The welfare state is but the vehicle for the provision of welfare and the latter does not necessarily entail the former. Much recent debate occasioned by government policy and rhetoric has therefore confused means and ends. This paper argues that a defence of welfare must come before a concern for protecting the welfare state. A number of foundations for guaranteed welfare provision, including justice, rights and contract are considered but the most persuasive foundation for welfare as need-meeting is found to lie in the Kantian categorical imperatives. Not only do these provide a moral prescription that welfare ought to be provided, they also dictate the ways in which it ought to be provided. It is against these requirements therefore that the necessity of a welfare state as a means of providing welfare can be tested. The second part of the paper then considers how extensive a welfare state needs to be, and how the boundaries between the public and private domains in the provision of welfare may be drawn. The equality principle, allied to the notion of equality of welfare, is found to be a useful instrument in determining the bounds of the public domain but only (so the paper concludes reluctantly) when harnessed to objective specifications of need.

There has been continuing debate ever since the reorganisation of social services following the Seebohm Report as to the most appropriate mode of organising field social work. At different times various models have been proposed with more or less enthusiasm, some of which expect fieldwork caseloads to be of a generic kind and others which demand a greater degree of specialisation. This paper examines the extent of specialisation in social work based on a national survey of fieldwork organisation and considers some reasons why this trend to specialisation is evident, even in authorities with a strong commitment to community-based modes of provision.

The cross-national works of development sociologists and of political scientists have sought to disentangle some of the determinants of welfare, whereas studies in comparative social policy have been mainly evaluative. These have laid themselves open to charges of being, variously, a-theoretical, unsystematic and narrowly focused on the state sector. However, a case is made here for the continuation of such studies with a clear focus on social policy rather than the mixed economy of welfare, using more explicit evaluative criteria and a range of methods. A small comparative study of social security benefit levels in Australia, Britain and the USA is used as an illustration of the potential in this approach and the problems of method involved.

Owner-occupation is now an important source of wealth for many people. Housing has experienced price appreciation much in excess of most other assets over the last 20 years and, at the same time, owner-occupation has expanded dramatically. This paper first discusses the impact that this growth in popular wealth holding has had on the overall distribution of income and points to its great importance for all groups except the very wealthy. The importance of housing wealth to the individual is also discussed. Despite the importance of housing wealth, both at an individual and at the broader level, there is virtually no evidence on the transmission of wealth between generations for the mass of people with moderate wealth. This paper rectifies this by analysing the patterns of inheritance of housing wealth for a sample of estates in Glasgow. The evidence shows that wealth left by owner-occupiers is typically passed to a very small group in the close family. The amount of money received can be quite substantial, but tends to go to those in the same or the following generation, that is, people already in middle or old age themselves. Thus, housing inheritance is not likely to be passed directly to young, first time buyers, but to people who already have an established housing career.

Using data from the 1980 General Household Survey, differences in the provision of statutory domiciliary services to disabled elderly people are explored. Domiciliary services vary in their degree of ‘substitutability’, that is, in the extent to which the care may be performed either by state services or by other members of the elderly person's household. Domestic support services are substitutable by any available carer; personal health and hygiene services are partially substitutable depending on the relationship between the carer and the cared for; and medical services are not substitutable by informal carers. The paper shows that discrimination by statutory services against women carers is dependent primarily on the household composition of the elderly person rather than on gender per se. Taking into account the level of disability of the elderly person, younger ‘single’ women carers receive no less support than ‘single’ men carers, but carers who are married women under 65 obtain the least domestic and personal health care support. Carers who are elderly receive more support than carers under 65. Among disabled elderly people who live alone, men receive somewhat more domestic and personal health services than women.

This paper examines some of the social and political implications of retrenchment and privatisation in British housing policy. It reviews arguments and evidence about residualisation in the housing market, the effects of consumption sectoral cleavages, and attitudinal ambivalence to welfare, in an attempt to understand the apparent absence of discontent about inequalities in housing. It is argued that recent trends have exacerbated social fragmentation and reinforced tendencies to political acquiescence.

Social assistance in many countries is administered locally. Centralised, uniform schemes, such as those which operate in Britain are often assumed to guarantee, or at least to enhance, territorial equity, that is the equal treatment of individuals with identical needs irrespective of where they live. This assumption is examined with respect to the system of single payments—lump sum payments to meet exceptional needs—which existed prior to the 1988 social security reforms. Although much of the geographic variation in the volume of awards which used to exist is explicable in terms of variations in the level of need, territorial inequity is demonstrated to have occurred in what was a nationally administered and closely regulated scheme. The reasons for the inequity seem in part to have been due to variations in office work flow and working practices, welfare rights activity and unidentified processes linked in some way to the regional administrative structure of DHSS.

It is commonly argued that democratic-welfare capitalist societies face a continual tension between market individualist and need-oriented welfare values. If this is so, the attempt by the British Conservative Government of the 1980s to administer a brisk restorative to the welfare state with a purging dose of market principles seems likely to generate a tenacious opposition. This paper uses the transfer of sick pay responsibilities to employers through the 1983 Statutory Sick Pay scheme as a case study, to examine with what success market-based ideologies have encroached on people's conceptions of welfare citizenship.

In several West European countries the way in which social security is currently financed by payroll contributions is widely criticised for its negative effects on employment and on the future stability of social security revenue. The calculation of the contributions on a broader assessment base, that is, value-added, might be a plausible alternative. Since human labour is increasingly replaced by technology, could the latter's value-added be used for financing social insurance? This article reviews the major empirical studies on the economic effects of such a rebasing to a so-called ‘Maschinenbeitrag’. It shows that the economic and budgetary benefits are very uncertain; therefore a shift towards a fiscalisation of social security financing is suggested as an alternative line of policy.

The Netherlands are of considerable interest to students of comparative social policy, because Christian democracy and not social democracy is the leading political force. This article analyses the history of the Dutch system of social security in terms of political forces and their power resources. In particular, it considers the reasons for the comparatively high level of social security development in the Netherlands. The various approaches which have been adopted in much current research in comparative social policy are critically discussed in the context of the Dutch experience.

As unemployment has risen, so has academic, professional and political interest in its possible social consequences. In recent years a large number of studies have sought to prove—or disprove—that unemployment causes ill health, with few definitive results. This paper reviews the methodological and conceptual difficulties experienced by researchers in this field. It concludes that, generally, the impact of structural factors on the shape of the analysis has been all but ignored. It suggests that an historical perspective provides useful insights into the question and ought to be given more attention.

Early retirement is a policy for tackling unemployment which is popular among unions, employers and government, but there has been little recent research on its social implications for the individuals concerned. This article examines the reasons given by older men for retiring early and investigates the extent of income poverty in early retirement. Particular attention is paid to how early retirement is defined and to the differences between the early retired, the sick and the unemployed. Using data for men aged 60–64 from the General Household Survey for the years 1980–82 and from the Labour Force Survey of 1983, it is shown that ill-health is a less important reason for retirement than previous studies have suggested and that those who retire early are divided by class, with manual workers being more likely to retire early because of redundancy and more likely to be living on very low incomes than non-manual workers.

Social security provision for young people has been cut back by a succession of reforms since 1980 culminating in the almost complete withdrawal of income support from 16 and 17 year olds by the Social Security Act 1988. Conservative government policy seems to indicate a desire that families assume greater responsibility for young people until either they find work or reach their mid-twenties. It is assumed that until young unemployed people reach this stage they are dependants, to be treated as such by the social security system (and, to a large extent, by the training schemes). But the twentieth century has seen a progressive growth of young people's independence and expectations of it among young people and their families. The enforced dependency produced by recent government policy runs counter to this trend. More importantly, it may be having a profound effect on the progress of the transition to adulthood.

Past comparisons of the extent of poverty in Britain have been based on widely differing poverty levels. A constant relative poverty level is defined and new estimates of the extent of poverty from 1899 to 1983, based on this consistent standard, are presented. Factors that have contributed to the past changes are analysed.

During the second half of the 1970s, the practice of the closed shop became widespread in some parts of the British public sector, but was resisted in others. This paper examines the issue in relation to the National Health Service, where trade unionists made frequent demands for the closed shop and where many managers were apparently not unwilling to concede it. Yet very few closed shops actually resulted. The paper examines the origin and patterns of these demands, health authority policies towards them, and their outcomes in terms both of the operation of the closed shops which were agreed, and the reasons for failure to agree. The conclusion is that although NHS industrial relations had apparently matured very rapidly between 1973 and 1977, the trade unions were neither strong enough nor united enough to enforce the closed shop; nor were industrial relations so far developed as to make the practice a natural next step.

Travellers, or Gypsies, constitute a minority group with its own culture and traditions for whom access to health care can pose problems. A study of Traveller women and children showed that the sites where they lived were often lacking in facilities and provided a poor environment in terms of cleanliness and safety. Perinatal mortality was above average, and was especially high on sites with inadequate facilities and among the more mobile families. Immunisation and preventive care of children were both inadequate, especially among the more mobile. There continues to be a need for more, and better, permanent sites for Travellers. Other responses include allowing Traveller families to carry their own medical records, providing mobile clinics for Gypsy sites, and appointing specialist health visitors to ensure that Travellers get the health care to which they are entitled.

Poverty can be defined and measured either directly (in terms of consumption) or indirectly (in terms of income). The relative deprivation concept of poverty is a direct concept; poverty is understood as visible poverty, that is, a low standard of consumption. The income poverty line is an indirect measure; poverty is established as low income. It is argued that recent mainstream poverty research combines a direct definition and an indirect measure. This causes there to be no logical line of deduction between definition and measurement and, along with other problems in the approach, renders the statistics produced invalid.