In Part I of this article a typology of existing need indicators was developed. For the ‘meaning’ of a need indicator to be clear, the indicator must be theoretically based. More specifically, it should be rooted in theoretical conclusions about the policy of welfare interventions. In Part II, the theory of the need judgement as a cost-benefit decision is used to provide a basis for a need indicator. This method is then explicated with regard to social services provision for the elderly, so as to provide an indicator which is in fact a standard level of expenditure for social services departments in England and Wales.

Territorial indicators of need, describing variations in the characteristics of areas ranging from wards to standard regions of the United Kingdom, represent a mainstream application of social indicators in this country. The development of these indicators has, for the most part, been based on an intellectual tradition which has paid little attention to theoretical argument.

In Part I of this article, a typology of existing need indicators is developed. By analysis of some of the best-known and most sophisticated examples, it is illustrated how this lack of theory has severely limited their usefulness in policy practice, particularly with regard to resource allocation, where they are potentially very important. A predominant symptom of the problem encountered with empirically based need indicators is the difficulty of establishing criteria for testing their validity.

For the ‘meaning’ of a need indicator to be clear, the indicator must be theoretically based. More specifically, it should be rooted in theoretical conclusions about the policy of welfare interventions. In Part II of the article, the theory of the need judgement as a cost-benefit decision is used to provide a basis for a need indicator. This method is then explicated with regard to social services provision for the elderly, so as to provide an indicator which is in fact a standard level of expenditure for social services departments in England and Wales.

The objective of this article is to analyse the way in which budget allocation decisions have been made in the National Health Service (NHS) of Britain. Despite the criticisms of the pre-1948 health care system on the grounds of geographical inequity, it was not until nearly twenty-five years after the service's inception that explicit allocation formulae were devised and implemented in an attempt to achieve equity, defined as equal financial resources for health care for those in equal need.

The article is divided into four sections; the first analyses briefly the establishment of the NHS in 1948 and the failure of policy-makers to rectify the significant inequalities in the distribution of health care inputs between the regions. The second section is concerned with the official recognition of the policy problem of geographical inequality in resources and the first attempt to rectify it. In the third section the most recent set of resource allocation formulae for England, Scotland and Wales will be analysed and compared. The final section offers some brief conclusions.

The concept of social control is crucial in explaining both the growth of social policies and their effects. It raises important questions about the legitimacy of state intervention, the maintenance of order and the protection of individual freedom. The term is widely used in the social policy literature but there have been few attempts to define it or to explore its various meanings and connotations. The aim of this article is to examine some of these issues. It begins with an account of the growth of social control theories focusing particularly upon recent developments in Marxist thought and the literature on the ‘urban crisis’ and ‘radical social work’. The second and third sections of the article explore the different usages of the notion of social control and evaluate some of the main propositions of social control theories of social policy.

Much social and economic policy is based upon units such as the tax unit or the household, and much of it makes certain assumptions about flows of resources within these units. This article focuses on the control and allocation of financial resources within households, drawing on work done in the past and on original material taken from a study of the problems of a group of women whose marriages had broken down because of violence. Concentrating on the household type which is composed of a married couple and their dependent children, the article outlines three broad types of allocation system – the whole wage system, the allowance system and the pooling system. It is suggested that there are links between the system of allocation within the family, the stage in the life cycle which the family has reached, the income level of the household, and the occupational, regional and ethnic culture within which the household is located. The article concludes by suggesting that a better knowledge of intra-household money flows would be relevant to discussion concerned with the distribution of poverty, the allocation of welfare benefits, and the contribution made by married women's earnings to family living standards, and that it would also contribute to a better understanding of marital tension and marital breakdown.

This article explores why some of the arrangements for the employment of disabled people are so resistant to change despite their evident shortcomings. From historical data it is argued that the negotiations which shaped the Disabled Persons Employment Act 1944 were motivated by sectional concerns which were detrimental to the interests of disabled people but that the legislation subsequently became symbolic of deeply felt and widely shared values. The implications of this for current policy options are discussed. An attempt is made to show how an analysis of the relationships between motives, actions and values in the policy-formation process can help to explain why some policies are both more ineffective and more persistent than others.

Britain has no statutory minimum wage. There is a system of wages councils responsible for fixing statutory minimum rates in forty-one trades where wages are low relative to the average, opportunities for working overtime are variable and no adequate machinery for collective bargaining exists. A peculiar feature of this system is the presence of three independent members who form a third ‘side’ in council negotiations. This article looks back briefly over the seventy years of the existence of wages councils (originally trade boards) and the changes in function which have occurred albeit by implication rather than overtly. It then proceeds to examine the role of the independent members within the system as it is now. Do these ‘conciliators with a casting vote’ fulfil a useful function? The main problem facing them today is seen as the need to reconcile the original purpose of helping to fix a just (or less unjust) wage translated into contemporary terms with a remuneration which is reasonable and feasible under the circumstances prevailing within the trades covered by wages councils.

During the years following the Boer War, infant mortality became an issue of national importance, and increasing emphasis was placed on the provision of infant welfare clinics and health visitors. The infant mortality rate declined steadily throughout the period, and officials attributed the improvement to the new services. But just as the causes of infant mortality were complex, so were the reasons for the decline in the mortality rate. What needs explanation therefore is why health officials concentrated so exclusively on one particular form of solution. It is argued that this was a consequence of, first, the way in which infant welfare was perceived as a problem of mortality and especially as a problem of diarrhoeal mortality and, secondly, the philosophy of the infant welfare movement, which held that responsibility for infant mortality rested with the individual mother. Infant welfare services were thus compartmentalized as a set of personal social services, and kept separate from broader socio-economic issues.

Despite the existence of sex discrimination legislation certain social policies appear to militate against equal opportunities between the sexes. Community care policies are a case in point, especially with current interest shifting towards ‘care by the community’, and the presumed existence of ‘informal caring networks’, with a view to their effective mobilization at a time of cutbacks both in public expenditure and in domiciliary social service provision for groups such as the handicapped and the elderly. To the extent that community care policies rely on women's unpaid domestic labour and may necessitate their withdrawal from the labour market, such policies could be counter-productive to the promotion of ‘equal opportunities’. The challenge is to devise community care policies which do not disadvantage women and which give men ‘equal opportunities’ to take on caring roles usually assigned to women.

This article, in which we examine developments in public expenditure on social policy in relation to total public spending in the United Kingdom (UK) in the period after the Second World War, is part of a larger international study on developments in social welfare spending on which we are currently engaged.

In Section 1 we briefly sketch in the theoretical background to the study of public expenditure growth in general and social welfare spending in particular. We shall not in this article attempt to evaluate the validity of the competing hypotheses – this exercise is in hand as part of the international study, and we shall report the findings at a later date. Section 2 examines the growth of public expenditure in the UK at the aggregate level. In Section 3 we analyse public expenditure at the individual programme level and in Section 4 we summarize the conclusions.

The objective of this article is to explore aspects of the nature and process of exchange in welfare systems. The welfare exchange was the focus of much discussion in the early 1970s stemming from the writings of Titmuss, Pinker and Pruger, and this article starts with a review of that debate. In searching for a more adequate theoretical framework it argues that Gouldner's work on reciprocity, beneficence and complementarity provides that framework. A model of exchange on an interpersonal level is put forward in which welfare exchanges are viewed as lying along a continuum reflecting the notions of reciprocity and beneficence, with exchanges at each end of the continuum being represented by the two types of complementarity. Dependency, power and disequilibrium are seen as crucial factors in the exchange process, and the total pattern of exchanges is shown to be strongly influenced by the pattern of resource generation and availability within which all exchanges occur. Different types of social services are located at various points along the exchange continuum, and these are seen as reflecting differing relationships between service donors and individual service recipients. The final section of the article is concerned with discussing the influence of the interaction between ‘servers’ employed by agencies and service recipients.

This article examines in detail some recent data on the living standards of elderly people. It is argued that poverty is related to low resources and restricted access to resources and therefore the article includes summarized information about a wide range of benefits and services. Questions are raised concerning the various social policies and processes which have contributed to the creation of poverty and dependency in old age. The growing importance of retirement is singled out for attention as one significant factor contributing to the depressed social status of the elderly, and as part of the general tendency in British society to devalue the worth of elderly people. It is this social relationship between age and the labour market which deserves attention from policy-makers, who have tended to concentrate on the consequences rather than the causes of dependency.

The early twentieth century has been seen as a crucial period in the development of British social policy. However, attention has been concentrated almost entirely on the increased role of the state, and in particular on the Liberal ‘welfare reforms’ after 1906. These developments have tended to mask the significant changes that were taking place in the field of voluntary charitable effort. One organization which emerged out of the ferment surrounding social policy in late Victorian and Edwardian England was the Guild of Help movement.

The first guild was formed in Bradford in 1904 and embodied a new approach to the organization of charity. It rapidly expanded from Bradford throughout England and Wales and was in 1919 the leading organization which took part in the merger which created the National Council for Social Service. In this article the creation of the guild will be examined within the context of the changing economic situation, the growth of the labour movement and the nature of existing charitable provision in an attempt to give a critical assessment of the nature and role of this new body.

The population census provides a somewhat neglected and under-utilized source of statistical information. Data on the labour force from household censuses and surveys are of particular interest for policy research on the social aspects of employment. The characteristics of these data sources are outlined, and their potential for secondary analysis is explored with particular reference to census statistics. The census provides a useful source for studies of the changing definitions of ‘work’, ‘occupation’ and ‘employment’; the labour force participation profiles of individuals and families; the unemployed (both registered and unregistered); occupational segregation on the basis of sex or other factors; the separation of home and work-place and the characteristics of homeworkers; labour force minorities such as the self-employed and family workers; the labour force characteristics of ethnic minorities; qualified manpower; and the determinants of earnings. Recent developments have improved access to household census and survey data for researchers outside the government.

The dimension of time has been relatively neglected in studies of means-tested benefits. This article explores some of the issues which arise when time is considered explicitly. It is based on housing department records for 205 rent allowance claimants in Bristol which were monitored over a twenty-seven- to thirty-two-month period between November 1974 and June 1977. All the claimants had initially applied for rent allowances in response to a one-off promotion undertaken by the local authority and so they do not constitute a representative sample. Nevertheless mathematical controls indicate that the findings are fairly robust. Only a third of the claimants studied were continuously in receipt of rent allowances during the monitoring period and most claimants who dropped out of the scheme did so as a consequence of changes in their circumstances rather than because they failed to reapply. For most claimants, therefore, the rent allowance scheme provided temporary assistance rather than continuing financial support. The implications of the marked fluctuations in the financial circumstances of the observed claimants are discussed in relation to the administration of means-tested schemes.

Social security and income maintenance

As January had closed so February opened with anxiety about the effects of cuts in public expenditure on the most vulnerable members of the community. The position was outlined by the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) in Abandoned Social Priorities. Millions of families, the pamphlet said, faced an unjustified fall in living standards as a result of the decreased proportion of national resources being devoted to the poorest section of society. At the same time they faced increased costs of school meals and transport, prescription charges, rents and clothing. In addition, the Labour Member for Birkenhead pointed out in a letter to the Secretary of State for the Social Services that because they were not informed of their right to free welfare foods only 2.5 per cent of 1.5 million families which were eligible to receive them claimed that right. He estimated that this was saving the government £125 million a year. Further spending cuts, already announced, which would amount to £1,000 million in 1980–1 augured a harsh year ahead.