Part One: Continuities and change in UK social policy

Traditionally, Part One of Social Policy Review draws together chapters concerned with the key ‘pillars’ of the welfare state. This edition follows this tradition in spirit, but with contributions that underscore both the continuities and change that shape these pillars. In Chapter One, Hannah Lambie-Mumford discusses an issue that, while central to any debate on human needs, and historically significant in the development of social assistance transfers, has been largely subsumed in wider analyses of poverty and social exclusion. The rapid emergence of ‘food banks’ and their usage has placed the existence of ‘hunger’ in the global North under a policy spotlight. Although not a UK-specific phenomenon, and not necessarily one that has only emerged in the post-2008 context, the rise of food banks in the UK has occurred in tandem with the austerity project pursued by the coalition government. Chapter One seeks to demonstrate how food banks and their charitable status are symptomatic of wider and longer-term developments in welfare state development, and represent both an immediate challenge to meeting needs, an ongoing challenge to the quest for ‘joined-up’ policy-making, as well as a disciplinary challenge to those engaged in social policy research.

Chapter Two considers another dimension of social policy that has been gradually buried under the recent avalanche of policy attention given to benefit recipients without work: the question of wage subsidies for those in work. Chris Grover's analysis highlights the shift in justification for the existence of subsidies for low wages, and the ideological anomalies they can be argued to represent. With a focus on the introduction of Universal Credit (UC) and its historical precedents, the discussion in this chapter reminds us that the question ‘who benefits’ remains core if we are to properly understand the complexities of contemporary social protection mechanisms and their relationship to labour market discipline. This is a particularly pressing concern given that the ‘recovery’ from the great recession is largely reliant on the expansion of precarious, part-time and low-paid work, that outside the voluntaristic notion of ‘employment portfolios’ is incapable of providing security. Chris Grover's chapter contrasts the goals and outcomes of UC with alternative avenues for achieving social security, notably the idea of the ‘living wage’, which currently has momentum but not yet traction.