Series: CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy
Poverty is still a real issue within Britain today and this essential series provides evidence-based insights into how communities and families are dealing with it.
Published in conjunction with the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE) at the London School of Economics, this series draws together fresh research and sheds important light on the impact of anti-poverty policy, focusing on the individual and social factors that promote regeneration, recovery and renewal.
CASE Studies on Poverty, Place and Policy
Social policy is now central to political debate in Britain. What has been achieved by efforts to improve services and reduce poverty? What is needed to deliver more effective and popular services to all and increase social justice? How can we make social policy work? These are some of the questions discussed in this book. The book covers key issues in contemporary social policy, particularly concentrating on recent changes. It examines the history and goals of social policy as well as its delivery, focusing in turn on the family and the state, schools, higher education, healthcare, social care, communities and housing. Redistribution is also examined, exploring child poverty, pension reform and resources for welfare. The chapters in this collection have been specially written to honour the 70th birthday of Howard Glennerster whose pioneering work has been concerned not only with the theoretical, historical and political foundations of social policies but, crucially, with how they work in practice. It is a collection of primary importance for those working in and interested in policy and politics in a wide variety of fields and for students of social policy, public policy, and the public sector.
Social policy is now central to political debate in Britain. What has been achieved by efforts to improve services and reduce poverty? What is needed to deliver more effective and popular services to all and increase social justice? How can we make social policy work? These are some of the questions discussed in this book. The book covers key issues in contemporary social policy, particularly concentrating on recent changes. It examines the history and goals of social policy as well as its delivery, focusing in turn on the family and the state, schools, higher education, healthcare, social care, communities and housing. Redistribution is also examined, exploring child poverty, pension reform and resources for welfare. The chapters in this collection have been specially written to honour the 70th birthday of Howard Glennerster whose pioneering work has been concerned not only with the theoretical, historical and political foundations of social policies but, crucially, with how they work in practice. It is a collection of primary importance for those working in and interested in policy and politics in a wide variety of fields and for students of social policy, public policy, and the public sector.
This chapter reviews the development and use of funding formulae for distributing resources geographically between different local jurisdictions in the UK. It traces the historical roots of today’s systems back to the ideas of the Webbs and others in the early 20th century, forward to the changes in local government finance proposed in the Lyons report early in 2007. It describes the way resources are distributed for health, education, housing, local government, and between regions and territories. Formula-based grant arrangements for achieving this are more emphasised as policy instruments in England than in many other countries, in part as an attempt to compensate for the relatively high levels of personal income inequality in this country, and because demands for public services that achieve equal outcomes have grown. However, the advent of quasi-markets, the need to change behaviour in relation to the environment, and the need to provide different incentives for providers may mean that the evolution of equalising funding formulae in Britain has already passed its zenith. Resource distribution in the 21st century is already evolving beyond the settled model of the latter years of the 20th, and the delivery of public services will change accordingly.
This chapter examines why family issues are so hard for policy makers. It discusses how the increasing pluralism of family form and function poses challenges for state intervention. This is both directly, in terms of family dealings with government officials, and indirectly, via the assumptions that policy makers make, embedded implicitly or explicitly in policies to deliver cash and services. It looks at how recent policy in the UK has ‘muddled through’ these developments, examining in particular the changes in policy towards the balance between work and family life since 1997. It is argued that types of policy intervention that work with the grain of family change are likely to be more successful than those that work against that grain or indeed try to reverse the changes themselves. State interventions cannot be based on assumptions about family form and function that are too far from the reality of people’s own ideas, but have to cope not just with the increasing diversity of these ideas, but also the conflicts that may often exist between family members and different types of family.
This chapter discusses the controversial reforms in higher education finance in England in 2006, arguing that — contrary to popular belief — they are strongly progressive. The opening discussion sets out the 2006 system. The following two sections explore the historical confluence of ideas between Friedman’s work and that of Glennerster and colleagues, and then the analytical principles that should underpin policy. The most elegant policy, however, will fail unless properly implemented (the easy part is to disburse the money; collecting loan repayments is harder); the next section briefly discusses this aspect of making social policy work. A further section considers the choice between a graduate tax (where a person’s repayments continue permanently or until some date such as retirement) and a loan with income-contingent repayments (where a person’s repayments are a fraction of earnings, but, in contrast with a graduate tax, stop once the borrower has repaid what he or she has borrowed, plus interest), and concludes that the general case that brings the two together is social insurance. The final section considers the unfinished agenda.
This introductory chapter begins by briefly setting out the focus of the book, namely contemporary issues, particularly on the ways in which social policy in Britain has been reshaped in the first decade of the 21st century, the arguments that lay behind those changes, and the issues that they raise for the future evolution of policy. This is followed by overview of the subsequent chapters. The ingredients that make policy work and the work of Howard Glennerster are discussed.
Social policy is now central to political debate in Britain. What has been achieved by efforts to improve services and reduce poverty? What is needed to deliver more effective and popular services to all and increase social justice? How can we make social policy work? These are some of the questions discussed in this new and wide-ranging collection of essays by a distinguished panel of leading social policy academics.
The book covers key issues in contemporary social policy, particularly concentrating on recent changes. It examines the history and goals of social policy as well as its delivery, focusing in turn on the family and the state, schools, higher education, healthcare, social care, communities and housing. Redistribution is also examined, exploring child poverty, pension reform and resources for welfare.
The essays in this collection have been specially written to honour the 70th birthday of Howard Glennerster whose pioneering work has been concerned not only with the theoretical, historical and political foundations of social policies but, crucially, with how they work in practice. It is a collection of primary importance for those working in and interested in policy and politics in a wide variety of fields and for students of social policy, public policy and the public sector.
This chapter examines evidence to support a neighbourhood focus for delivering social policy. It presents some findings on how neighbourhood renewal in practice addresses the problems of integration and urban recovery. The central questions are: Why does the neighbourhood affect social conditions? What is the evidence of progress in neighbourhood renewal? Are more mixed urban communities likely to emerge through neighbourhood renewal? The chapter draws on several long-run studies about low-income areas and their prospects. The Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion at the London School of Economics and Political Science has been tracking 12 highly disadvantaged areas, covering the different representative types of deprived neighbourhoods in England for the last eight years. The Neighbourhood Renewal Unit is trying to help in the recovery of up to 3,000 such areas.
This chapter looks at the evidence on what the public wants from pensions, and at how people react when confronted with the potential ways of achieving it. The first section discusses why it became apparent that wide-ranging pension reform was necessary. The next section describes recommendations made by the Pensions Commission (of which the author was a member) in 2005, the government’s reaction to them, and the reforms that are now being put into legislation. Subsequent sections discuss public attitudes to pensions in general, public views of the trade-off between the fundamental choices in tackling the pensions problem, and then specific views of how entitlement to state pensions should be ‘earned’. For social policy to ‘work’ and reforms to stick, social policy ultimately requires sustained public support. The conclusion discusses the long-term prospects for survival of the reforms in the light of these findings.
This chapter uses an analysis of the Poor Law to deconstruct some of the mythology surrounding the history of the welfare state. It argues that seemingly quite dated policies and institutions of past eras may contain elements that are constant and universal, or at least recurrent, in many different contexts and epochs, while other apparently ‘timeless’ models are actually time-specific. It suggests that the Poor Law was less unpopular with poorer classes and not as universally harshly administered than is often portrayed. Some of the strengths and virtues often ascribed to the welfare state may more properly be seen to be stemming originally from the Poor Laws, while other, seemingly timeless, aspects of the post-war welfare state, such as its universalism, were in many ways a product of the particular period in which they were introduced. There are lessons to be learned from history about what works; but they may not always be the most obvious ones.
