The social security settlement of the 1940s, implemented in 1948, appeared to have the prevention of want as its central focus, inasmuch as its inspiration came from the Beveridge Report (1942). In addressing the issues about freedom from want, this chapter could try to deal with the extent to which poverty was effectively prevented then and now. At the end of this chapter some observations will be included on that, but the achievement of a satisfactory comparison would be very difficult. Moreover, I write as a student of policies rather than as a student of poverty. Beveridge’s rhetorical use of...

The importance that William Beveridge attached to the maintenance of full employment is not surprising. Unemployment had been a major focus of his work both as an academic economist and as a policy adviser since the beginning of the 20th century (see, for example, Beveridge, 1909). The labour exchanges together with unemployment insurance, which, along with other economists, he advocated to facilitate the matching of jobs with those seeking employment, were introduced before the First World War. He was heavily involved in the work of the Unemployment Assistance Board in the 1930s and was all too aware of the problems...

In this chapter, we reflect on education policy in 2008 in the light of the events and debates of 1948. We concentrate on events in England, although contrasts with the devolved policies of other parts of the UK also feature in our analysis.

1948 was a quiet year in the war on ignorance, with Butler’s Education Act already four years old. Moreover, rather than embodying a clear set of post-war ‘ideals’, education policy reflected an uneasy post-war settlement hammered out after bitter pre-war divisions between church and non-church schooling and other unsettled arguments.

Some things were clear. A public opinion...

The 60th anniversary of the National Health Service (NHS) gives an appropriate time to reflect on progress in conquering Beveridge’s (1942) giant of disease. After Bevan, Beveridge is often regarded as a parent of the NHS (coming sixth in theHealth Service Journal’s ‘Diamond’ list of the most important people in the 60 years of the NHS;Health Service Journal, 30 June 2008). However, Beveridge’s role in creating the NHS was limited. As Scrivens (1991, p 27) points out, although a comprehensive health service was a central feature of the post-war reconstruction programme, Beveridge made little reference to its specification....

This chapter offers a long-term perspective on the role played by council housing in tackling the ‘social evil’ of squalor within Scotland. By the mid-1970s, public sector housing – encompassing council, new town and Scottish Special Housing Association property – accommodated fully two thirds of the Scottish population (Gibb, 1989). The proportion of the population housed by the public sector in England, by contrast, was markedly less at just one third (Ravetz, 2001). So public housing in Scotland was on a markedly different scale, with a state housing sector comparable to many countries in the-then ‘Eastern Bloc’. Scotland consequently provides...

On 1 January 1908, the total number of persons in receipt of some form of poor relief in England and Wales was 928,671: ‘one out of every 44 persons was a pauper’ (Poor Law Commission, 1909a, vol 1, p 31). Behind the figures, within a framework amended in 1834 yet retaining local variations in policy, was a world of interaction yielding decisions about the quality of life for the most vulnerable in society. The Royal Commission on the Poor Laws of the time still signifies as a landmark in social policy with its celebrated division over future policy, where Fabian...

Critics have raised many doubts about the movement of children for intercountry adoption, asking whether it is a ‘global trade or global gift?’ (Triseliotis, 2000), ‘a global problem or a global solution?’ (Masson, 2001). In this chapter I want to explore this question in Europe, which shares with America the pattern of being a continent with major movements of children between countries – in America from South to North; in Europe from East to West. However, Europe is of particular interest in the context of the enlarged European Union (EU), which contains both receiving states and states of origin.¹ I...

It is well established in the child development literature that children from materially deprived backgrounds have poorer outcomes than those from wealthy families (Hoff et al, 2002; Centre for Community Child Health Royal Children’s Hospital, 2004; Richardson and Prior, 2005). There is now a significant body of literature on the relationships between indicators of material and social well-being on the one hand, and child outcomes on the other (Bor et al, 1997). The majority of studies compare families who are defined as poor with non-poor families (see, for example, Fergusson et al, 1994), or alternatively measure the average association between...

The past 40 years have seen major shifts in the demographic constitution of families and households, in particular with regard to aspects of their formation and dissolution. A growing diversity in family forms has meant that increasing numbers of children are growing up in households that do not include both biological parents. Much of the research and policy interest surrounding these changes has focused on the growth in lone motherhood, where the ratio of lone mothers to lone fathers has remained remarkably consistent over many years, at roughly nine to one (Duncan and Edwards, 1999). As a result, in as...

Comparative welfare research now acknowledges that social services, as well as social security systems, define welfare states (Bambra, 2005; Jensen, 2008). In the child welfare field, cross-national studies offer critical insight into the goals, priorities and logic of welfare systems; differences in institutional structures and boundaries; and differences in the roles and characteristics of professionals, managers and service users in contemporary welfare states (Hearn et al, 2004; Hetherington, 2005). Interview methodologies enrich these approaches, linking stakeholder preoccupations and perspectives to cross-national analyses of system priorities and design (Hetherington, 2005).

This chapter draws on interview data from three study countries to...

It has been noted that the concept of governance has been both underused as a tool of analysis and underresearched as a set of practices by social policy scholars (Daly, 2003). In response, this chapter will argue that governance can provide a useful framework for understanding recent shifts in the organisation and delivery of welfare in the UK. ‘Governance’ is a nuanced process open to various interpretations and enactments (Davies, 2005) and in this chapter the focus is on its contribution to the rescaling of social policy through processes of spatialisation and localisation, which increasingly structure welfare activities around the...

The European welfare state has rested since its inception on an explicit or implicit model of the bounded nation-state. Common nationality underpins social solidarity and provides a rationale for redistribution. State boundaries lock in actors, notably capital and labour, bind their fate together, and encourage them to engage in social dialogue. Similarly, rich and poor regions are bound together, and inter-territorial redistribution is part of a national circulation of wealth, which benefits all. A strong and centralised state can mobilise resources for welfare programmes and redistribute both among individuals and across territories. These features are being transformed in the process...

It is far from clear where South East Europe begins and ends. It is as much, if not more, a geopolitical construct as it is an identifiable geographical space. It may best be conceived as an emergent subregional space, more ascribed by outside forces rather than celebrated as a region from within. These ascriptions are, themselves, contradictory and somewhat Janus-faced, with a rather pejorative construction of the Balkans, only slightly amended in the European Union’s (EU) notion of the Western Balkans (former Yugoslavia minus EU member state Slovenia and plus Albania), standing in some tension with an idea that the...