Social policy: Five things you didn't know about the world you live in!
Dr Simon Pemberton – September 2009
SPWhat I’m going to do today is firstly, tell you a little bit about what Social Policy is about because some of you may not be too sure what the discipline, what the field of study is about. Secondly, to give you a little light introduction into some of the things and the debates we talk about in Social Policy and on a Social Policy degree through “Five things you didn’tknow about the world you live in”. So there’s five facts you can take away today and impress your friends and colleagues with at a later date. And then I’ll talk a little bit about the structure of the course after that, to give you a flavour of the sort of the things that we teach on the BSc in Social Policy here at Bristol. But also, it will give you an idea of the way that we teach it in terms of lectures and classes and assessments.
Right, so the first thing, is for me to grab myweatherman controller and to ask “What is Social Policy? “Who knows what Social Policy is”? You’ve all come here to the talk today, so who’s got an idea of what Social Policy is about?
AudienceIt’s a study of the welfare state.
SPSorry.
AudienceIt’s to do with the welfare state.
SPOkay, yes, well a lot of Social Policy is concerned with looking at the way the welfare state operates. The discipline, as Pete Alcock says, is based upon distinct empirical focus. That focus, he says, is the support for the wellbeing of citizens provided through social action. So certainly, social action through the welfare state, through state policy would be one way that we seek to improve people’s wellbeing through social policies. And that of course, is the concern of the discipline. But also through other areas such as the market, such as through the family and such as through increasingly in the voluntary sector. But also it is not, unlike many other social sciences which essentially concentrate on their own theme, Social Policy is a multidisciplinary subject. Now for some people that’s a weakness, for other people that’s a strength, for me that’s a strength because when you study Social Policy what you’re essentially studying is a number of other disciplines as well; Law, Sociology, Politics, Economics, Geography. But also the term Social Policy refers to the process of policy making. The real world of making policies that seek to improve people’s wellbeing. So, that’s kind of, if you like the technical, academic way of describing Social Policy, but let me give you a few examples. The sort of things that we, … the sort of issues of social policies academics and students will be interested in are those of poverty and social exclusion, that’s not just the relative poverty in the UK, but also global poverty issues. Health care reforms, the way thatthe health system works, education policies, whether or not you should pay fees to come to university. Crime and criminal justice, so there’s a lot of criminology on our course. We’ve got a unit on criminology, but also on punishment in society, looking at the use of prisons, housing and homelessness. Urban problems and regeneration, so for instance, looking at the way that cities have recently regenerated in this country, if you think if cities like Bristol for instance, they’ve had huge amount of investment in the city centre, but also places like Birmingham. Changing populations and patterns of family life and how they affect getting work and the way that we provide welfare for those family units. Okay, so, those sorts of issues, so hopefully you can see it’s quite a lot broader than just looking at the way the welfare state operates.
Why is Social Policy important? Well in some respects there are three things when I think about why Social Policy is important. First of all as we seen from those issues we’ve just talked about, the issues that Social Policy deal with essentially are of great social importance. We also, for people who pay taxes, we spend a lot of money on welfare. Social Policy provides as a discipline, provides a way of critiquing the value in that expenditure, whether it is good or bad. But also, and this is when I think Social Policy differs from other social sciences, not just Politics and Sociology, but what Social Policy does is, it doesn’t just study the way that society operates, it studies the way, it suggests waysthat society may be transformed. As we can see in a moment, Social Policy has transformed society both in positive and negative ways.
The point of the following five facts is again, as I said, it’s a light introduction, it is to get you to start thinking about the ways that Social Policy contributes to our understanding of modern day life and the way that we can change our societies. So a lot of the social problems that we’re going to discuss, again are the sort of things that you’ll be discussing, that you’ll be studying on the Social Policy Programme here at Bristol.
Okay, so, here we go. And this is where we come in. Which city in the developed world has the largest homeless population. Now before anybody says it, this is without any natural disasters occurring like Hurricane Katrina for instance. So excluding those, does anybody recognise that shot of that city? Sorry?
AudienceNew York?
SPNew York, no. But you’ve kind of got the right area of the world.
AudienceRio de Janeiro.
SPNo, you’re hot with New York.
AudienceChicago?
SPNot Chicago.
AudienceWashington?
SPMove further across, away from us.
AudienceLA?
SPLA excellent, yes. Los Angeles, 91,000 people are homeless in LA. Now why is that? Well there are a number of different reasons suggested for that level of homelessness in what essentially is a very affluent city. First of all, of course, Los Angeles is a very expensive place to live as we know, some very famous people live there. Our own David Beckham lives there and lives very comfortably. Now the reasons suggested for the homeless levels in the US that we’re currently experiencing can be traced back to the 1980s and the series of policies that were put in place during the 1980s. Now Los Angeles has a very, when we look at federal states in the US obviously there are very different welfare states within those states. Of course, LA has one of the least generous welfare systems. So, when Ronald Reagan announced massive cuts in spending during the 1980s, because LA was a very expensive place to live, those effects were felt more harshly within a state like LA. Now, what happened was that, by 1985, the number of low cost units, that’s low, cheap rented accommodation had fallen to £5.6 million. And the number of low income renter households had grown to £8.9 million, so that was a disparity, a shortfall of social housing of £3.3 million units. So what you had happening at that point in time was cuts in welfare benefits. At the same time cuts in the amount of social housing available to people. Therefore you got this disparityin the amount of funding??to afford social housing.
Now, okay, so, what was Reagan’s comment about this? Well Regan once remarked people were sleeping on the grates, the homeless are homeless you might say by choice. So that’s a very specific response to that policy problem. Now a number of other commentators would argue that it’s the State’s responsibility to intervene within that social problem. Reagan saw it very differently as it was down to the individual to intervene within their own social issue.
So, okay, let’s move onto number four. How much do we think we spend on the welfare state in the UK? Are we talking millions or billions?
AudienceBillions
SPWe’re talking billions, okay, correct, well done. So how much do you think we spend on, for instance, social security? £10 billion? £20 billion? higher or lower? It’s a bit like Bruce Forsyth. Which one?
AudienceHigher.
SPHigher, okay, how much higher? 100?No. 100 and go on?
Audience£40 billion.
SPOkay, if you add another 100 on, you might be somewhere near it. So if you look at that graph, what that graph demonstrates is the rise in the cost of social security benefit expenditure over a period of time since 1978. Okay, so we currently spend around about £140 billion on social security. But if we have a look at expenditure on welfare as well, we see that pattern repeated over time. So if you look in 1900, if you look at expenditure in terms of billions of pounds at 1996 prices, then what we see is that we spent £3.6 billion. If we take the expenditure as a percentage of GDP, the country’s wealth, that was £2.6. And then we see a massive leap in 1951 of the percentage of GDP spent, what happened after the 1940s?
AudienceWorld War II.
SPYes, what happened after World War II?
AudienceThe welfare state.
SPThe welfare state, okay, as we know it was created. In particular, which institution?
AudienceThe NHS.
SPYes, okay, the NHS. So we can see social spending rise. Okay, then social spending plateaus. As we can see it rises steadily through what’s called the “golden period” of welfare,from 1951 up towards the 1970s then it plateaus in 1981. What happens then?
AudienceThatcher.
SPThatcher, Margaret Thatcher. So, there is an ideology around welfare and also certain limits on the amount that we could spend that were placed upon us by the IMF around the amount that we could spend on welfare. So we see welfare spending plateau that again is the start to our answer,if we could add other columns. So who do we spend the most on? Which social groups? Where does all the money go?
AudiencePensions.
SPPensions, yes, excellent, pensions. Okay, and do you think that’s going to get any better in terms of the level of spending that we actually make? Well arguably not with the amount of money that’s been wiped out of private pensions recently, and the estimations of how long we’re all going to have to work in order to achieve a sensible pension.
Secondly, I’m sure you’ve heard on radio debates, on the news, that the concerns that are being raised around sickness, healthcare and disability payments. Payments that have been made to people who are claiming sickness benefit, again you can see that massive rise. Then we have family and children. Why do you think that spending has dropped? Can you see that that spending has dropped? From that to that. Why does that not follow the trend?
AudiencePeople are having less children?
SPNot the reason I was searching for.
AudienceTrue to them saying that their benefitwas low.
SPWell they are. What do you think, what Government policy, what are Labour trying to do to push people?
AudienceChild tax, ah family tax credit, they’re putting it through tax rather than paying.
SPOkay, so how do you get your family tax credits, what do you have to do?
AudienceWork.
SPWork, yes, so more people are being asked to work. So that certainly cut the amount of payments that we’ve seen. Right, so how do we compare to other countries in terms of what we spend on the welfare state? Whilst that might seem enormous amounts of money, comparatively, according to our GDP we spend a lot less than comparable other European countries, in particular, Scandinavian countries, Nordic countries. And here you can see our expenditure from social protection per head, so that’s in thousands of pounds. Now, what does that mean in terms of poverty, do you think, relative deprivation? If we spend less, what do you think happens to our rates of inequality?
AudienceIt goes up again.
SPYes, So if you compare, remember Sweden was the top of that chart. If you have a look at Sweden there, yeah, the amount of people living below this threshold which is the EU threshold which measures relative poverty, you can see, Sweden has £0.8 million people living below that, so that’s 9%. Whereas we have 19%. Again you saw Denmark up the top, that’s slightly higher, that’s 11%. But still less than the UK. So as the argument goes, the more you spend on social protection, the more likely you are to affect relative poverty or inequality.
Now again, whether or not you agree with that spending of course is up to your political opinion, your political persuasion, it’s those sort of debates that you have on a Social Policy course.
Which country spends a large percentage of its wealth on their criminal justice system? Fact number three. Which country would you expect?
AudienceUnited States.
SPYes, correct, but it’s not them. But it’s a good idea. They’re second.
AudienceSaudi Arabia.
SPNo. But again, that’s a fair guess.
AudienceAre you talking about the criminal justice system overall, or the courts, and the prisons, and the whole lot … and the amount of people incarcerated.
SPYes, everything, it is the whole complex.
AudienceChina.
SPNot China. It’s a percentage. I will show you. It’s us! Yes, does that surprise you? We spent just over 2.5% of our GDP on public order and safety which is essentially the way the OECD measures policing, court system and putting people in prison. So, is that money worth spending? Well of course, some people would argue yes. There are a number of arguments which counter that. First of all, prison is incredibly expensive. It costs around about £37,000 a year for us to put somebody in prison and, of course, now we have record numbers of people in prison. That figure is not up to date so it keeps on fluctuating monthly and I can’t keep up with it. But, at times, the prison estate has been operating at around about 111% capacity. In other words, massive overcrowding. Now what effect does that have? Well that has a number of effects. First of all, the first effect is there’s been an unprecedented rise in the number of people committing suicide in prisons, and one person every four days commits suicide in prison. Secondly, people have argued that actually it affects the real purpose of prison for many people, which is the rehabilitation of those people who go into prison. So this figure comes from, what was the Social Exclusion Unit, which is a government office, and what they’ve found in their research is that prisoners released in 1997, 60% are convicted of another crime within two years. 36% were back inside serving a sentence again. So, you can see that, whilst we put more people in prison, there are a number of questions that have been raised by Social Policy academics, about whether or not, that actually works as a means to defeat the problem of crime. A number of people would argue for more welfare spending particularly through drug rehabilitation, alcohol support so on and so forth. Again, those are sort of debates that you have around a criminology course or punishment in society course on a Social Policy degree.
This is a bit rhetorical. Put your hands up. Who thinks corporations are more powerful than countries? Although of course this might be contextualised within the recent stock market crashes anyway, but what do you think? Corporations more powerful? Nation states more powerful? There are a lot of undecided people here! Alright, let’s give you a few facts to make you decide. It would appear that corporations are becoming more powerful, of course this was written slightly before recent events. Of the largest 100 economies in the world, 51 are now corporations. And 25 countries have a larger GDP than the annual value that serves the biggest transnational corporation General Motors. Within these corporations, of course, we know, we’ve heard of recently, all these people who earn great deal amounts of money within those corporations. So the assets of the top 200 richest people in the world is larger than the combined income of 41% of the world’s population. The top three have more wealth than the combined wealth of the 43 least developed countries. Now, who are those top three? Do we know?
AudienceWarren Buffet.
SPYes, yes, you’re exactly right, number three. Definitely, he’s a stock broker in America, excellent. Right, who’s next?
AudienceIs this executives and corporations?
SPIndividuals and families.
AudienceBill Gates.
SPBill Gates of course, number two. Number one, where do you do your shopping?
AudienceAsda, Walmart.
SPExcellent, the Walmart family. There you go, the top three, see, well done. And of course, what a lot of social policy commentators have argued is the power of these corporations, especially against the least developed countries, affects their ability, the relative ability of those countries to, and those states to create social policies, to raise taxes, to put taxation burdens upon those corporations - especially if you want to redistribute wealth.
SPSo, the ultimate question, how much would it cost to end absolute poverty?
AudienceAbout the same as we’ve spent on most of the wars.
SPThat certainly could be true. Probably a lot less than that actually in fairness. Anybody else, are we talking millions or billions, first of all. Billions okay, right, billions yes. And then 10, 20?