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Student Number: 0373390

“UK social policy is less concerned with meeting needs and promoting well-being than it is with managing risk”. To what extent is this an accurate reflection of UK policy? You must illustrate your answer with examples from at least two areas of current policy, which are studied during the module.

Social Policy (SP) is concerned with the study of social, economic and political relationships. Social scientist Titmus (1976) described SP has ‘…the study of social needs and the functioning, in conditions of scarcity, of human organisation, traditionally called social services or social welfare systems, to meet those needs…’ (Cited in Lavalette and Pratt, 1997:2). People have a range of needs and look to the State to meet them. ‘Need is a dynamic concept, the definition of which will vary over time in accordance with: changes in national legislation; changes in local policy; availability of resources; and patterns of local demand’ (SSI/SSWG, 1991, cited in Rummery and Glendinning, 1999:341). A more recent analysis of SP is rooted in political, economic and market failures. According to Esping-Andersen (1999) ‘Social policy means the public management of social risks’ (p.36). The ways in which needs and risks are defined have important implications for policy intervention because essentially they are the legitimate demands to which social welfare has traditionally been addressed. Hence both terms are socially constructed and equally shaped by contested and conflicting perspectives (Langan, 1998). Within these assignments I will look at how needs and risks are central to the policy making process and how political ideologies have influence this process. The two policy areas that I will look at in illustrating whether SP is more concerned with managing risks rather than meeting needs will be community care (CC) and Education. In providing this evidence particular reference will be made to whether CC is managing to meet the needs of older people and the government educational polices on inclusion.

The Welfare State (WS) was founded amidst a broad post-war consensus in which parties from across the spectrum saw a social responsibility in meeting the basic needs of the people, through pillars such as the NHS and free comprehensive education for all. Under post-war welfare ‘many needs formally regarded as the responsibility of the individual- for housing and health care, for example- were for many people met by social institutions’ (Langan, 1998:4) The Labour party and ‘one nation’ Conservatives supported a shared view of government responsibility and collective state action (Ellison and Pierson, 2003). By the 1970s, the consensus that existed came under increasing strain in the austere economic climate of the day. ‘The emergence of mass unemployment and a declining economy eroded one of the main ‘pillars’ of support for the welfare state (Clarke and Langan, 1993), one consequence of which was a widespread reassessment of the role of the state in welfare provision…’ (Lavalette and Pratt, 1997:229). In a bid to roll back state welfare the political right argued that the state was far too extensive and costly. The concept of need became the focus of political polarisation as arguments for a reduction in state welfare expenditure rapidly became targets for those seeking to minimise state intervention. The lurch towards the political right by the Conservatives marked the end of post-war consensus.

The New Right (NR) under Thatcher were interested in minimum regulation, free markets, competition and tight control of public spending. Hence by the late 70’s there is a fundamental shift towards neo-liberalism ideology and the importation of market principles in SP. The NR analysis of the welfare state is that it is wasteful and an impediment to economic prosperity. ‘…too much redistribution, equality, and social protection reduces individuals’ incentives and impairs the market’s ability to furnish adequate jobs. If income erodes peoples’ incentive to save, this raises interests rates and leads to underinvestment; if they erode incentive to work, the economic base of the system is weakened’ (Esping-Andersen, 1999:175).

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The argument for minimum state intervention can be seen against the backdrop of changes taking place within the traditional family structure, in gender relationships, demographic changes and globalisation (Esping-Andersen, 1999). The impact of these changes placed additional demand for services. According to the NR the impact of globalisation meant the WS needed to adopt the principles of the market in order to drive down costs so as to counter the threat of the fast emerging tiger economies of Asia, particularly Japan and South Korea. The NR therefore embarked on a radical restructuring of welfare provision with affordability and cost containments becoming the key issues. The application of privatisation, deregulation and quasi-market into the public sector were hallmarks of the Thatcherite drive for reform in the early 1980s. The marketisation of welfare provision was based on the classical neo-liberalism economic argument that ‘the most efficient way of distributing capital is to allow the market in which goods and services are traded to operate with a minimum amount of regulation’ (Alcock, Payne and Sullivan, 2000:126). Constraints in public spending meant that SP was less concern with meeting needs.

New labour (NL) having returned to power in a re-invented social democratic form have sought to find a ‘third-way’, acknowledging that the WS is in need of modernisation. Accepting the economic arguments of the NR, the ‘third-way’ aims ‘…to balance the freedom of the market with a commitment to social justice’ (Stepney and Ford, 2000:6). What we find as the WS embarks into the 21st century is a miss-mash, in which NL attempts to meet needs within the constraints of tight fiscal control; one of their election pledges of 1997 was to retain the spending limits put in place by the previous Conservative administration. Hence the Labour government have well-meaning policies such as ‘life-long learning’ and ‘Community Care’ starved of adequate funding and forced to manage risk rather than meeting needs too often. New challenges emerge with fear paralysing much of SP and faced with an ever litigious society risk avoidance has dominated the thinking of social care professionals.

The neo-liberalism stance on minimum state intervention is reflected by the Conservative policy on Community Care (CC). The term CC refers ‘…to the care needs of vulnerable people in society, where those needs are met outside institutional care’ (Alcock, Payne and Sullivan, 2000:206). The concept was initially developed in the 1960’s as policies on institutional care were being questioned. The idea was aimed at promoting deinstitutionalised care for vulnerable people and to increase their support within the community. The idea was hijacked by the Conservative government who viewed it as a financially prudent option in that it would replace costly institutional care with other forms of provision (Griffiths, 1998). The development of ideas about CC in the 1980’s was fundamentally based on free market principles and viewed as the cornerstone to the delivery of the effective and efficient community-based caring services. Its development under the Tories represent a ‘…move away from commitment to community and collective responses to social need towards individualisation’ (Payne, 1995:33).

The NHS & CC Act 1990 essentially changed ‘… the role of the local authority social services department from that of the provider of services to that of ‘enablers’ or ‘purchaser’ of service from a mixed of public, voluntary and private sources’ (Ellison and Pierson, 1998:165). According to the Conservatives the development of a mixed economy of care, would widen choice and facilitate competition between service providers. The ‘…intention of competition is to drive down cost, and potentially improve the quality, of provision by encouraging the availability of providers who will offer the service more cheaply than traditional local authority service…’ (Payne, 195:27). The practice of care management became central to the implementation of CC. The role of care managers is something of a paradox. On the one hand they aim to provide need led services and empower service users, whilst on the other; they were designed to achieve value for money and the containment of cost (Payne, 1995).

In many instances the responsibility for providing unpaid informal care within the family falls upon women. According to the feminist critiques of CC policy, the exploitation of women’s labour without heavy state investment enables the state to continue to provide a residual role. Understandably feminists have been very critical of this underhanded approach which essentially assumes that women should and could provide informal care (Page and Silburn, 1999). In fact feminists are very critical of WS in that it reinforces social inequalities. According to radical feminist the ‘WS is a bastion of male power which reflects the patriarchal nature of society and functions to control women’ (Alcock, Payne and Sullivan, 2000:129). Women are therefore disadvantaged in all three pillars of welfare, the state, the family and the labour market which all feed into one another (Fitzpatrick, 2001).

The Thatcher governments of the 1980’s approached education with the same reforming zeal as they did other areas of the public sector. Thatcher aimed to raise academic standards by introducing market principles into education. Themes of choice, standards and specialist schools became the Tory education policies in the 1980’s and were then adopted by Labour in the late 1990’s. ‘The passage of the education Act of 1988 heralded a decade of unprecedented change in which educational provision has transformed from a locally administered system based on the principles of social welfare to a centrally regulated quasi-market’ (Ellison and Pierson, 1998:146). Education was removed from state control and schools became funded primarily on the basis of the number of students they recruited. The Education Act 1988 introduced…

competition between providers
choice
Publication of Schools league table
testing standard and performance (OFSTED)

Essentially education ‘was developing as a market commodity driven by consumer demands and market competition between schools, and fuelled by league table publication, school choice, specialist schools, and failing schools’ (Tomlinson 2001:8). The provision of school choice increased covert selection between comprehensive schools and begun the sharp division between ‘popular’ schools and less popular schools. Selective policies enable popular schools which are normally situated in affluent middle-class areas to select more desirable pupils via aptitude and a post code lottery. Without an address in the locality of the school admittance is not possible as demand far exceeds available places (Tomlinson 2001). Working class parents are therefore forced to send their children to less desirable comprehensive school which are not full and therefore operate with reduced funding. They also tend to have a greater propensity of students with SEN and therefore greater resources are required in order to meet their needs. The number of overt and covert selective policies introduced by NL ensures that familial self interest and the scramble for ‘good’ schools continues (Tomlinson 2001).

The Inclusion policy of the government aimed at meeting students with learning needs within mainstream education have been thwarted by school choice, league tables and poor funding. Statistic in the mid-1990’s indicated that that ‘…the majority of children…having SEN were children with learning and behavioural problems which many schools would like to see moved out of mainstream education, but which the government, mindful of the cost of any form of special school, wished to see retained in schools’ (Tomlinson, 2001:77). Closure of special schools has meant more and more pupils with SEN are educated within mainstream schools. In some areas as many as 1 in 6 students in schools have special needs () yet the provision provided by special schools has not transferred across with them leading to inadequate funding and unsatisfactory staffing levels. In meeting the needs of those students with learning and behavioural difficulties the government has fallen short because schools have not received enough additional funding, training and increased recruitment required for this policy to work.

Analysis from research findings have indicated a decline in needs led services and an emphasis on rationing becoming the key objectives of government. Rummery and Glendinning (1999) found from their research study into the experiences of disabled and older people in obtaining access to CC assessment ‘…that the cumulative consequences of community care policies in the UK have resulted in a move from universal access to NHS services to discretionary access to residual local authority services…’ (P.335-336). The study found that the government ‘…deep normative core of curbing expenditure on long-term care had succeeded, through the transfer of a capped budget from the social security to the local authority social services budget, with the latter now responsible for rationing all public spending on social care (Lewis and Glennerster, 1996). Assessment for long-term care now had to consider not only financial circumstances but also social and functional needs, with explicit priority being given to those with the greatest needs or at highest risk (Rummery and Glendinning, 1999: 338). Risk has now become the mechanism by which to access scarce and costly resources. The introduction of ‘gatekeeping’ mechanisms has increasingly restricted access to services.

The promotion of ‘community’ care has increased the number of older people dependent on domiciliary home help and day care services. Access to such services have become increasingly subject to means-tested charges (NCC, 1995; Chetwynd et al., 1996; Baldwin, 1997). This extension of means-testing into domiciliary services has meant that, apart from treatment provided by hospitals, general practitioners and domiciliary nurses, long-term care services free at the point of delivery are now largely available only to the very poorest older people. In fact research indicates that roughly half the elderly who live alone receive no help from social services and therefore CC is failing to meet the needs of the increasing number of elderly. Furthermore ‘People with capital of more than £18,500 got no state help with care costs, except in Scotland, and the financial position of older people was deteriorating after the recent changes in annuity rates and the decline in the value of pension funds’ ( 12/11/04). Hence the definition of needs is increasingly being narrowed. Rationing has become an increasingly emotive issue with the public. A series of well publicised scandals have led to social services departments being roundly criticised for allegedly abandoning the vulnerable to the whims of the market.

There is increasing evidence to suggest that the government policy on inclusion is failing to meet the needs of both SEN and mainstream pupils. Margaret Morrisey (2004), of the National Confederation of Parent Teacher Associations clearly states that the integration of children with behavioural difficulties was severely disruptive to all children's education. ‘It is neither beneficial to the SEN pupil or to the class and disrupts teaching and learning’ (). In fact according to teachers’ leaders the government's policy on inclusion is in reality "disastrous". The key problem being that schools have not received enough additional funding, training or increased recruitment required for this policy to work. According to a report by the audit commission, provision for SEN pupils is patchy and all too often treated as an "add-on" by schools and local education authorities in England and Wales ( 12/11/04). NASUWT executive member Amanda Haehner (2004) in a statement to The Guardian points out , how ‘Forcing mainstream schools to take children who needed a lot of specialist attention had turned many into enormous special schools without any of the benefits of true special education’ ( 12/11/04). In reality many teachers are forced to sideline teaching in favour of ‘trying to coerce unwilling and, increasingly, aggressive children into behaving in an appropriate manner, or, if all else fails, just keeping them in the classroom’ (), thus making management of risk the main consideration. Ms Haehner concluded that only highfliers appear to get the education that was tailored to their needs.

There can be little doubt about risk replacing need as the central principle of contemporary UK SP formation and welfare delivery. According to Kemshall et al (1997) ‘risks principles are now significantly embedded in the organizational practices of welfare agencies and that the rationale of welfare delivery is predicted increasing upon risk rather than needs. This is exemplified in organizational policies and procedures for service delivery, and in the identification of priorities and resource allocation’ (Kemshall et al, 2002:24).With the spotlight on risk, professional activity becomes the work of risk-assessment and risk management.

Bibliography

Alcock, Payne and Sullivan (2000) Introducing Social Policy Pearson Education Limited

Asping-Andersen (2000) Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ellison and Pierson (1998) Developments in British Social Policy Macmillan Press LTD

Lavalette and Pratt (1997) Social Policy: A Conceptual and Theoretical Introduction SAGE

Langan (1998) Welfare: Needs, Rights and Risks (edited) THE OPEN UNVERSITY

Payne M (1995) Social work and Community Care Macmillan

Rummery and Glendinning (1999)

Negotiating needs, access and gatekeeping: developments in health and community care policies in the UK and the rights of disabled and older citizens’, Critical Social Policy, Vol. 19, No. 3, 335-351