Welfare state in the United Kingdom

Pie chart of UK central government expenditure, 2009–10. Social Protection is shown in orange, health in red, education in grey, and personal services in light blue. The welfare state represents around two-thirds of total government spending.

The welfare state of the United Kingdom comprises expenditures by the government of the United Kingdom intended to improve health, education, employment and social security. The UK system has been classified as a liberal welfare state system. The UK has among the largest populations in Europe, being third in the EU after Germany and France.^[1][2]

History

In 1984 historian Derek Fraser told the British story in a nutshell. The welfare state, he said:^[3]

Germinated in the social thought of late Victorian liberalism, reached its infancy in the collectivism of the pre-and post-Great War statism, matured in the universalism of the 1940s and flowered in full bloom in the consensus and affluence of the 1950s and 1960s. By the 1970s it was in decline, like the faded rose of autumn. Both UK and US governments are pursuing in the 1980s monetarist policies inimical to welfare.

The welfare state in the modern sense was anticipated by the Royal Commission into the Operation of the Poor Laws 1832 which found that the old poor law (a part of the English Poor laws) was subject to widespread abuse and promoted squalor, idleness and criminality in its recipients, compared to those who received private charity. Accordingly, the qualifications for receiving aid were tightened up, forcing many recipients to either turn to private charity or accept employment.

Opinions began to be changed late in the century by reports drawn up by men such as Seebohm Rowntree and Charles Booth into the levels of poverty in Britain. These reports indicated that in the massive industrial cities, between one-quarter and one-third of the population were living below the poverty line.

Impact

This policy resulted in increased expenditure and a widening of what was considered to be the state's responsibility. In addition to the central services of education, health, unemployment and sickness allowances, the welfare state also included the idea of increasing redistributive taxation, increasing regulation of industry, food, and housing (better safety regulations, weights and measures controls, etc.)

The foundation of the National Health Service (NHS) did not involve building new hospitals, but nationalisation of existing municipal provision and charitable foundations. The aim was not to substantially increase provision but to standardise care across the country; indeed William Beveridge believed that the overall cost of medical care would decrease, as people became healthier and so needed less treatment.

However, instead of falling, the cost of the NHS has risen by 4% annually on average due to an ageing population,^[15] leading to a reduction in provision. Charges for dentures, and spectacles were introduced in 1951 by the same Labour government that had founded the NHS three years earlier, and prescription charges by the successive Conservative Government were introduced in 1952.^[16] In 1988, free eye tests for all were abolished, although they are now free for the over-60s.^[17]

Policies differ in different countries of the United Kingdom, but the provision of a welfare state is still a basic principle of government policy in the United Kingdom today. The principle of health care "free at the point of use" became a central idea of the welfare state, which later Conservative governments, although critical of some aspects of the welfare state, did not reverse.

Welfare spending on poor people dropped by 25% during the decade of austerity, cuts to benefits that disabled people receive were significant, Personal Independence Payments and Employment and Support Allowance have both dropped by 10%. Over half of families living below the breadline have at least one relative with a disability. Cuts include, tax credits (£4.6bn), universal credit (£3.6bn), child benefit (£3.4bn), disability benefits (£2.8bn), ESA and incapacity benefit (£2bn) and housing benefit (£2.3bn). Frank Field said, “A £37bn attack has been mounted on the living standards of many of our fellow citizens to such an extent that possibly millions struggle to keep on top of their rent, pay the bills and buy adequate food. Likewise, an unknown number are unable to clothe their children properly before sending them to school where all too many of these children not only rely on free school dinners as a cornerstone of their diet, but on breakfast and supper clubs as well.”^[18]

Family support services have been cut by over 25% in five years. Children at risk of abuse or neglect are left unsupported till a situation reaches crisis point and then children are taken expensively into care. Action for Children maintains budgets for services designed to help families and prevent them experiencing a crisis have been reduced by £743m, over a quarter during the five years to 2018. Sure Start children's centres saw funding drop by £450m, which amounts to 42% from 2013-14 to 2018-19. During this time money spet on child protection and children in care increased by £597m (10%). Local authorities maintain this is due to demand for emergency interventions growing fast because of increasing poverty and welfare cuts. Imran Hussain of Action for Children said, “We know from our own work that without the safety net of well-funded early help services like children’s centres, thousands of children at risk of abuse, neglect or domestic violence are being left to fend for themselves until problems spiral out of control. This failure to act with the right help, at the right time, will inevitably have devastating consequences for some children that last a lifetime. As these figures clearly show, it also makes no financial sense to cut early help as councils are then forced to spend vast amounts on expensive crisis interventions, ‘firefighting’ problems after they have escalated. The government needs to allocate additional, dedicated funding for children’s services at next year’s spending review. Without urgent action, we risk failing thousands more children across the country.” County councils warned that increased demand for child and adult social care, which authorities are legally required to meet, would lead to almost £1bn of “unpalatable” cuts to other services like road repairs and bus subsidies.^[19]

Expenditure

In the financial year 2014/15, state pensions were overwhelmingly the largest governmental welfare expense, costing £86,500,000,000 followed by housing benefit, which accounted for over £20,000,000,000^[20] Expenditure in 2015–16 on benefits included: £2,300,000,000 paid to unemployed people and £27,100,000,000 to people on low incomes, and £27,600,000,000 for personal tax credits.^[21][22]

Criticisms

Critics of the welfare state claim that, in addition to the vast expense, by relieving citizens of personal responsibility for their own welfare the government has inadvertently promoted irresponsible and immature attitudes, with the result that squalor, ignorance, and idleness are common.^[23][24] In 1980, T. E. Utley, wrote that the welfare state was "an arrangement under which we all largely cease to be responsible for our own behaviour and in return become responsible for everyone else's. The temptations which this way of doing things offers to synthetic anger, fraudulent penitence, all other forms of hypocrisy and the sheer evasion of duty are infinitely too strong for fallen man".^[25]

In 2010, the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government led by David Cameron has argued for a reduction of welfare spending in the United Kingdom as part of their programme of austerity.^[26] Government ministers have argued that a growing culture of welfare dependency is perpetuating welfare spending, and claim that a cultural change is required to reduce the welfare bill.^[27] Public opinion in the UK appears to support a reduction in welfare spending, however commentators have suggested that negative public perceptions are founded on exaggerated assumptions about the proportion of spending on unemployment benefit and the level of benefit fraud.^[28][29]

Figures from the Department for Work and Pensions show that benefit fraud is thought to have cost taxpayers £1.2 billion during 2012–13, up 9% on the year before.^[30] This is lower than the £1.5 billion of benefit underpayment due to error.^[31]

In some cases, relatives who bring up a child when the parents cannot bring up the child face sanctions and financial penalties, they can be left poor and homeless.^[32] There are also widespread complaints from church groups and others that the UK welfare state does insufficient work to prevent poverty, deprivation even hunger. ^[33]

Support for raising taxes to finance more provision on health, education and social benefits is the highest it has been since 2002, NatCen Social Research maintains. Two-thirds of Labour supporters favour tax rises and 53% of Conservatives also favour that.^[34]

Historical statistics on welfare trends

See also

• Social welfare
• Welfare reform

Housing:

• Public housing
• Housing estate
• Council house

References

Bibliography

• Béland, Daniel, and Alex Waddan. "Conservatives, partisan dynamics and the politics of universality: reforming universal social programmes in the UK and Canada." Journal of Poverty and Social Justice 22#2 (2014): 83–97.
• Calder, Gideon, and Jeremy Gass. Changing Directions of the British Welfare State (University of Wales Press, 2012).
• Esping-Andersen, Gosta; The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press (1990).
• Ferragina, Emanuele and Seeleib-Kaiser, Martin. "Welfare Regime Debate: Past, Present, Futures?" Policy & Politics 39#4 pp. 583–611 (2011).http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/tpp/pap/2011/00000039/00000004/art00010.**
• Fraser, Derek. The evolution of the British welfare state: a history of social policy since the Industrial Revolution (2nd ed. 1984).
• Gilbert, Bentley B. The Evolution Of National Insurance In Great Britain: The Origins of the Welfare State (1966).
• Harris, Bernard. The origins of the British welfare state: social welfare in England and Wales, 1800–1945 (Palgrave, 2004).
• Häusermann, Silja, Georg Picot, and Dominik Geering. "Review article: Rethinking party politics and the welfare state–recent advances in the literature." British Journal of Political Science 43.01 (2013): 221–40. online
• Hay, Roy. "Employers and social policy in Britain: The evolution of welfare legislation, 1905–14." Social History 2.4 (1977): 435–55.
• Hay, James Roy. Origins of the Liberal Welfare Reforms, 1906–14 (1975) 78pp full text online
• Levine-Clark, Marjorie. Unemployment, Welfare, and Masculine Citizenship: So Much Honest Poverty in Britain, 1870–1930 (Springer, 2015).
• Mommsen, Wolfgang J., and Wolfgang Mock, eds. The emergence of the welfare state in Britain and Germany, 1850–1950 (Taylor & Francis, 1981).
• Slater, Tom. "The myth of “Broken Britain”: welfare reform and the production of ignorance." Antipode 46.4 (2014): 948–69. online
• Weiler, Peter. The New Liberalism: Liberal Social Theory in Great Britain, 1889–1914 (Routledge, 2016).
• Welshman John. Underclass: A History of the Excluded, 1880–2000 (2006) excerpt

External links

• Text of the Beveridge Report
• The Welfare State – Never Ending Reform Brief history of the Welfare State by Frank Field (BBC website)
• The UK Economy at the Crossroads, research paper from the Center for Economic and Policy Research