Lee Gregory - Exploring Welfare Debates: Key Concepts and Questions

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

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I wish to dedicate this book to a few people.

First, while writing this book, my good friend Rob Cooper passed away. Despite great adversity, Rob was a fundraiser and campaigner to admire. He was able to be this because of the support he received from the welfare state: a poignant reminder of the importance of welfare provision to ensure all can not only survive but also flourish and impact on the lives of so many.

Second, I would like to dedicate this book to my grandparents: Audrey and Kazimierz (Jimmy) Bogira and Grantley (Pop) and Phyllis Gregory. They didnt get to see how far I was able to go, and they grew up in a world where there was no welfare state and lived through much of the history that this book reviews.

Concepts can be taken individually, but they are part of a wider interconnected debate, and trying to get this across in the pages that follow was a challenge as different approaches emerged during the writing. That said, there are a number of people to thank, and without them this journey would have been even more painful. And so, thanks go to Ailsa Cameron for commenting on my lecture material: There is enough here for a book. This book starts from that comment, but goes beyond the material we were discussing; I also thank her for her comments on earlier drafts. Thanks to the Policy Press team (Ali, Catherine, Laura and both Emilys, in particular), and to Simon Pemberton, Stuart Connor and the anonymous reviewers for their comments. Thanks also to Paul Lodge, whose lectures in 2002 started me down this path; Mark Drakeford, as ever; as well as the usual Scooby Gang and Kings Heath Running Club for needed distractions and stress busting. Particular thanks to the University of Bristol Social Policy first-year students of 2012 our lectures and seminars informed my approach to teaching and the foundation of this text. Thanks also to my parents for their continued support. As ever, all factual or typographical errors remain my own.

The author and publishers would like to thank the following for their permission to reproduce copyright material in this book: Jonathan Bradshaw for Figure 3.4 on page 44; Taylor & Francis for Figure 9.3, page 216.

Social Policy, perhaps more than any other social science, is preoccupied with the pursuit of human welfare. As a field of study, it looks at how social problems are constructed and what responses can be created and implemented to resolve them. Typically, introductions to Social Policy start by exploring how the discipline draws on a number of Social Sciences to understand particular topics such as housing, education, health and income maintenance with the implicit assumption that human welfare can be secured by addressing these specific aspects of social life.

Richard Titmuss (1971:20), the founding father of the discipline of Social Policy, highlighted the importance of this approach: Basically, we are concerned with the study of a range of social needs and the functioning, in conditions of scarcity, of human organisations, traditionally called social services or social welfare systems, to meet these needs. A number of key debates can be drawn from this quote. We will be exploring these debates in this book. The central point is around the concept of social need and how this is fundamental to the concept of welfare. Need, as Chapter 3 will explore, indicates certain goods and services required to secure both individual and social welfare items that, when missing from our lives, hinder us in various ways. Lack of food results in hunger. Inadequate housing can cause health problems. Inadequate education could result in poor job opportunities. What is embedded within this quote is the means by which societies organise their resources to meet these needs. For Titmuss, our welfare needs are too important to be left to the market (commercial organisations through which we can buy access to goods and services); their importance requires that affordability should not be a factor in satisfying them. This illustrates a broader debate between the state and the market as providers of welfare. We will explore these terms in due course in the early chapters in this book. For now, this introductory chapter has two core aims: