO) had been established, in the USA of the 1960s, to campaign for "More Money Now!". [footnote 5] The 'welfare rights' being asserted by the NWRO were to entitlements set out in the regulations at state level - New York was the leading case - to public assistance. In a word, 'welfare'. If we were to assert similar 'rights' in the UK - leaving aside for the moment the matter of there being few rights in the discretion-dominated, regulation-free system - then it made little sense to call them 'welfare'. But 'welfare rights' was a catchy slogan and it caught on. Coincidentally, 'Welfare Departments' were abolished in the Seebohm reforms of the l970s. It was as if we suddenly substituted a new narrow meaning for 'welfare.' Pretty soon, CPAG was deciding to follow the NWRO example of publishing a guide to this kind of 'welfare'. If they were subject to unregulated discretion, then we could hardly call them 'rights.' So, starting in 1969, the Group published what soon became its annual National Welfare Benefits Handbook - as distinct from a parallel series of guides to contributory (and other non means-tested) benefits as of 'right'. True, these two guide books have of late become one - with a CD-rom version for good measure - and the Welfare Benefits Handbook now covers both means-tested and non-means-tested benefits. But this reflects a publishing decision about the best way CPAG could get its guides to its users. It in no way detracts from the distinction between universal and selective benefits that remains as fundamental to CPAG's position as it always was. Aneurin Bevan's boast, of 1948, that assistance would 'wither away' was never realised, although both major parties pretended, to differing degrees over the next 30 years, that it remained an objective - if not achievable by improving the provisions of social insurance, then perhaps by amalgamating the tax system with benefit in some form of 'negative income tax' or by extending work-based pensions (thus extending the coverage of Titmuss's other 'welfare states'). What nobody seemed yet to be suggesting was that assistance benefits might be reduced - or at least withdrawn from certain categories of claimant. Except, of course, from the workshy and the fraudulent. If the age-old witch-hunt to deny benefits to the 'sturdy beggar' had never gone away, [footnote 6] the British were not yet in the business - long-established in Southern states of the USA especially - of 'periodic campaigns' to invent and enforce rules that would 'purge the rolls'. [footnote 7] Then, the more you studied America's 'welfare', the more regularly you would read of 'welfare reform', almost as if the two words had become one. It seemed to be something US politicians could repeatedly promise as if previous failures could not possibly indicate that there were serious obstacles to reform. When, I wondered, had these promises begun? Chapter
2 By 1971, of course, there were those, on either side of the Atlantic, who were envisaging that this end could best be achieved not by improving the protection of insurance but, as I have intimated, by some form of negative income tax. While Cohen opted for a structural solution, he was concerned to avoid the alternatives of what we might call 'urging' or 'purging' that were being championed by those American reformers for whom the receipt of welfare indicated individual fallibility. In the first of these options, new incentives must be found to persuade recipients to leave welfare for what would increasingly be called 'workfare.' If those inducements failed, then the rolls would have to be 'purged' in some other way. It was this notion of 'purging' that forcibly struck me - initially upon reading Piven and Cloward in 1971 and then from my first sight of American welfare in action in 1977 - as a feature that especially distinguished the American approach from the British way of doing things. Give or take the spasmodic witch-hunts of the workshy or the anti-fraud campaigns of various kinds, with which CPAG was very soon concerned, [footnote 9] the British focus was more clearly fixed on the 'true welfare reform' that had attracted Cohen. If there were too many Britons on assistance, this represented a failure not of poor people, but of social insurance (or, for some dreamers, a failure to 'simplify' by somehow combining tax and benefit systems). The notion that the British rolls might likewise be purged has not appeared suddenly on the Blair Agenda. The Americanization of the British approach to assistance has been more insidious than that. Without attempting to trace that process step-by-step, we might venture back to 1954, when the Phillips Committee reported on the first 'crisis' in post war income maintenance. That Committee was concerned with the basic paradox that was by then presenting itself in the claiming behaviour of retired people. On the one hand, too many were applying for National Assistance: this was not the residual benefit that Aneurin Bevan had envisaged. Yet it could also be said that too few were applying: of those eligible for this not-so-residual benefit, too many were reluctant to claim (for reasons that were to be elucidated in other reports that followed in the 1960s [footnote 10] and which were to become a feature of a European concern with 'take-up' - an issue that receives so little attention in the USA). The Phillips Committee essentially advocated a two-pronged policy: keep down the numbers on assistance, by improving the coverage of insurance; but accept also that something needed to be done to improve the image of assistance. [footnote 11] Both major political parties knew what they wanted to do in the first regard: introduce graduated pensions - and, subsequently, graduated benefits for other categories of claimant. The image-changing took a little longer; but eventually, after further investigation into the nature and extent of the assistance deterrent, the Ministry of Social Security Act 1968 introduced some of the cosmetic changes that would make it less stigmatic to 'claim' (no longer 'apply for') assistance benefits. [footnote 12] It will be noticed that, 20 years after the Assistance and Insurance legislation of 1946-48, the focus was largely on one claimant group: pensioners. Predominantly female, of course. And white. This was very different from the American emphasis. The concern there was also with women, but they were young single parents and disproportionately black (of which more in Chapter 3). It cannot be stressed too strongly that the first 15 to 20 years of the UK's post war debate on poverty and income maintenance - until a 'rediscovery of poverty' in 1965 that was essentially about child poverty - concerned older people. [footnote 13] The USA was a much younger population and a generation behind the UK in contemplating the 'burden' of old age. By this time, the cross-party pretence, among British politicians, that they would somehow restore assistance to its 'safety net' role had been exposed by civil servants for what it was. Their Social Assistance report of 1978 - commissioned by a Labour Government worried about the growth in public expenditure generally and of the demand-led benefits budget in particular [footnote 14] - made it plain: Governments would not find the money to spend on the universalist programmes that would keep the assistance rolls to the size envisaged 30 years earlier; let's stop pretending that assistance would ever play that residual role and accept that it was now playing a 'mass role.' In order that this role might be affordable, social assistance needed, the civil servants reasoned, to shed some of its more expensive habits: let local government attend to the rents of poor tenants; while labour-intensive discretion should be replaced by the kind of 'itemized' entitlements that American welfare rights activists had vigorously pursued. [footnote 15] This Americanization was ironic in that the leading British expert (the UK's Cohen-equivalent and the only authority acknowledged in Social Assistance) had warned against such a legalistic approach to discretionary extras. [footnote 16] But down that road the incoming Thatcher Government eagerly skeltered, rushing through under-refined regulations. [footnote 17] This 'reform' was short-lived. Too many wretched people claimed their legalized entitlements [footnote 18] and new rationing devices had to be found in the 1986 Act. By now, the Thatcher and Reagan administrations had each come to appreciate two 'rules' of income maintenance expenditure. Firstly, if you want to target benefits by resorting to more means-testing, then the biggest pot to aim at is the payment of universalist retirement pensions. Secondly, though, no Conservative or Republican government is that keen to alienate its older electorate. Plenty of these voters may want cuts in income maintenance, but not in their chunk of it. The grey vote was common cause in both countries. If you promise cuts in income maintenance budgets but retirement pensions are sacrosanct, then you are going to have to find a more vulnerable target. If, as I have been suggesting, this was familiar territory for American reformers, it was new ground for British politicians. To assist them in this journey, these policy-makers adopted another weapon from the US: a new terminology for blaming the victim. Charles Murray was the flavour of the decade and the mantra of the 'dependency culture' was catching on. [footnote 19] Benefits were to blame for people's poverty: so cut them to enable these people to escape poverty. As this creed began to be put into practice in several states of the USA - in ways described in Chapters 1-3 - the Conservative admirers in the UK of this American way were losing office to New Labour. The enthusiasm for welfare reform was not, however, lost. Tony Blair even appointed a Minister for Welfare Reform. And the Wisconsin reformers came to London in various guises. [footnote 20] It would have been hard enough to assess where any of this might be heading, without the confusion of language. What was the British reader to make of a politician's statement of intent that used 'welfare' to mean two or three different things? Robert Walker has blamed this tendency on the recruitment to Downing Street of US educated and influenced policy advisers and to a desire to find an alliteration with 'workfare'. [footnote 21] Maybe so - although Frank Field, the former CPAG Director who was to become the aforesaid Minister for Welfare Reform, has surely made a considerable contribution, starting in Opposition, to this terminological waywardness. Thus, the reader soon discovers that the 'welfare' referred to in the title of his 1995 book [footnote 22] was neither welfare in the strict American sense nor 'welfare' as in a 'welfare state'. For Field, a welfare state was a synonym for the income maintenance system, in which there was both 'insurance-based welfare' and 'means-tested welfare'. And Field wanted to see the former improved to rid the 'welfare state' of the poison of the latter - an objective loyal to his CPAG past; but wherever had he acquired such a vocabulary? His various forms of 'welfare' were never defined: you had to adjust to the novelty of the usage as you went along. That might not matter a great deal to many observers of the recent British debate. Like the authors of this book, though, I am less sanguine. If we are to understand the parameters of 'welfare reform' - whether as citizens being promised legislative change or as anti-poverty campaigners seeking to engage in a responsible debate - then unambiguous definitions do matter. Yet, confused usage has become epidemic. When Frank Field became the Minister for Welfare Reform, he continued to confuse the issue. And, we shall see, his Westminster colleagues, including the Prime Minister, tended to be just as haphazard. The more's the pity, since Field, the Minister, was soon contributing a fine point of language to this 'welfare' debate. Taking up his Government's promise of radical welfare reform, [footnote 23] he reasoned that, literally speaking, this meant that any changes should start from the roots, taking into account the values and culture that have shaped what is to be reformed. If we accept that premiss, then it surely follows that we should be wary of uprooting, from their own cultural history, the ideas and practices of other countries - which means, in the instant case, America. Chapter
3 From these two reports, we can glean two checklists - one of American approaches that could be replicated, if the will is there, in the UK; the other of Anglo-American differences that will stand more steadfastly in the way of such imports. The Social Security Committee was concerned that a fundamental difference - between the federal USA and the unitary UK - should not be used as an excuse for saying that British are less able than the Americans to experiment. Of course, the freedom of American states to do their own thing in many aspects of welfare administration means that they can learn from the trials and errors of each other. Driven by the populist imperative to 'get welfare out of Washington', [footnote 26] the states may effectively be conducting experiments whether they intend to or not. But that advantage of a federal system should not be used an excuse, the Social Security Committee reasoned, to avoid pilot projects in selected areas of the UK. [footnote 27] That plea sits well with Frank Field's crusade [footnote 28] for more local autonomy in benefit offices. On average, Field has calculated, [footnote 29] staff in area and local offices pay out £1m per employee per year and should have more say in the administration of those payments. Any such change will need to be accompanied - and the Select Committee agrees - by a change in 'bureaucratic culture'. [footnote 30] Mead takes this as axiomatic, apparently feeling no more need than the Committee to offer any evidence of what this involved, let alone how it was achieved. Whatever it may have taken in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the USA, nobody seems to be insinuating that British officials are inherently and irrevocably more resistant to change than their American counterparts. The British literature on benefit administration, developing from 1970s, [footnote 31] may suggest that office customs could be a serious obstacle. I might have been more convinced of this had I not witnessed, at close quarters, the remarkable change - seemingly at the flick of a training session or two - in the behaviour of the presenting officer at Social Security Appeal hearings, from vindictive adversary to helpful amicus curiae. But, if the bureaucratic culture is susceptible to change, how much more resistant might the popular culture be? We know, from endless polls, that public opinion can be extremely volatile. That does not tell us much, though, about what kind of articulate and influential majority might rally behind any particular aspect of US 'reform' that a British Government might propose to replicate. If we take the levels of demonstrations in Westminster - whether in the voting lobbies or on the pavements - as a guide to public concern, then it might be concluded that the Government is as free as ever to mess unemployed people around but that it may have over-estimated the willingness of the allegedly put-upon taxpayer to support sanctions on lone mothers and people with disabilities. As the Select Committee warned, any British consensus for change may be for one that entails taking fewer risks and creating fewer casualties than the American consensus has seemed willing to tolerate. [footnote 32] But if, as this book reminds us, Americans have been willing to punish 'welfare moms', will they continue to support sanctions against mothers once they appreciate that the victims are their children? If the sanctions are what the American electorate is believed to have voted for, then how 'horrified', asks the President of Bread for the World (quoted in Chapter 5) will 'decent people' be when they see the outcome? And what of decent people in the UK? How far down the less liberal US road, the authors ask, might they be prepared to go? The Westminster rebellions may give us a clue, especially when coupled with the expression of concern, by the Social Security Committee, about the 'potentially damaging' effects of the Wisconsin policy, whereby lone mothers are deemed eligible to restart work once their youngest child is 12 weeks old. [footnote 33] But, then, as Chapter 3 reminds us, British means-tested benefits have never been focused on lone parenthood in the way that American welfare has been. Noting this difference, [footnote 34] the Select Committee cites other clients - those who are unemployed or disabled - with which British reform will be necessarily concerned. Whichever client-group is being targeted, however, there is a common underlying theme: how much sooner might its members be dispatched back to the labour market? The British obstacles may be not only cultural but institutional. In the former regard, it is not just our more liberal concern to avoid 'casualties'; there is also the question (addressed by Karen Lyons) of how ready the British might be to develop an American attitude to life-long learning. [footnote 35] However well that point is taken and whatever the willingness of government to invest in programmes that really do re-equip its workless citizens for new opportunities - like those discussed in Chapters 4 and 5 - there remains the obstacle that worried the Select Committee: the British economy does not have the demand for labour that the American economy generates. [footnote 36] The Committee goes on, however, to qualify its own concern: thanks to an overall increase in employment opportunities and to particular shifts - as in the creation both of more temporary jobs and of more flexible work patterns - the UK now has 'the right opportunities to reform its social security system'. That conclusion seems less than self-evident. It is far from obvious how taking a temporary job as an alternative to a weekly guarantee of benefits can be described as 'social security'. And the IEA debaters, regardless of the perspective they were coming from, were far less sanguine about British prospects. For a start, Mead is concerned [footnote 37] that, even in the US, part-time jobs are an inadequate solution: full-time, permanent jobs are needed. The Minnesota mantra, quoted in Chapter 2, that 'any job is better than no job' will not wash: how can you enforce sanctions against non-workers, Mead asks, [footnote 38] if there is an inadequate supply of suitable jobs? And we would surely be concerned if and when parents were obliged (as in Chapter 3) to leave welfare for a sub-minimum wage. For Mead, though, the supply of jobs is more important than the problem of low pay - especially if the UK is tackling the latter with a Minimum Wage [footnote 39] - although he admits that unattractive pay contributes to the unsteadiness of employment with which he is principally concerned. Whether or not you agree with that appraisal, [footnote 40] there would appear to be considerable support for John Philpott's anxiety on behalf of jobless households who are 'excluded from the wider economy and society'. [footnote 41] While we may look with him to an improved economy that would offer hope and opportunities to these households, there is surely no gainsaying his conclusion that benefits offer many such Britons more security than work does. But there's the rub. American 'Social Security' serves deserving groups, while 'welfare' is the residuum for those with a less popular claim upon the public purse. While that same divide - in attitudes if not nomenclature - has long afflicted the British debate, 'social security' has continued to be offered to all manner of citizens who can prove 'need' - no matter that some must jump through tougher hoops than others and expect more limited awards. Some aspects of that security may have been undermined by successive governments - with the Thatcher administrations sometimes willing to demolish what their labour predecessors had been content merely to erode - but the Blair Government should mark seriously the cross-party concern, on the back benches, that British voters may be less ready than their American counterparts for an increase in social and economic in-security. Footnotes 1.
For the classic exposition of how 'fiscal welfare' and 'occupational
welfare' favour certain beneficiaries, see R M Titmus, 'The Social
Division of Welfare', in Essays on the 'Welfare State', Allen
& Unwin, 1958,Ch2.[back to text] Foreword from: |
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