The Evolution of the British Welfare State

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Thus far, much of scholarly endeavor has been either about welfare state expansion or welfare state retrenchment, and accordingly the resilience of welfare states in relation to change. More recently, though, a number of research projects have begun to examine the new risk configurations that have emerged in the transition to postindustrial societies and that in turn have challenged welfare state arrangements that were established in the context of old, traditional risk contexts of industrial societies (Taylor-Gooby 2004; Bonoli 2005; Armingeon and Bonoli 2006). Numerous risk categories peculiar to postindustrial restructuring make an entry (Esping-Andersen 1999). Yet the central driving force of this postindustrial change is the notable rise in the international mobility of capital, which has an unprecedented impact on the welfare state. Swank has argued that Marxists, neoliberals, political scientists, economists, and popular analysts utilize “nearly identical reasoning to argue that the globalization of capital markets has effectively increased the power of capital over governments that seek to expand or maintain relatively high levels of social protection and taxation” ( 2001:203). The present Government has now embarked on its programme of welfare reform. Time will tell how well it succeeds in implementing the unthinkable. Making reform workable is a more important objective. As I resigned as Welfare Reform Minister I will inevitably be seen as a biased observer. And bias in the welfare debate is something about which readers should continually be on their guard. National health and a more limited coverage, unemployment insurance, were introduced by the 1911 Act. Contribution and benefit levels were laid down by Parliament, but friendly societies and mutually-owned bodies operated the health scheme. Brings the story right up to the present day, now including discussion of the Coalition and Theresa May's early Prime Ministership

An established introductory textbook that provides students with a full overview of British social policy and social ideas since the late 18th century. Derek Fraser's authoritative account is the essential starting point for anyone learning about how and why Britain created the first Welfare State, and its development into the 21st century. In the 16th century, society was faced with the problem of what to do with the poor. Eventually, the Elizabethan government realized they would have to introduce some kind of system to support them. By an act of 1601 overseers of the poor were appointed by each parish. They had the power to force people to pay a local tax to help the poor. Those who could not work such as the old and the disabled would be provided for. This is an ideal core text for dedicated modules on the history of British social policy or the British welfare state - or a supplementary text for broader modules on modern British history or British political history - which may be offered at all levels of an undergraduate history, politics or sociology degree. In addition it is a crucial resource for students who may be studying the history of the British welfare state for the first time as part of a taught postgraduate degree in British history, politics or social policy. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2021-01-14 18:03:38 Boxid IA40039213 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifierThe identification of these clusters itself was the key contribution of his work. Yet what is more compelling is his explanation for the reasons why particular nations developed their welfare provision along one particular path or another. He rejects the conception of an evolutionary development of social reform. For him, it is the interaction of three most important factors over time that produced a distinctive welfare state regime, much of which depended on the outcome of the power constellations during the formative phase of welfare states. Each of his three highly diverse regime types is organized around its own discrete logic of organization, stratification, and societal integration, and is given an “account that is much more nuanced, much more attentive to particularities and context – in a word, much more historical – than the older, unilinear, social scientific approach […] by taking a more contextualized and particularized approach to the development of social policy” (Baldwin 1992:703). For Esping-Andersen ( 1990:4), and Baldwin ( 1990:299) too for that matter, “politics not only matters, but is decisive.” A significant advance has been made in theorizing welfare state development. Yet much of early work tends to focus on finding one single powerful causal force within the well-established procedures and assumptions which are based on conceptions of linearity. Instead, the second generation of welfare state research began to identify salient interaction effects of multiple factors. In his early work, Esping-Andersen ( 1985), one of the most prominent adherents of the “working-class mobilization theory,” presented a classic formulation that distinguished social democratic models from others. Yet later, in his masterwork (Esping-Andersen 1990), he refined and significantly changed this duality, abandoning an ideal mode of one extreme or the other, and identified three separate routes of welfare state instead. An enquiry was established in 1941 to propose how best to tidy up state welfare. Beveridge seized the opportunity, rewrote the script, and then redesigned the contours of British welfare. The publication of his report was fortuitously delayed. When it was produced in November 1942 it followed hard on the heels of the Allies' first major victory of World War Two. Implementing Beveridge was immediately seen as part of winning the peace.

In 1911 the National Insurance Act was passed. All employers and employees made contributions to a fund. If a worker was ill he was entitled to free treatment by a doctor. (Normally you had to pay and it was expensive). If he could not work because of illness the worker was given a small amount of money to live on. However, his family was not entitled to free medical treatment. An increasingly interdependent world economy has also led many scholars to anticipate a significant degree of convergence (Scharpf 1991; Mishra 1996; Greider 1997; Martin and Schumann 1997; Gray 2002). Indeed, many countries have embraced the free market policy prescription as a solution to a range of policy problems, and some scholars predict a long-run decline – a race to the bottom – of the welfare state (Rodrik 1997; Allard and Danzir 2000) or a future of “permanent austerity” (P. Pierson 2001b:456). On the other hand, many studies of welfare state trajectories during the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century indicate that various welfare states respond differently to more or less similar sets of challenges, thereby negating a second coming of convergence thesis. The key to this divergence has been the politics of reform in each country, which has produced very different results and reform paths (Esping-Andersen 1999; Scharpf and Schmidt 2000a; 2000b; Huber and Stephens 2001; P. Pierson 2001a). Historically informed work by the likes of Esping-Andersen ( 1990), Baldwin ( 1990), Immergut ( 1992) and Skocpol ( 1992) could all be grouped under this tradition, particularly in their articulation of the ways in which institutions and interests interact and in their claims that different paths of welfare state development have occurred over an extended period of time. It is recent debates surrounding globalization and the crisis of the welfare state, however, that have brought with them a fresh wave of theorizing in the realm of the institutional analysis of social policy. The overall notion of path dependency is also present in the welfare regimes literature in the sense that distinctive welfare regimes produce distinct policy legacies which in turn largely determine both the extent of change and the types of change that may be possible. For Esping-Andersen, it was the “class coalitions in which the three welfare-state regime types were founded” ( 1990:33) that generated the bearing of an existing welfare state structure on the current politics of change. For P. Pierson ( 1994; 2001a; 2001b), it was more of a sectoral dynamic that generated varying policy outcomes depending on the specific social policy areas in question. So, for instance, Myles and Pierson ( 2001) found that various trajectories followed by many nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in their pension reform do not neatly correspond with existing categorizations of those nations’ political cultures or historic welfare regimes. And they claim that examining preexisting pension arrangements provides the best explanation for the paths of reform chosen. In both cases, specific regimes, once consolidated, tend to produce unique policy path dependencies that in turn overdetermine solutions to new problems as well as strategies of welfare reform (cf. Scharpf and Schmidt 2000a; 2000b).Pensions and unemployment benefits were made more generous in 1928 and in 1930. In 1931 unemployment benefit was cut by 10% but it was restored in 1934. Furthermore, prices continued to fall during the 1930s. By 1935 a man on the ‘dole’ was about as well off as a skilled worker in 1905, a measure of how much living standards had risen. The gap between the theoretical prediction and empirical reality gave rise to a new body of literature with substantially different aims. The problem was that the major explanatory accounts that dominated the heyday of welfare state expansion no longer seemed to provide convincing explanations, despite the claim that, as Esping-Andersen put it, “a theory that seeks to explain welfare-state growth should also be able to understand its retrenchment or decline” ( 1990:32). For the scholars who advocate the welfare state “resilience” thesis, and P. Pierson ( 1996) in particular, theories about the “old politics” (Skocpol and Amenta 1986; Amenta 2003) that rely on socioeconomic functionalism and class-based power resources do not adequately explain developments after the end of the “Golden Age.” In other words, an increasing number of scholars began to identify that “politics” in the old sense, typified by class, parties, and unions, matters less and less for welfare state development and outcomes (Castles 1998; Stephens et al. 1999; Huber and Stephens 2001). Arguments about how to explain retrenchment or the resilience of existing welfare regimes began to focus on “new” political variables such as party systems, the logic of elections, political institutions, and political learning (Kuhnle 2000; P. Pierson 2001a; Huber and Stephens 2001; Swank 2002). And these new factors at play make the logic of welfare state retrenchment very different from welfare state expansion (P. Pierson 1996). The key questions that dominated the academic inquiry of the late twentieth century were concerned with how and why existing welfare state regimes either seem to resist change or appear to change only incrementally according to a built-in regime logic that seems to reaffirm, if not aggravate, the difficulties that are typical for the regime (Starke 2006).

The 1948 National Health Act, aimed at achieving that very objective, and established for the first time a national minimum. An established introductory textbook that provides students with a full overview of British social policy and social ideas since the late 18th century. Derek Fraser's authoritative account is the essential starting point for anyone learning about how and why Britain created the first Welfare State, and its development into the 21st century. This is an ideal core text for dedicated modules on the history of British social policy or the British welfare state - or a supplementary text for broader modules on modern British history or British political history - which may be offered at all levels of an undergraduate history, politics or sociology degree. In addition it is a crucial resource for students who may be studying the history of the British welfare state for the first time as part of a taught postgraduate degree in British history, politics or social policy. New to this Edition: The resulting paralysis of both will and mind resulted in little concern for how different types of welfare (insurance or means-tested) affected behaviour; and to raise the question of fraud was to be automatically deemed politically unbalanced. 'Thinking the unthinkable' was the task for Labour's final years in opposition before 1997, and was part of the strategy of making Labour electable. It was never meant to be an activity undertaken in government. Evolved from the state-centered approach that criticizes the demand-driven approaches (e.g., social forces and conflict) involving passive and defensive actions from a government (Nordlinger 1981; Orloff and Skocpol 1984; Evans et al. 1985; Skocpol 1985; Skocpol and Amenta 1986; Ashford 1986; Almond 1988; Thelen and Steinmo 1992), scholars inspired by the institutional perspective began to stress the relationship between institutions and individual behavior and the distinctive political outcomes produced by this relationship (Steinmo et al. 1992; Hall and Taylor 1996). For them, “political life is characterized, not simply by a struggle over the allocation of resources, but also periodically by strife and uncertainty about the rules of the game within which this allocative process is carried out” (Krasner 1984:225). Institutions establish the rules of the game, have long-term effects, foster stability by resisting dramatic change, and condition the opportunities and incentives for political action or inaction. They are thereby seen as intervening or intermediate variables that shape behavior and political outcomes (Krasner 1984; Gorges 2001). Taking the cue from Heclo’s ( 1974) illuminating parallels between the British and Swedish systems, where he stressed the critical importance of the inheritance of past policies in determining what is feasible at any given time, those inspired by this tradition have shifted the study of social policy away from a predominantly sociological perspective and into the realm of political science. In 1909 the Trade Boards Act set up trade boards who fixed minimum wages in certain very low paid trades. Also in 1909, an Act set up labor exchanges to help the unemployed find work. In 1908 an Old Age Pensions Act gave small pensions to people over 70. The pensions were hardly generous but they were a start. From 1925 pensions were paid to men over 65 and women over 60. Widows were also given pensions.

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The first generation of welfare state research was very much occupied with the question of why welfare states emerge, rather than why welfare states differ and how they differ. Instead of making explicit claims about what explains welfare state variations, the exercise was one of “devising laws” that could account for welfare state development and could be applied to a whole range of countries. A law of 1697 said that paupers (people supported by the parish) must wear a blue or red ‘P’ on their clothes. On a more cheerful note in the 17th century in many towns wealthy people left money in their wills to provide almshouses where the poor could live. Welfare was not therefore seen as a neutral agency operating in society. Rather it was one, which, for good or ill, helps determine motivation, shape action and thereby determine character. Life was hard for the working class at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1900 surveys showed that between 15% and 20% of the population were living at subsistence (bare survival) level. Worse between 8% and 10% of the population were living below subsistence level.