Jonathan Bradshaw - Experiencing Poverty

EXPERIENCING POVERTY

Editors: Sally Baldwin and Jonathan Bradshaw

Cash benefits and care services together make a fundamental contribution to human welfare. After income derived from work, they are arguably the most important determinants of living standards. Indeed, many households are almost entirely dependent on benefits and services which are socially provided. Moreover, welfare benefits and services consume the lion's share of public expenditure. The operation, impact and interaction of benefits and services is thus an important focus of research on social policy.

Policy related work in this field tends to be disseminated to small specialist audiences in the form of mimeographed research reports or working papers and perhaps later published, more briefly, in journal articles. In consequence public debate about vital social issues is sadly ill-informed. This series is designed to fill this gap by making the details of important empirically-based research more widely available.

Edited by
Jonathan Bradshaw and Roy Sainsbury
Social Policy Research Unit
University of York

First published 2000 by Ashgate Publishing

Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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Copyright Jonathan Bradshaw and Roy Sainsbury 2000

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

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The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and welcomes correspondence from those they have been unable to contact.

A Library of Congress record exists under LC control number: 00132577

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-71747-3 (hbk)

ISBN 13: 978-1-315-19631-2 (ebk)

Peter Alcock
Sheffield Hallam University

Michaela Benzeval
King's Fund Policy Institute

Margaret Boneham
The Institute of Human Ageing

Jonathan Bradshaw
University of York

Julian Buchanan
University of Central Lancashire

Roy Carr-Hill
University of York

Marc Chrysanthou
University of Salford

John Coleman
Trust for the Study of Adolescence

Gary Craig
University of Humberside

Elizabeth Dowler
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Gillian Elam
Social and Community Planning Research

Linda Grant
Sheffield Hallam University

John Hills
London School of Economics

Alper Hulusi
Social and Community Planning Research

Paul Johnson
Institute for Fiscal Studies

Ken Judge
King's Fund Policy Institute

Bob Lavers
University of York

Suzi Leather
London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Janet Lewis
Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Ruth Lister
Loughborough University

Robert Moore
Liverpool John Moores University

John M. Pitts
University of Luton

Martin Rein
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jane Ritchie
Social and Community Planning Research

Debi Roker
Trust for the Study of Adolescence

Roy Sainsbury
University of York

Peter Saunders
University of New South Wales

Jayne Taylor
Institute for Fiscal Studies

Christopher Winship
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lee Young
University of Liverpool

SIR PETER BARCLAY, CHAIRMAN
JOSEPH ROWNTREE FOUNDATION

As chairman of Joseph Rowntree Foundation, I welcome the publication of these volumes containing the proceedings of the conference sponsored by the Foundation.

The Foundation was delighted to support this event for a number of reasons:

His work and his ideas also had a great influence on his father Joseph and in 1904 were partly responsible for Joseph's decision to establish his three trusts.

If you read about the debates which followed the publication of the survey, in Asa Briggs' fascinating and comprehensive study of Seebohm's life, they have an uncomfortably modern ring. The Charity Organisation Society had, throughout the previous century, maintained that poverty was caused by the moral turpitude of the poor (shades of 'benefit dependency? ') - in answer to which Seebohm was able to show that poverty was a real phenomenon with clear structural causes. He called for a minimum wage and warned his opponents, as Asa Briggs recounts, 'not to pit their uninformed feelings about poverty against his facts '. If they saw people who by his standards were in primary poverty appearing to live well (as we see sometimes in TV documentaries today), let them not, said Seebohm confuse 'things that are seen with consequences of poverty which are not seen' - (in our time, isolation, bad health, bad living and social exclusion in general).

Finally, the Foundation welcomes this publication because it provides a unique opportunity to review the theory method and policy relevance of poverty research. As a consequence, I hope that after 20 years in which such research has been largely ignored - in fact, in recent years only the brave even dared to mention the word 'poverty' at all -1 hope we can bring high quality research in this area back into the centre of both social research effort and informed policy debate and that we shall look back on these conference proceedings as a significant turning point.