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- Author or Editor: Howard Glennerster x
The presumption of growth in a relatively stable economic and political environment is deeply embedded not merely in administrative and budgetary practice but in the framework of ideas that political scientists have used to analyse resource decisions. It is as much a part of the rational comprehensive planning tradition as it is of the incrementalist budgetary literature. The more turbulent economic environment and the era of cuts in public spending call for a re-appraisal of theory and practice.
There have been a series of articles on this theme in the Public Administration Review (1978) and in Maurice Wright’s recently (1980) edited collection of essays and Christopher Hood’s contribution to this Journal (1980). The discussion so far seems to be an extension of the debate between the rational comphrehensive school and the incrementalists.
The theme of some contributors to Maurice Wright’s book and many American writers has been to argue that cuts will be good for the public sector. Faced with a tight financial situation public authorities will be forced to adopt more rational and therefore more efficient appraisals of their spending.
In the Wright volume Professor Stewart suggests that the management process can no longer focus on the increment.
Poverty campaigners have devoted too little attention to the fact that most poor people have no assets. Tom Paine (1969) wanted to tax the assets of the wealthy, transferring the proceeds to citizens at the beginning of life. Modern neo-conservatives want to replace the welfare state with a capital grant at birth. This article rejects the latter course on the basis of economic theory and praticability. But it does advocate capitalising welfare and tax benefits in the case of higher education and pensions, as well as extending housing asset ownership.
This chapter summarises the four perspectives on Thatcherism. These range from the ‘wicked witch’ theory to the views that not much has really changed. It is argued that there have been important changes in the British welfare state, and that some of these were probably necessary. It considers the challenges posed by the Conservatives to traditional assumptions about the role of the state, the authority of professionals, and the association of universality with uniformity. The chapter also states that the destruction of the industrial base of the UK and the high levels of unemployment associated with it may be too expensive for a partially reorganised welfare state.
Richard Titmuss was Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics (LSE) from 1950 until his death in 1973. His publications on welfare and social policy were radical and wide-ranging, spanning fields such as demography, class inequalities in health, social work, and altruism. Titmuss’s work played a critical role in establishing the study of social policy as a scientific discipline; it helped to shape the development of the British Welfare State and influenced thinking about social policy worldwide. Despite its continuing relevance to current social policy issues both in the UK and internationally, much of Titmuss’s work is now out of print.
The capacity for individuals to make choices that, individually and collectively, affect their lives is one of the essential characteristics of a liberal democratic society. Its relative absence for some groups defines their social exclusion. As Sen (1999, pp xi-xii) says, ‘the freedom of agency is inescapably qualified and constrained by the social, political and economic opportunities that are available to us’. Not the least of these constraints is the availability of credit or the possession of capital. Perhaps the single most distinguishing feature of the socially excluded in a society that has some kind of income safety net is their lack of assets and hence credit worthiness. This precludes risk taking, any feasible way of beginning a business, trading off between present and future income, investment in skills apart from those subsidised by the state, the capacity to overcome even minor disasters without becoming indebted to the state or local loan sharks. People are trapped in a narrow range of choice sets that make their lives different in significant ways from the lives of even working-class families with a steady, reasonably paid job. The capacity to change life’s pattern of opportunities is highly constrained.
Much of the discussion about giving children assets at birth has emphasised the behavioural advantages of educating families into the ways of saving (Nissan and Le Grand, 2000; Regan, 2001; Regan and Paxton, 2001). For us, however, the starting point is the intrinsic importance of extending individuals’ agency, especially that of the poor. The growth of owner occupation has given most people a significant asset that gives them an enhanced chance of borrowing, financing their old age, moving jobs and living arrangements, giving opportunities to their children to move into owner occupation and much else.
This chapter examines the way in which education policy has attempted to tackle the evil of ‘ignorance’ and promote social mobility, from the perspectives of policy in 1948 and 2008. It points out that the Butler education reforms were among the first raft of legislation which implemented the post-war Beveridge welfare state, and that these reforms were always an uneasy settlement between the public, private and ‘third’ sector of the welfare state. It discusses how developments in 2008 can be seen as part of the ongoing social and political debate in policy and practice about the role of education in promoting equality of opportunity and social mobility: which of course, is not quite the same as tackling ‘ignorance’ per se.
Labour signalled that education was a policy priority well before the 1997 General Election. In his now famous Labour Party Conference speech in 1996, Tony Blair announced that the three highest priorities in government would be ‘Education, education, education’. In December 1996, Blair outlined Labour Party thinking on education policy; themes, which, as we shall see, have continued to be important since 1997:
I believe there is the chance to forge a new consensus on education policy. It will be practical not ideological. And it will put behind us the political and ideological debates that have dominated the last thirty years. The foundations of the consensus are clear. Early support for children under the age of five. Primary schools delivering high standards of literacy and numeracy. Rigorous assessment of pupil and school performance, and action based upon it. Improved training and qualifications for teachers, especially Heads. Early intervention when things go wrong. Support from all sections of the community to ensure that all our children are given the best possible start. And we must never forget that education is not a one-off event for the under 18s. The new consensus must be based on wide access to higher education and continual opportunities for all adults to learn throughout life. (Tony Blair MP, Speech given at Ruskin College, Oxford, 16 December 1996)
Education also featured in both the 1997 and 2001 election pledges. In 1997, as one of the five ‘early pledges’, Labour promised to cut class sizes to 30 or under for five-, six- and seven-year-olds by using money from phasing out the assisted places scheme.
This chapter comes from Parents revolt, an angry volume printed on cheap war quality paper, co-authored with Titmuss’s wife Kathleen. It hypothesises a connection between the growth of acquisitive social values and the tendency of people to have fewer children. It argues that a nation’s true wealth is not what it is called today ‘gross national product’; rather, a nation’s wealth inheres in the vitality of its people, and in people from all social classes. It observes that the fear of population decline which fuelled Parents revolt was an aspect of a European-wide anxiety about the survival capacities of national populations. It further observes in part, that this was a worry about the eclipse of elites by the masses; in part, a eugenic fear of ‘race’ pollution. It discusses themes of altruism and of the narrow-minded computation of public services in terms of economic costs and benefits — both key concerns in later social policy writings.
This chapter comes from Richard Titmuss’s book, Poverty and population, which describes the concentration of poverty, poor diet, and premature death in certain social groups and regions. It analyses regional statistics of illness, accidents, and deaths, comparing the poorer with the richer. It notes that this careful computation of statistics about social groups and life-chances — a legacy of Titmuss’s time in the insurance industry — is one of his most valuable contributions to the demographic and health literature.
