The Evolution of the British Welfare State

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The poor called the new workhouses ‘Bastilles’ (after the infamous prison in Paris) and they caused much bitterness. However, as the century went on the workhouses gradually became more humane. The Modern Welfare State From 1911 workers in certain trades such as building and shipbuilding who frequently had periods of unemployment all contributed to a fund. If unemployed they could claim a small amount of money for a maximum of 15 weeks in any year. Again it was hardly generous but in 1920 the scheme was extended to most (not all) workers. For the unfortunate people made to enter workhouses, life was made as unpleasant as possible. Married couples were separated and children over 7 were separated from their parents. The inmates were made to do hard work like breaking stones to make roads or breaking bones to make fertilizer.

An enquiry was established in 1941 to propose how best to tidy up state welfare. Beveridge seized the opportunity, rewrote the script, and then redesigned the contours of British welfare. The publication of his report was fortuitously delayed. When it was produced in November 1942 it followed hard on the heels of the Allies' first major victory of World War Two. Implementing Beveridge was immediately seen as part of winning the peace. The overall notion of path dependency is also present in the welfare regimes literature in the sense that distinctive welfare regimes produce distinct policy legacies which in turn largely determine both the extent of change and the types of change that may be possible. For Esping-Andersen, it was the “class coalitions in which the three welfare-state regime types were founded” ( 1990:33) that generated the bearing of an existing welfare state structure on the current politics of change. For P. Pierson ( 1994; 2001a; 2001b), it was more of a sectoral dynamic that generated varying policy outcomes depending on the specific social policy areas in question. So, for instance, Myles and Pierson ( 2001) found that various trajectories followed by many nations in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in their pension reform do not neatly correspond with existing categorizations of those nations’ political cultures or historic welfare regimes. And they claim that examining preexisting pension arrangements provides the best explanation for the paths of reform chosen. In both cases, specific regimes, once consolidated, tend to produce unique policy path dependencies that in turn overdetermine solutions to new problems as well as strategies of welfare reform (cf. Scharpf and Schmidt 2000a; 2000b).

Brings the story right up to the present day, now including discussion of the Coalition and Theresa May's early Prime Ministership United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. At www.unrisd.org, accessed Jul. 2009. Here UNRISD provides various research reports and conference news, working papers, and academic publications. Key research programs include social policy and development, democracy, governance and well-being, civil society and social movements, markets, business and regulation, identities, conflict and cohesion, as well as gender and development. An established introductory textbook that provides students with a full overview of British social policy and social ideas since the late 18th century. Derek Fraser's authoritative account is the essential starting point for anyone learning about how and why Britain created the first Welfare State, and its development into the 21st century. This is an ideal core text for dedicated modules on the history of British social policy or the British welfare state - or a supplementary text for broader modules on modern British history or British political history - which may be offered at all levels of an undergraduate history, politics or sociology degree. In addition it is a crucial resource for students who may be studying the history of the British welfare state for the first time as part of a taught postgraduate degree in British history, politics or social policy. New to this Edition: A significant advance has been made in theorizing welfare state development. Yet much of early work tends to focus on finding one single powerful causal force within the well-established procedures and assumptions which are based on conceptions of linearity. Instead, the second generation of welfare state research began to identify salient interaction effects of multiple factors. In his early work, Esping-Andersen ( 1985), one of the most prominent adherents of the “working-class mobilization theory,” presented a classic formulation that distinguished social democratic models from others. Yet later, in his masterwork (Esping-Andersen 1990), he refined and significantly changed this duality, abandoning an ideal mode of one extreme or the other, and identified three separate routes of welfare state instead.

This is an ideal core text for dedicated modules on the history of British social policy or the British welfare state - or a supplementary text for broader modules on modern British history or British political history - which may be offered at all levels of an undergraduate history, politics or sociology degree. In addition it is a crucial resource for students who may be studying the history of the British welfare state for the first time as part of a taught postgraduate degree in British history, politics or social policy.The 1948 National Health Act, aimed at achieving that very objective, and established for the first time a national minimum.