Introduction

Richard Titmuss, the first professor of social administration in Britain, was also the first to set out a comprehensive research agenda for social policy (Titmuss, 1958). He was strongly committed to an infrastructure of universal services because it “provides a general system of values and a sense of community” (Titmuss, 1968, p 135). However, he was well aware that “universalism was not by itself alone, enough” (1968, p 135). His own work, along with that of Peter Townsend, Brian Abel-Smith, and Tony Lynes, had revealed that poverty among pensioners, as well as sick and disabled people, low-wage earners and their families, and lone parents, had not been eradicated despite full employment and the general growth in affluence in the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, inequalities in the distribution of income and wealth remained, despite being tempered by the tax and benefit systems. In practice there was unequal access to – and effective use of – the social services. In particular, the middle classes made fuller use of the education and health care systems. As universalism has been watered down, particularly since 1980, the challenge today is how to re-establish universality in the context of growing reliance on the private for-profit sector heavily subsidised by the taxpayer. Or, perhaps, the challenge in fact is to find an alternative way to sustain a sense of community and social solidarity. This chapter explores some of the key issues involved, looking first at some of the main changes which have occurred since the 1950s.

During the 1960s, Beveridge's principle of flat-rate benefits in return for flat-rate contributions had been abandoned, and both National Insurance (NI) contributions and benefits had become earnings related (up to a ceiling set at one and a half times average male earnings). A tax credit scheme to tackle the problem of the inadequacy of the basic state pension had been considered in the mid-1960s and abandoned (for a detailed account, see Webb, 1975). Instead,attention focussed in the short term on making means-tested supplementary benefits (now Income Support) more acceptable to pensioners, and in the longer run developing a ‘partnership’ between public and private providers which would form the basis of reforming state pensions. In this partnership (which took until 1975 to reach the statute book because of two intervening general elections), employers, with their occupational pension schemes, had a significant role to play.