Introduction

On 19 July 2010, then Prime Minster David Cameron delivered his so-called ‘Big Society’ speech in Liverpool (Cameron, 2010). He stated that:

Cameron's ideas got a mixed reception at the time. Whereas some critics considered it an admirable and genuine attempt to unite a conservative communitarian agenda with social aspirations, other critics dismissed it as ‘just another argument for austerity’ or ‘a fig-leaf for neo-liberalism’ (see Kisby, 2010; Jordan, 2011; Corbett and Walker, 2013). According to Kisby (2010), the ideas of the Big Society never came to full realisation as the ‘Great Recession’ reached the UK in 2010 and turned the political and economic landscape upside down. This may be one of the reasons why the ideas of the Big Society have not fundamentally rebalanced the responsibilities between the state and society in the UK. An audit by non-profit agency Civil Exchange in 2015 even claimed that the results of the Big Society programme were largely negative (Civil Exchange, 2015).

However, Cameron's ideas of the Big Society were part of a bigger ideology that Wiggan (2011) refers to as a ‘civic conservative’ perspective. This ideology emphasises that social problems and the decline of civil society are exacerbated by a big state (see also Sage, 2012: 371). Therefore, elements of the Big Society ideology also found their ways to other countries. One of these countries is the Netherlands.

In his first annual address to Parliament in September 2013, after succeeding his mother in April 2013, the Dutch King Willem- Alexander announced the end of the era of the welfare state and proclaimed the ‘Participation Society’.

Amid all the process of welfare reform, cutbacks, and austerity measures, we would almost forget that the British welfare state offers its citizens historically almost unprecedented protection against the risks of illness, old age, invalidity and unemployment, among other things. It was Sir William Beveridge who identified the five ‘evil giants’ of the society of his time: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. The welfare state was the solution he proposed to combat these giants. Since then, his ideas – and those of many other ‘founding fathers’ of the welfare state – have relieved the hardship for many Brits who suffer from unemployment, illness or other social risks. However, in our current time, the solutions that modern welfare states have offered increasingly are considered as part of the problem themselves. Therefore, traditionally, Part One of Social policy review focuses on the state of affairs in each of the pillars of the welfare state. It assesses to what extent the evil giants have been defeated, which new problems and unintended consequences have emerged and how this affects the policies. In this year's edition, we focus on four policy areas: pension policies, health care, income benefits and housing.

In Chapter One, Gordon Clark reassesses the behavioural assumptions underlying pension policies and its recent reforms. To guarantee the sustainability of the British pension system, defined benefit pension systems with a guaranteed benefit at retirement have been replaced by so-called defined contribution systems in which the benefit at retirement depends on external conditions and choices made by citizens themselves. This implies that people are becoming increasingly responsible for their own pensions. This presumes that people are capable of making decisions about their pensions. Clark argues that the behavioural paradigm that has recently became popular in many social-scientific disciplines challenges the ideas of individuals as rational decision makers. Therefore, he argues that it is not surprising that many of those participants tend to make decisions that, when considered over the long term, are not in their best interests. So, according to Clark, in addition to the neo-liberal paradigm that grounds the reforms of the British pension policies, a neo-paternalistic one is needed to correct the decision-making pitfalls of individuals.

The NHS is the British answer to the evil giant of ‘disease’.

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.