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Welfare and moral community

Welfare and moral community

This essay first appeared as Chapter 12 in 'The Future of Welfare'


Attitudes to ‘welfare’


Although the term “welfare state” has been in use now for around three-quarters of a century, it has described subtly different entities over that time. When the term was first coined, in the pre-war period, it was used to denote a state that ruled for the people, in contrast to the ‘Power State’, which ruled over them. In the years after the war the phrase came, in Britain, to denote a system, based on William Beveridge’s war-time report and implemented by the Attlee government, in which (for the most part) flat-rate, universal, mandatory social insurance provided a social safety net through which no-one could, in theory, fall.

The same phrase is still used today in spite of the fact that the system we describe is unrecognisably different from that of 1945. In the words of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, “very little of today’s welfare system bears even a passing resemblance to the system envisaged in the Beveridge Report.”  This is partly because the shape, size and expectations of the population it serves have changed out of all recognition,  but it is also because the size, mechanics and fundamental purpose of the system itself has also changed, the insurance-based system that once formed backbone of the Attlee settlement now reduced to a vestigial stump.

Public opinion has also changed, although more subtly, over time. In the late 1940s, there was widespread, nearly unqualified approval of the welfare state. Similarly, according to various research studies today, conducted for/ by British Social Attitudes,  Prospect/ YouGov,  and BBC/ ComRes, the original concept of the welfare state remains highly popular. Only one in ten people disagrees that the creation of the welfare state is “one of Britain’s proudest achievements”.

However, public attitudes to its present operation are more sceptical, with a growing proportion of the population associating today’s welfare state with unfairness, inefficiency and dependency. The context of this change is important. Over the last 30 years, the public has tended to be more sympathetic to increased welfare spending, and to benefit recipients themselves, during periods of economic downturn – and vice versa.  This makes intuitive sense. During recessions, people need more help, fell more vulnerable, and know more people who are on benefits, thereby drawing the stigma that is often attached to welfare. During times of plenty, the opposite is true.

Research over recent years has shown that this inverse correlation – between security/ wealth and attitudes to welfare – is becoming decoupled, and public opinion about universal, state-based welfare provision is much more reserved than it once was, in spite of the deepest and longest recession in the post-war period. Thus, for example, in 2010, three in ten respondents recommended an increase in taxation and spending compared with five in ten who did so in 2002. Similarly, whereas twenty years ago (at the end of another recession), only 26% of people agreed or agreed strongly that “if welfare benefits weren’t so generous, people would learn to stand on their own two feet,” today 54% do. Although the most recent data from British Social Attitudes survey for 2012 indicate a slight reverse in recent trends, the direction of travel over the last generation is reasonably clear.  We are falling out of love with the welfare state.

Two caveats

It would be easy simply to wring our hands at such data and bemoan how individualistic and mean-spirited the British public has become. That, indeed, is how some commentators have reacted, blaming public ignorance, lurid media tales of benefit fraud and the ghost of Margaret Thatcher for the shifting opinion. No doubt all three factors are involved in some way, but to blame the public for not being as positive about the role of the state in welfare-provision as it apparently should be is not only rather haughty but, more importantly, is to miss critical nuances that change the picture. Two in particular are worth noting.

The first is that the public’s reaction against state-based welfare provision is not undifferentiated. Whatever the overall direction of travel is, support for state spending on health and disability remains high and constant. When asked whether they think it should be the government’s responsibility to provide health care for the sick, 83% of people said it definitely should be in 2012 (compared with 85% in 1990). Similarly, in 2010, 85% of people said they thought the government “should mainly be responsible for ensuring that people have enough to live on if they become sick for a long time or disabled”, compared with 7% who thought it should be mainly a person’s employer, and 7% who thought it should be mainly the person themselves and their family. However sceptical we are becoming about state-based welfare provision, it is not about its use to cover sickness and disability.

The second caveat is that the public’s reaction against state-based welfare provision is not the same as a reaction against welfare. Put another way, for all that public opinion has swung against the state as the primary source and provider of ‘welfare’ in some areas, it has not embraced thoroughgoing individualism as the obvious alternative. Thus, the percentage of people who believe that a person’s employer is mainly responsible for ensuring “that people have enough money to live on in retirement” rose from 7.4% in 2001 to 11.2% in 2010. The percentage who thought that the person themselves or their family (the two options are rolled into one in the BSA questionnaire) had the same responsibility rose from 29% to 35% over the same time. Similarly, when asked in 2012, who they thought should be responsible for reducing child poverty in Britain, 78% said central government (up from 74% in 2009) and 62% said local government (vs. 55% in 2009), whilst at the same time 30% said friends/relatives of people in poverty (vs. 26% in 2009) and 28% said charities (vs. 23% in 2009). 

These two observations make it clear that the public’s turn against state-welfare is neither blanket nor does it constitute an uncomplicated embrace of hard-nosed individualism. Instead, the reaction is concentrated in a number of specific areas. Thus, the public is more sceptical about state welfare support for parents on standard rate tax receiving child benefit, for the low paid who are receiving support through benefits, and for single parents. The public is also considerably more hostile to the government taking responsibility for ensuring that people have enough to live on if they become unemployed.

There are pertinent questions here about whether the public’s increased emphasis on the responsibility of employers, families and voluntary organisations to meet people’s needs is matched by their own behaviour. The percentage of people who told British Social Attitudes that they were a member of a voluntary group that helped the sick, elderly, children, or another vulnerable group actually fell slightly (from 1.9% to 1.5%) between 1997 and 2012. Similarly, the percentage of people who say they are a member of another “local community or voluntary group” (i.e. one that does not have a function like those above) has remained static, at 6.7%, over the last twenty years. Increased support for localised welfare activity does not necessarily translate into increased local welfare activity.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is not simply that the public is necessarily more heartless than they were a generation ago concerning those in need, but rather that they see the responsibility for care shifting away from the individual as taxpayer and towards the individual as employer, employee, volunteer or family member.

A sense of ‘us’

The reasons for this are many and complex. One is wealth: a wealthy population feels less need for state-based welfare support than a poorer one. A second is institutional trust, or the lack of it: trust in politics (and institutions generally) is dismally low, and people seem not to feel their money is being administered well, fairly or to people who genuinely deserve it.

More significant than either of those, however (at least for the purposes of this essay) is the question of common identity and responsibility. Do I have a meaningful sense of belonging? If so, to whom and to what extent? How ‘thick’ is that sense? And how exacting are its responsibilities? It is our answers to these questions that determine the welfare landscape we cultivate.

It was precisely an overpowering national sense of ‘us’ that enabled the creation of the welfare state in the first instance. A nation that had pooled its resources and energies as never before to come through the greatest external threat in its history was a nation acutely conscious of a sense of ‘us’. That sense was not simply negative and circumstantial, forged entirely in opposition to a deadly foe. It was positive also, drawing on a powerful common identity – the “Christian civilisation” that Churchill and many others spoke about – which it transmuted into a common peacetime object, namely a nationalised system of mutual social protection secured by insurance. A strong national sense of ‘us’ was called on to win the peace, as it had been to win the war.

Two important factors have changed since this happened, however. The first relates to the nation. Few prominent British politicians would now describe contemporary Britain as the hope for Christian civilisation. The sense of national destiny and responsibility that was once pervasive is gone, as is any substantive notion even of national identity (witness the repeated attempts to define Britishness over the last 15 years). Large scale net inward migration; the evaporation of a normative Christian moral atmosphere, however faintly it was once felt; and the now-instinctive mistrust of authority and government – all these have combined to erode still further that overpowering sense of mutual responsibility that underpinned the Attlee settlement. The nationalised sense of ‘us’, that founded and sustained the welfare state, is much weakened.

The second factor relates to the system itself. The Attlee settlement was an insurance system, predicated largely on flat-rate contributions. In other words, the principal bond of unity, the centre of ethical gravity of the whole system, was just desert: the longer you worked or the more you paid in, the more you would (probably) receive, and vice versa.

Over the years, this original system was reshaped, contribution giving way to general taxation, flat-rate contribution to progressive rates, and receipt according to contribution to receipt according to means-testing. In other words, the centre of gravity shifted from just desert to perceived need, the primary call on the common purse being not whether someone had worked and saved, but whether they were in need.

Need-centred systems can function perfectly successfully, but in order to do so they require a very thick sense of identity to sustain them. The reason for this is two-fold. First, a need-centred system inherently fails to value, and therefore ends up disincentivising, industriousness. In such a system, you don’t get more out the more you put in, which invites the question (however quietly asked), why bother putting much in. Second, a need-centred system pays particular regard to, indeed prioritises, vulnerability, and therefore ends up incentivising dependency. In such a system, the needier you are, the greater call you have on the common purse, which invites the temptation (however quietly acknowledged) to exaggerate your needs.

In order to overcome such dynamics, a need-centred system relies on a very strong bond of mutual trust and responsibility. It requires participants to maintain necessary levels of personal diligence (i.e. work and saving) even though they know they will probably not benefit from them. It requires them not to exaggerate their level of need, even though they would probably benefit from doing so. And it requires them to trust one another in all this – not only to maintain their levels of work and to be honest about their need, but to trust that others are also being so. In short, it requires sufficient and sustained virtues of diligence, honesty, and trust to nullify or overcome the free-rider problem.

It is important to stress that those who shifted the system in the direction of being need-centred were not intentionally disincentivising hard work or incentivising need. To imagine they were would be unduly cynical. Indeed, it is possible to see the development of such a system of mutual responsibility as an example of the highest, rather than lowest, moral aspiration. Such a system calls on a people to care and serve for those who most need care and service, and not to count the cost in doing so.

In this regard, such a need-centred system was a (perhaps unconscious) adaptation of the New Testament ethic in which “all the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.”  The emphasis in the public ministry of the early church was that it was need that dictated generosity. Such was an ethic founded on the example and teaching of Christ, such as in the Good Samaritan, in which it is the solely the need of the victim that commanded a practical response – and where ethnic, cultural, and religious differences, not to mention personal cost and risk, were immaterial. A need-centred social system is the highest calling but also, therefore, the most demanding.

Responsibilities

Certain elements of the post-war welfare state, in its fullest sense, show how this vision of a need-centred community could work. And not just ‘could’: the on-going public support for the NHS shows how it continues to do so. Those who have paid very little in taxes, such as children and the young, are treated by the health service simply on account of their need. Those who have not paid enough, such as the long-term unemployed or the chronically ill, similarly get the service they need. The system is funded by those who have for the sake of those who need.  Merit does not come into the equation.

The NHS, and affiliated services connected with disability, increasingly seem to be the exception, however. (And even here the edges are being frayed, with questions being – legitimately –raised about the extent to which new residents or, for example, persistent smokers can draw on a need-centred system.) Beyond the NHS, the ingredients to sustain a need-centred system are simply not present in the public conscience.

The reason for this may be glimpsed in a second, rather more unsettling incident from the life of the early church. In Acts chapter 5, a couple called Ananias and Saphira donate the money from property they have sold to the common purse, but in doing so disingenuously withhold some of the proceeds. This emerges and the apostle Peter severely berates the couple, not for their lack of generosity but their deception. This short and disturbing vignette – both Ananias and Saphira keel over and die when exposed – serves as a counterpoint to the earlier story of how the needs-based community flourished. That first account talked about how “all the believers were together and had everything in common” (emphases added). In other words, there was a common existential and ethical bond the underpinned the community, and which enabled it to serve “anyone who had need”. Once that is undermined, the capacity to sustain a need-centred system is damaged. Ananias and Saphira were not free-riders as such. They did not claim what was not rightly theirs. But they betray the bonds of trust and honesty on which the community’s identity, and its ability to answer need, depended.

Post-war Britain is rather different from the early church, but the parallel is a meaningful one. The story of Britain’s post-war welfare settlement is one of how the nation gradually, almost accidentally, developed a needs-centred welfare system, which demanded the strongest possible sense of mutual identity, trust and responsibility, just as the nation itself felt its sense of national identity, mutual trust, and unqualified responsibility to one another attenuate

Conclusion

How might we respond to this? Three responses present themselves. The first is to throw in the towel, and adopt the essentially libertarian response of dismantling state-based welfare altogether in favour of a society of self-interest. The second is the mirror opposite, namely to soldier on without paying attention to the new public landscape.

The first is unappealing: not only morally problematic but clearly not where the public is or wants to go. The second is unrealistic: carrying on with business-as-usual is positively Canute-like, not so much in commanding the incoming waters to stop as ordering the withdrawing tide of public opinion to return to where it was three generations ago.

There is a third option. This is to pay more serious attention to what public opinion is saying about a greater variety of welfare provision. Doing so might suggest several points of action, three of which may be mentioned in the space available.

First, we need to make a powerful case for those parts of the nationalised need-based system that remain, particularly health. Nigel Lawson once remarked that the NHS was the closest thing that the English had to a religion. Perhaps so, but the English (or indeed the British) are as capable of losing their medical religion as their Christian one, and we cannot assume that public support will remain as high and steady as it has for the last generation, especially when the irresistible force of ever greater medical needs meets the immovable object of a limited budget. In such a clash, the moral case for a health system whose fundamental criterion for access is need must be made repeatedly.

Second, those aspects of the welfare state, such as social security, where a needs-centred system is witnessing the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of public support need reform, specifically reform into the kind of system that 21st century population can support. This, in effect, means change into a system centred on desert – the insurance-based system that once was – rather than need.

This could be a costly reform, not only financially, but also, potentially socially. Britain in 2013 is not Britain in 1945. The social fabric is more threadbare with many bigger holes – fragmented families and communities – and the move from a need-centred system of means-tested welfare to a desert-centred system based on insurance risks people falling through those holes. This eventuality cannot be ignored or minimised which is why the second response necessitates a third, namely to enable a much greater role in welfare for those groups that are need-centred, namely voluntary, charitable and church groups. Shifting from a needs-centred system will seem just too costly to those most in need of help unless other means of support are encouraged and maintained. William Beveridge understood well that his proposed system required a secure foundation of voluntary (and indeed mutual) activity on which to rest. In this, as in so much else, he was prophetic. Ultimately reform of the welfare state will succeed only if we can re-form the welfare society in which it operates.

Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos

 

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