Rodney Lowe

Resignation at the Treasury: the Social Services Committee and the Failure to Reform the Welfare State, 1955–57

Between 1955–7 welfare expenditure in Britain came under serious attack. The main protagonist was the Treasury and its chosen implement a five-year review of the social services, to be presided over by a ministerial Social Services Committee. The attack rebounded, for the Committee provided the opportunity for the consolidation of the defence of welfare expenditure and for a frontal attack on Treasury assumptions. This neglected episode in Conservative government social policy places in historical context the early defeat of monetarism (with Thorneycrofts resignation in 1958) and provides the background to the establishment of the Plowden Committee and of the Public Expenditure Survey Committee. It also raises questions about the degree of post-war consensus and the failure to make the constructive development of the welfare state an objective of ‘conviction’ politics.

MILESTONE OR MILLSTONE? THE 1959–1961 PLOWDEN COMMITTEE AND ITS IMPACT ON BRITISH WELFARE POLICY

The Plowden committee on the control of public expenditure has been described as a milestone in the modernization of postwar British government. Certainly it effected major changes in both the Treasurys structure and personnel and, by securing the establishment of the public expenditure survey committee, gave subsequent governments the opportunity to plan public expenditure rationally in relation to prospective resources. Ultimately, however, the committee was a failure. The civil service was re-examined by the Fulton committee within five years and public expenditure soon escalated out of control. The Plowden committee thus represented a major lost opportunity. The time had been ripe for a fundamental political and administrative adjustment to the needs of the extended postwar state; but the committee failed to build the necessary political, parliamentary or public support for its recommendations. The reason for failure was its restricted nature as an internal enquiry with largely ineffectual ‘outside’ members, which enabled vested Treasury interests increasingly to dictate its deliberations. A more open enquiry would have stimulated and brought the best out of the ‘modernizers’ within the Treasury. The committee, therefore, proved to be not an administrative milestone but a prime example of how British institutions, under the guise of reform, have traditionally deflected criticism, truncated discussion and thereby stifled the fundamental reforms required to halt Britains decline. In relation to welfare policy, the committee failed to examine the relative efficiency of collective provision in given policy areas, opposed contracyclical demand management and covertly sought to cap welfare expenditure. In short, it accepted the electoral necessity but not the legitimacy of the welfare state.

The core executive, modernization and the creation of PESC, 1960-64

The period between 1957 and 1964 was one of immense yet underestimated political and administrative change. It culminated in what many have seen as a golden age in Whitehall. This is reflected by the wealth of records now available for the study of government and policy networks. The period is thus an ideal one for collaboration between historians and political scientists. The decisional case study examined in this article focuses on the early years of the Public Expenditure Survey Committee, as viewed from the perspective of welfare policy. The drive to ‘modernize’ government started with attempts to ‘roll back the state’ and to hive off the implementation of policy to executive agencies, very similar to those pursued in the 1980s by Mrs Thatcher and Next Steps. The reasoned rejection of such a policy was symbolized by the creation of PESC, a centralized attempt to allocate resources rationally. PESC itself, however, was initially a failure. External circumstances, such as the breakdown of political and administrative networks within the core executive, and internal tensions, including the Treasury’s covert attempt to impose its own departmental interest, led the Cabinet Secretary to conclude that the prioritization and strict control of forward expenditure commitments was ‘not possible’. This case study demonstrates how future studies of the core executive might be broadened and deepened.

Sir Horace Wilson, 1900–1935: the Making of a Mandarin

In 1975, Max Beloff wrote an article entitled ‘The Whitehall factor: the role of the higher civil service, 1919–39’, which historians have been singularly slow to exploit. Influenced, no doubt, by the publication in the same year of the Crossman Diaries , Beloff argued that no modern political history could be complete which ignores the influence of the civil service on policy-making. ‘The anonymity of the civil service’, he argued, ‘may or may not be a valuable convention of the constitution: it is one which the historian of modern Britain accepts at his peril.’ The peril was greatest, he suggested, for the inter-war period because it was then that higher civil servants in Britain ‘probably reached the height of [their] corporate influence’. In contrast to their predecessors, they controlled a far more centralized machine whose influence had been greatly extended by increasingly interventionist policies. In contrast to their successors, they were a highly compact group – being a mere 500 in number.

Life Begins in the Seventies? Writing and Rewriting the History of Postwar Britain

Paul Addison and Harriet Jones (eds), A Companion to Contemporary Britain, 1939-2000, Oxford, Blackwell, 2005; pp. xvi + 583; ISBN 13 978 0 631 22040 4 (hbk), 10 0 631 22040 2 (pbk) Wm. Roger Louis (ed.), Yet More Adventures with Britannia. Personalities, Politics and Culture, London, I.B.Taurus, 2005; pp. x + 419; ISBN 1 84511 082 X (hbk), 1 84511 092 7 (pbk) Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good. A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles. London, Little Brown, 2005; pp. xxiv + 824; ISBN 0 316 86083 2

The formation of the child poverty action group

This witness seminar on the early years of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) was held at the Institute of Historical Research on 17 November 1993. It was chaired by Professor Alan Deacon and introduced by Dr Rodney Lowe (University of Bristol). The participants were Professor Brian Abel‐Smith, Professor John Veit‐Wilson, Dr Harriett Wilson, Tony Lynes, Professor Hilary Land, David Bull, Professor Peter Townsend, Fred Philp, Geoffrey Beltram, Professor David Donnison. The seminar was kindly sponsored by the Economic History Society, the Social Policy Association and the University of Bristol Alumni Foundation.

Warfare state: Britain, 1920-1970 - David Edgerton

No abstract available.

The Personal Social Services

The personal social services are one of the most ill-defined, neglected and yet vital parts of the welfare state. The term covers essentially the residual services provided by, or through, local government for groups such as the elderly, the physically and mentally handicapped, children and ‘problem families’. Since the war — and in sharp contrast to earlier Poor Law practice — the ordinary needs of individuals within such groups have been catered for, as for everyone else, by the main welfare services. Moreover, many of these main services (and most notably general practice within the NHS) provide a sympathetic ‘personal’ service. What is distinctive about the personal social services is that they provide for extraordinary individual need. They have also been concerned, particularly since the 1960s, not with one specialised area of care but with their clients’ overall welfare — so that those in need of care can enjoy as normal a life as possible and those deemed to require ‘control’ can adapt to, or at least come to terms with, society at large.1

Book Review: The origins of the British welfare state: state and social welfare in England and Wales, 1800–1945.

Every decade since the 1960s, a major text seeking to popularize the latest trends in academic research has been produced on the long-term development of British welfare policy. Hence Maurice Bruces pioneering The coming of the welfare state (1961) was followed in 1973 by Derek Frasers The evolution of the British welfare state (3rd ed., 2003) with its nuanced account of the nineteenth-century accommodation between laissez-faire and collectivism. Then in 1982 Pat Thanes Foundations of the welfare state (2nd ed., 1996) injected a gendered and comparative perspective. Harris ably maintains this tradition by incorporating into the well-known story not only rich new historical detail but also quantitative evidence and theoretical insights gained from the social sciences. It may have taken longer than the standard decade to produce but that is because there is so much more to incorporate. A crisis in both the welfare state and the history profession has questioned the fundamental nature of both. Some critics may complain that this book is not as good a read as its predecessors. They may question, for instance, why even the preface requires five footnotes and why Charles Webster, let alone some lesser historians, deserves as many index references as Lloyd George. They may also cavil at the density of the text and the lack of any clear overarching theme. Such criticisms, however, are unjustified. Social policy by its very nature is complex. Simplicity can therefore mislead. For instance, the “nuts and bolts” of policy are often far more revealing of both the underlying purpose and actual impact of policy than its professed grand design. Moreover, there is no justification, as in some competing accounts, for policy areas to drop from view when there is no dramatic new legislation. Patients do not suddenly stop being treated in the absence of new health legislation. Significant if subtle shifts in the implementation and financing of policy can also occur. Harris presents the fuller and more satisfying, if necessarily more complex, story. The lack of an overarching theme presents a bigger problem. Given the opening theoretical chapters and the “restructuring” of the welfare state since the 1970s, the bold question might have been asked: how viable was the “mixed economy of welfare” in 1939 with its apparent accommodation between state, market and voluntary provision? Was this the natural destination of the “welfare escalator” which Victorian society boarded? Was excessive centralization between 1945 and 1976 simply an aberration caused by the temporary social solidarity and faith in “big government” encouraged by the Second World War? The adoption of such a theme, however, might have slanted the selection and presentation of evidence. That would have been unfortunate since one of the books greatest strengths is its comprehensive bibliography and the breadth of the evidence, both qualitative and quantitative, which it deploys. It is indeed an ideal quarry for others. No library should consequently be without it. All welfare specialists should have it as a reference tool and all serious students should use it as both the grounding and a stimulus for their research. There are three discrete chapters on health care summarizing changes in policy and practice. Clear, and often novel, quantitative evidence covers principal health outcomes as well as the varied provision of services by, and use of, national health insurance and both voluntary and municipal hospitals. Each chapter challenges some conventional truths and provides a stimulus for further thought. Such thoughts, moreover, may be placed in the context of other policy, if not political, developments through a reading of other chapters. This book, in short, provides both a comprehensive introduction to welfare policy and one further reason why the temptation to write medical history as if it were an academic ghetto can be resisted.

The Welfare State under Threat

Despite its historic achievements, the welfare state in Britain — as elsewhere — was widely perceived to be in crisis in the mid 1970s. The immediate causes were economic. The quadrupling of oil prices after the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 so accelerated the underlying annual rate of inflation that it reached the unprecedented level of 27 per cent in 1975. Simultaneously, a slowing down in the rate of economic growth and an actual fall in GDP in both 1974 and 1975 pushed the number of people out of work, for the first time since the war, to above one million and to a peak in 1976 of 1.5 million. This denied the government the rising revenue it required to meet increasing demands for welfare — not least from the unemployed themselves — and, in the ensuing ‘fiscal crisis’, forced it to borrow more heavily. This in turn undermined foreign confidence in sterling so that the value of the pound fell, for the first time ever, below