The Winding Road to the Welfare State

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
George R. Boyer
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Social Policies ◽  
Skilled Workers ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Welfare Reforms

How did Britain transform itself from a nation of workhouses to one that became a model for the modern welfare state? This book investigates the evolution of living standards and welfare policies in Britain from the 1830s to 1950 and provides insights into how British working-class households coped with economic insecurity. The book examines the retrenchment in Victorian poor relief, the Liberal Welfare Reforms, and the beginnings of the postwar welfare state, and it describes how workers altered spending and saving methods based on changing government policies. From the cutting back of the Poor Law after 1834 to Parliament's abrupt about-face in 1906 with the adoption of the Liberal Welfare Reforms, the book offers new explanations for oscillations in Britain's social policies and how these shaped worker well-being. The Poor Law's increasing stinginess led skilled manual workers to adopt self-help strategies, but this was not a feasible option for low-skilled workers, many of whom continued to rely on the Poor Law into old age. In contrast, the Liberal Welfare Reforms were a major watershed, marking the end of seven decades of declining support for the needy. Concluding with the Beveridge Report and Labour's social policies in the late 1940s, the book shows how the Liberal Welfare Reforms laid the foundations for a national social safety net. A sweeping look at economic pressures after the Industrial Revolution, this book illustrates how British welfare policy waxed and waned over the course of a century.

Social Welfare Policy and Living Standards between the Wars

2018 ◽  
pp. 217-259
Author(s):  
George R. Boyer
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Disability Insurance ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
Social Surveys ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social

This chapter describes the interwar expansion of social welfare policies and their role in alleviating economic insecurity in an era of unprecedented unemployment. The social security system established before the war and extended in the 1920s consisted of several independently administered programs—unemployment insurance, sickness and disability insurance, old age pensions, widows' and orphans' insurance, and the Poor Law. This safety net of many colors proved to be quite successful in alleviating poverty and maintaining the well-being of working-class households. The important role played by the safety net is clearly shown in the social surveys undertaken in the 1930s—between one-third and one-half of all working-class families surveyed received social income of some form. While the condition of the working class would have been considerably worse without the safety net, it contained many holes, which led to calls for a restructuring of social policy.

The Relief of Poverty in Mid Nineteenth-Century Colyton

Rural History ◽  
1990 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Robin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Present Form ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor Person ◽  
The Welfare State

The welfare state emerged in 1948 when the National Assistance Act finally abolished the New Poor Law Forty-two years later, as politicians and bureaucrats struggle to keep increasing expenditure within bounds, the existence of the welfare state in its present form is under threat. Just over 150 years ago, the Old Poor Law was presenting parish ratepayers with a similar problem of rising costs, leading in 1834 to a fundamental reorganisation into the New Poor Law It may therefore be profitable to see how effective in practice the New Poor Law was when it replaced a system widely regarded as profligate, and to consider the extent to which benefits payable through the welfare state were available a hundred years or more ago.This study examines in detail how the New Poor Law, and other forms of relief, affected the whole population of the rural parish of Colyton, in south Devonshire, during the thirty years from 1851 to 1881. It will first describe the sources from which a poor person in Colyton in the mid nineteenth century could look for relief; next discuss how widespread poverty was and who the poor were; then look at what kinds of relief were available, under what conditions; and finally assess the comparative importance to the poor of the different agencies providing assistance.

What Was Gained

2018 ◽  
pp. 286-310
Author(s):  
George R. Boyer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Welfare ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Welfare Reforms

This concluding chapter summarizes the book's major findings. The road to the welfare state of the 1940s was not a wide and straight thoroughfare through Victorian and Edwardian Britain. As the previous chapters have made clear, the story of British social policy from 1830 to 1950 is really two separate stories joined together in the years immediately before the Great War. The first is a tale of increasing stinginess toward the poor by the central and local governments, while the second is the story of the construction of a national safety net, culminating in the Beveridge Report and Labour's social policies of 1946–48. The prototype for the welfare reforms of the twentieth century cannot be found in the Victorian Poor Law. The chapter then offers some thoughts regarding the reasons for the shifts in social welfare policy from the 1830s to the 1940s.

Living Standards in Edwardian England and the Liberal Welfare Reforms

2018 ◽  
pp. 169-216
Author(s):  
George R. Boyer
Keyword(s):  
Social Welfare ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Safety Net ◽  
Social Welfare Policy ◽  
Welfare Policies ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World ◽  
Welfare Reforms

This chapter argues that the Liberal Welfare Reforms of 1906–11, which created a safety net reducing the economic insecurity associated with industrial capitalism, marked a watershed in the history of British social welfare policy. Their timing is explained by increased middle-class knowledge of workers' insecurity and by the greater willingness of Parliament to act as a result of growing working-class political influence. The chapter then compares British social welfare policies with social policies elsewhere in Western Europe. Britain's welfare reforms did not take place in isolation—several European nations adopted social welfare policies in the decades leading up to 1914. Indeed, Britain was a bit of a latecomer in the adoption of social programs, although it caught up quickly after 1906 and by the eve of the First World War was a leader in social welfare protection.

DOES THE WELFARE STATE HELP THE POOR?

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyler Cowen
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Transfer Programs ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Simple Question ◽  
The Welfare State

Does the welfare state help the poor? This surprisingly simple question often generates more heat than light. By the welfare state, I mean transfer programs aimed at helping the poor through the direct redistribution of income. (This excludes general economic policy, antitrust, the volunteer military, and many other policies that affect the well-being of the poor.) Defenders of the welfare state often assume that the poor benefit from it, while critics suggest that the losses outweigh the gains. The most notable of such criticisms is Charles Murray's Losing Ground, which suggests that the welfare state has failed to achieve its stated ends.

The Break-Up of the Poor Laws— German Style: Progressivism and the Origins of the Welfare State, 1900–1918

2008 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 981-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Frohman
Keyword(s):  
Welfare State ◽  
Social Insurance ◽  
Subsequent Development ◽  
Social Security Systems ◽  
Security Systems ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Poor Laws ◽  
The Poor ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Welfare State

While the 1834 New Poor Law and the controversies over its reform represent one of the central threads in every narrative of the history of modern Britain, the same can hardly be said of the German poor laws, whose history is far less known. This is due in large part to a historiographical tradition that sees the Bismarckian social insurance programs as the fons et origo of the German welfare state and thus marginalizes all forms of social assistance that can not be neatly fitted into the narrative pre-history or subsequent development of these programs. This contrasts with a British tradition where, as E. P. Hennock has recently argued, national insurance was primarily conceived as a means of poor law reform, and where the poor laws figure prominently in the historiography of the welfare state. On the other hand, this insurance-centered approach to the welfare state is not entirely to blame because, for their part, historians of poor relief have not been able to establish any positive connections between individualized, subsidiary, deterrent relief and social insurance or social security systems based on rights deriving from either contributions or citizenship.

‘Virtue’, ‘Citizen Character’ and ‘Social Environment’: Social Theory and Agency in Social Policy since 1830

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN OFFER
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Policy Theory ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Over Time

This article takes a fresh look at the intellectual context of the poor law in Britain and Ireland from the 1830s to the 1930s, and is focused on the different conceptions over time of the ‘service user’ as agent (drawing on Le Grand) in relation to a fundamental contrast between social theory which is ‘non-idealist’ and ‘idealist’ (drawing on Harris). It first examines the ideas of liberal tories, rather than Benthamites, in remodelling the poor law in England and introducing it to Ireland in the 1830s. Second, it explicitly draws a contrast between idealist and non-idealist social thought, relating it to the idealist nature of both the majority and minority reports on the poor law of 1909 and to the non-idealist thought of Spencer and the earlier discussion. The subsequent dominance of idealist thought in social policy theory and practice is then reviewed, considering Titmuss on agency, the ‘rediscovery’ of informal care in the 1970s as evidence of a shift to the non-idealist perspective that people can act as rational agents for their own well-being, and the resurgent influence of idealist thought on ‘New Labour’. The article concludes that links identified between ideas of agency and types of social theory since the 1830s enhance our understanding of debates today.

The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. By Hernando de Soto. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Pp. 276. $27.50, cloth; $14.00, paper.

2001 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1166-1168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary D. Libecap
Keyword(s):  
Latin American ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Developing Economies ◽  
Poor Performance ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Formal Property ◽  
Commercial Activity ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Hernando De Soto

In this provocative book, Hernando de Soto argues that the reason why transitional and developing economies have had such limited success with adopting capitalism is the lack of formal property rights for the urban poor. Without legal ownership of the homes they inhabit or the businesses they operate, the poor live in a shadow economy, subject to high risk of expropriation, bureaucratic arbitrariness, and political corruption. The absence of title thwarts investment, limits markets, dampens incentives, and retards economic growth all round. The comparatively poor performance of many Latin American, African, and Asian economies stems not from cultures that are alien to commercial activity, from the legacy of past colonialism, or from low savings rates among the poor. The urban poor are entrepreneurs, and formal property institutions are needed to free their energies and expand their opportunities, allowing them to accumulate desperately needed capital. Currently, the urban poor are forced to hold their wealth in defective forms. This misallocation cripples developing economies. According to de Soto, the potential gain is huge. He argues that despite their lack of affluence, the poor still save, and in the aggregate the amounts exceed by perhaps 40 times all of the foreign aid sent to developing countries since 1945. Freeing up these savings and entrepreneurial energy could lead to a second industrial revolution, and end the disparities of wealth and well-being that differentiate the developed and developing worlds.

The Poor Law of Old England: Institutional Innovation and Demographic Regimes

2010 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morgan Kelly ◽  
Cormac Ó Gráda
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Institutional Innovation ◽  
Institutional Changes ◽  
Real Wages ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Demographic Regimes

The striking improvement in life expectancy that took place in England between the Middle Ages and the seventeenth century cannot be explained either by an increase in real wages or by better climatic conditions. The decrease in the risk of utter destitution or of death from famine that was evident on the eve of the Industrial Revolution stemmed, in part, from institutional changes in the old poor law, which began to take shape and become effective early in the seventeenth century.

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