From the cycle of deprivation to social exclusion

The 35-year period covered by this book is framed by two speeches. The first was by Sir Keith Joseph (1918-94), then Secretary of State for Social Services, in London on 29 June 1972, and was given to the Pre-School Playgroups Association. In the speech, Joseph referred to a ‘cycle of deprivation’, and voiced a paradox: ‘why is it that, in spite of long periods of full employment and relative prosperity and the improvement in community services since the Second World War, deprivation and problems of maladjustment so conspicuously persist?’. He acknowledged that deprivation was an imprecise term. But Joseph had continued: ‘perhaps there is at work here a process, apparent in many situations but imperfectly understood, by which problems reproduce themselves from generation to generation’. He did not want to be misunderstood, and there was not a single process. But it seemed that in a proportion of cases, occurring at all levels of society, the problems of one generation reproduced themselves in the next. Joseph argued that the phenomenon of ‘transmitted deprivation’ – what he had called the cycle of deprivation – needed to be studied, and had become clearer over the previous 20-30 years with rising living standards. A Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS)–Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Working Party on Transmitted Deprivation was established. The large-scale Research Programme that was organised through the Working Party from 1974 was to span eight years. It cost around £750,000 (at 1970s’ values), and by 1982 had generated a substantial body of published and unpublished material.

The second speech was by Prime Minister Tony Blair to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) in York on 5 September 2006. In August of that year, Blair had signalled a major push on social exclusion, aiming to show the government's determination to tackle ‘a hard core underclass’ estimated at one million people (The Independent, 24 August 2006, p 18). In the JRF speech, the focus was on the bottom 2% in society. Four issues identified as challenges were: halving teenage pregnancies by 2010; supporting children in care; tackling chaotic parenting through the National Parenting Academy, the extension of parenting orders, and a network of family support schemes; and helping benefit claimants with mental health problems (The Guardian, 30 August 2006, p 8).