State and Social Welfare - Essay Example

This paper argues that the UK welfare system has always contained a mixture of welfare providers, in which the and voluntary sectorhave played different parts at different historical junctures, even if the moving frontiers between the two sectors have been continuously challenged. The main analytical tools are based on the historical-institutionalist approach with an emphasis on both how the state controlled and regulated the voluntary sector through institutional adaptations, and how the voluntary sector opted to react through exit, loyalty and voice in response to state intervention. It is concluded that the historiography of the UK welfare system can be rewritten by varying but subsequent phases of social control dependent upon the different magnitude of political and economic power of the state and voluntary sector: legitimisation - mobilisation - cooptation - Integration. Introduction Social housing is a very significant part of the housing stock in the UK, accounting for about 25 percent of all housing. Social housing - consisting of local authority public housing and non-profit housing association dwellings - continues to provide accommodation to more than 5 million households, by no means all of them low income. Social housing remains important, and continues to have a substantial constituency - despite the loss of about four out of every ten local authority (council) dwellings to sales, transfers and demolitions over the past two decades (losses only partially offset by the increase in housing association dwellings), and despite the ostensible "residualisation" of social housing as the UK has been swept by the US-style idealisation and ideology of private speculative homeownership. It is now commonplace to note that organizations operating between the state and the market - variously labelled 'voluntary,' 'non-profit,' 'nongovernmental,' 'civil society' or 'third sector organizations' - have been rediscovered by politicians, academics and the public as a possible third way of a substitute for the statutory welfare service. From being an enclave on the margin of most social policy terrains, the various contributions of voluntary organisations have moved closer to the centre of current social policy debates and play an increasingly active role in its implementation. One reason for this rediscovery is the growing scepticism about the capacity of the state to deliver public services that satisfy user expectations and diverse citizen aspiration.1 Another reason is disillusionment with market solutions, whose difficulties and failings include the lack of attention they pay to socially excluded individuals and communities, and market's vulnerability to the changing economic environment in global economy. Overall, it can be argued that the rapid expansion of voluntary organizations in the Western welfare states took place in line with the dismantling of the universal idea of social welfare from the mid-1970s. Change in economy In 1900 the population Of united kingdom was around 38 million1 and gross domestic product (GDP) stood at just under 125 billion2 at constant 1995 market prices. The economy was more notably based upon trade and manufacturing: manufacturing represented 28 per cent of output; agriculture, forestry and fishing 11 per cent; and services 50 per cent. Looking at the labour market, the employment rate was 69 per cent, with 24 per cent in manufacturing and textiles, and 12 per cent in agriculture. Unemployment stood at around 3 per cent. Within this, the workforce was very much male dominated, with men representing 70 per cent of the active population. Britain in 2000 was a very different place. The days of Empire were gone. The population had increased by 50 per cent to 59 million;4 by comparison, GDP had risen fivefold to 800 billion, at constant 1995 market prices This increase in living standards was also visible in average weekly wages, which had risen to over 250 times their 1902 level while prices had risen 67 times.5 Manufacturing's importance had declined, representing only 14 per cent of employment and 22 per cent of output. Similarly, only 2 per cent of people worked in agriculture, forestry and fishing, which represented only 2 per cent of output. By comparison, services represented around 75 per cent of employment6 and 66 per cent of output. Government intervention had increased markedly with, for example, the development of the Welfare State and the National Health Service (NHS). Government expenditure as a proportion of GDP had increased from 15 per cent to around 40 per cent.7 Looking more generally at the labour market, the employment rate stood at 71 per cent, with unemployment at 4 per cent, as measured by the number of people claiming benefit. Female participation had increased greatly, with women representing 45 per cent of the active working-age population. By comparison, male participation was declining. The twentieth century was a period of substantial change for the UK. It saw among other things: two world wars; the rise and decline of trade unionism; the Great Depression; unemployment of up to 22 per cent; and great changes in social attitudes. There had also been great political change with the rise of the Labour Party at the expense of the Liberals. The political consensus had shifted over the century: first, to incorporate greater state provision of public services; and then more recently it moved back slightly with privatisation and the reduction in direct government intervention in industry. A similar, if more extreme, shift had been played out on a global scale with the rise and fall of communism in Eastern Europe. This article attempts to examine the links between these events and changes in the labour market over the century, and in particular in the changing nature of employment. Change in population Underlying the changes in the UK, and the UK labour market, patterns over the century have been changes in the population, most notably in migration, birth rates and life expectancy. Within this, the main change has come from the combination of falling birth rates and reduced mortality, which have led to an ageing population, with an increasing proportion of people of post-retirement age. Re-Inventing Citizenship The state plays a crucial role in how older people are perceived within a given society. From the point of view of a social role, the 'state' is seen in terms of performing the function of facilitating general economic activity, maintaining law and order and ensuring the legitimacy of social order. However, one of the transformations which has been taking place since 1979 to the present in the UK and elsewhere has been one in which 'citizenship' is changing its form from 'rights holder' to 'responsible consumer'. Historically, the advent of a welfare state meant that populations in a society such as 'the old' had services devised in order to meet their needs. For example, after 1945 in the UK, a welfare apparatus was set up to offer education, health care and pensions. By the 1970's the state became in 'crisis' due to a world economic recession. Consequently, in most advanced capitalist societies, the allocation of services and benefits became selective. When Thatcher came to power in 1979, the emphasis was not on 'citizen rights' but the efficiency concerns of the state. Responsibility for the well-being thus shifted from the power of the state to the individual. It demonstrates that the state places the onus of responsibility on the backs of individuals even though the social problems and fiscal processes are structural in nature - 'blaming approach'. Social capital as a cross-disciplinary concept Just as the convergence of policy discourses tends to simplify the explanation and solution for inequalities, in a convergence of academic disciplines, society is seen predominantly through the eyes of political economy; an approach which does not take account of the messiness, unpredictability and intricacies of social life. Traditionally, political economists have largely taken the view that in the choices they make individuals weigh up costs and benefits, so that human behaviour can then be predicted and statistically analysed. Sociology has a history of critical engagement with this position, suggesting that people act in the context of the structural forces that constrain them in relation to the way they understand themselves, and to the meanings that infuse their relationship to others and the world around them. The way these ideas are worked together highlights compatibility and downplays difference, so that any tensions that exist between the amalgamated ideas are not addressed. Political scientists and economists In framing their conceptualisation of the 'social', however, political scientists and economists have integrated aspects of functionalist sociology into their theoretical framework. Similar to functionalist sociology, social capital theory is thus concerned with the norms and values that shape social relations, social solidarity and social order or cohesion. However, as Gamarnikow and Green point out (1999a), in the transition from sociology to social capital theory, there is a key shift in the understanding of causality. Functionalist sociology, embedded in the modern context, has an integrated understanding of social and economic systems and relations, and the social inequalities they produce. Social capital explanations tend to view society as prior to and causative of the production of the economy. Housing-welfare state relationship During the nineteenth century, programs for the cooperative ownership of places of work and residence were integral parts of the utopian and revolutionary critiques of capitalism in the United States as well as Europe. In Britain, the cooperative housekeeping movement promoted housing and living arrangements in which"[h]ouseholds retained their individual homes and privacy, but ate some meals in a communal dining room and shared other communal facilities" In UK , with construction costs to be paid off out of rents, the units were still more expensive than the tenements occupied by poor and working-class people, so the residents were mostly moderate to middle income. The Inter-War Period Britain and the US emerged from World War I with very different housing needs and very different political environments, accelerating the divergence in social housing attitudes and policies that had begun two to three decades earlier. Peter Malpass and Alan Murie have summarised the situation in the UK as follows [T]here was a serious decline in the level of housing production for most of the decade before 1914, and new building fell still further during the war itself. The result was that by 1918 there was a severe housing shortage which for economic reasons private enterprise could not tackle effectively, especially in the short term, and which for political reasons the state could not ignore. I want to suggest that in the golden age of the postwar welfare state, from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s, the links between housing and the welfare state were superficial and circumstantial. Space permits only the briefest summary of the reasons for taking this view: 1 - Housing policy was not planned with the welfare state in mind 2 - Housing policy was based on support for the market, not rejection 3 - There was no reform agenda in housing 4 - Public housing was neither universal nor residual 5 - Retreat from public provision began much earlier than elsewhere - in the mid 1950s. However, I now want to claim that housing fitted quite neatly into the postwar settlement. Here I am adopting and amending the idea that it is useful to think of three distinct settlements, which have been called the political/economic, the social and the organisational . What, then, is the significance of 1954 When the Conservatives returned to government in 1951 they were determined to limit the growth of the welfare state . Their position was built around criticism of lack of individual choice, the wastefulness of universalism and the heavy burden of welfare on the economy - ideas that were to echo down the decades. The reshaping of housing policy in the mid-1950s was, then, not simply, or even mainly, that housing was the service most vulnerable to Treasury pressure, but it was driven by internally coherent thinking. And the minister's refusal to co-operate with the Social Services Committee was not a reflection of an unwillingness to change, quite the opposite in fact; the ministry was motivated by a commitment to change, but on its own terms, not at the behest of a cuts-based Treasury agenda. The discourse was constructed around promotion of private enterprise and the need to tackle the condition of the existing housing stock as a way to avoid having to build yet more subsidised council houses. It can be argued, therefore, that the primary forces shaping housing policy after the war were not the ideas and principles normally associated with the welfare state, and that from the mid 1950s housing was already moving further away at a time when other services were withstanding demands for change, or were, at least, proving to be more resilient. Over the next twenty years successive governments, both Conservative and Labour, expanded and extolled the market for owner occupation, experimented with deregulation and new ways of promoting private renting, and encouraged means testing as the way to target subsidies in the public sector. In a well known passage in its White Paper of 1965 it was a Labour government that justified expansion of council building programmes in terms of short term expediency, while arguing that, 'The expansion of building for owner occupation on the other hand is normal; THE MARKET AND THE STATE The predilection for market-based solutions for the design of social institutions which is aggressively evident in the dominant law and economics work exemplified by Posner can easily be understood in terms of the politics of the period in which it became to be regarded as compelling. In the 1970s, especially after the economic dislocations triggered by the oil crisis of 1974, the inadequacies of the existing political institutions governing economic activity came increasingly under attack everywhere. From the 1960s, there was a general re-evaluation of the role of the state in relation to economic activity and theorists from different perspectives put forward critiques of those existing conceptions which accepted a radical separation of the public and private spheres. Underpinning much of the state intervention since the 1930s had been implicit assumptions identifying state action with the public good and market transactions with private economic interests. This was linked to a broadly liberal view which accepted that private interests should be allowed free play, but only up to the point where a more general public good was required to be secured through the state, either by the correction of imbalances of power or by more direct modes of intervention such as state ownership. This conception was common to the broad centre-ground of the political spectrum, which can be described as social-democratic, and it came under attack from various parts of that spectrum, from the radical right36 to the Marxist left. However, an improved understanding of the relationship between the public sphere of the state and the private sphere of economic transactions through the market clearly depends on a consideration of the more general social conditions of existence of the apparent radical separation of those spheres. Formalist perspectives, on the other hand, confine themselves to analysing a particular social sphere or aspect of social activity from within the limits of its own surface forms of appearance, abstracted from any consideration of the overall social setting. Conclusion The twentieth century was a period of great change. In some cases, these were trends that had started in the previous century, for example in terms of industrial change and the continuing improvements in technology. As always when there is such sweeping change, there are winners and losers. Many traditional industries such as shipbuilding or mining, growth areas of the nineteenth century, went into decline. Trade unions rose and then fell in influence. However, the overall improvements were overwhelming: better working conditions generally; falling hours; increased real wages; greater flexibility in work; and increased female participation in the workforce. Each ideological phase of social policy, be it the Reagan/Thatcherite neo-liberalism of the 1980s and early 1990s, or the Clinton/Blairite interpretation of social democracy in the late 90s and start of the US Bush administration in new millennium, leaves a legacy. Moreover, policy development is uneven and subject to local emphasis and elision. Each period generates a narrative that can legitimate the lives of older people in particular ways, and as their influence accrues, create the potential of entering into multiple narrative streams. The notion of narratives can be seen as a mechanism by which the social world is fabricated and this explains why policy narratives continually break down and fail to achieve hegemony. Thus, political ideologies of citizenship can never achieve absolute power but instead are subject to a continuous process of re-constitution via the play of both policy and personal narratives contesting each other in a permanent state of flux. Such a perspective can facilitate an understanding of how older people can re-construct policy and personal narratives to explain their own self-identity ( Read More