We have come a long way in the last century. Instead of tackling widespread poverty and disease, today we are looking to extend opportunity to a small minority with complex needs. While the term ‘social exclusion’ may be new to some, tackling social exclusion is nothing new for the Labour movement. It’s what we do. But just as in the past, we have to learn to do it in different ways.
The Beveridge report of 1942 was written as a response to widespread poverty and a lack of welfare provision for the majority of the population. Where I come from in the north-east, some localities had over 50 per cent of their population out of work. William Beveridge’s plan was to commit the country to tackling ‘the five giants’ of disease, squalor, idleness, ignorance and want.
In fact, if the hallmark of inclusion is to be able to live a secure life in the knowledge that basic wants and needs will be met, then it could be argued that before the second world war, the majority of the population were socially excluded. Labour’s response back then was universal provision. As most people who would come to use public services were aspirant and had the social capacity to exploit them, universal services were exactly the right response to the challenges of the mid-20th century.
Since then, the number of people accessing health, education and social security has steadily declined. So from a majority of pre-war people living with extreme insecurity, it was reduced to 20 per cent by the early 1970s.
Beveridge, Clement Attlee and Aneurin Bevan all anticipated that the combination of public services and social insurance would create a virtuous cycle, where straightforward wealth redistribution would stimulate consumer demand and more jobs that could be filled by an ever-healthier and better-educated workforce. To some extent this happened, but in areas of chronic unemployment and low skills a dependency upon the state emerged that was, in hindsight, understandable. For some, the virtuous circle had spun the other way to one of dependency.
It has also become clear that people in higher socio-economic groups are more likely to access public services than people in lower socio-economic groups. This pattern is repeated across a raft of welfare services.
Today, the numbers of people suffering social exclusion are a fraction of what they were 60 years ago. So our methods of identification need to be more sophisticated. We look for people with multiple and complex needs, including long-term unemployment, mental health problems, addiction, lack of qualifications, teenage pregnancy, and poverty. The numbers of people who fall into five or more of these groups – the most excluded – amounts to around two to three per cent of the population.
Universal provision, so successful for the many, is failing those few who are the most excluded. Why? I believe that we have strayed from some of the founding ideals of our welfare state. The founding fathers did not envision a monolithic set of institutions. Beveridge himself said that his proposals were designed to ‘leave scope for change, invention, competition and initiative’. In other words, he wanted services that would evolve and adapt to the needs of the present, not the past.
Over the last 10 years, the bottom 20 per cent has seen their incomes grow faster than the top 20 per cent. Millions of pensioners and hundreds of thousands of children have been lifted from poverty, and we must continue apace with these progressive policies and the reforms that underpin them.
Personalisation of services must be a major part of that reform. Oddly, some of those conservatives who want to keep public services as they are accuse the reform agenda of simply serving the rich. Yet ask yourself this: who stands to gain most from greater choice and flexibility in public service provision – the rich who have always had it from their privately paid for services, or the socially excluded who have never had it? The excluded are left struggling to make appointments in distant locations, set to times that suit the service provider and not themselves. For the better off, inconvenient public services are a bit of a pain; for the excluded who depend upon them they are a nightmare.
Universal provision has served our nation well, but to extend the boundaries of social justice yet further our public services must become more progressive, prioritising the needs of the people who need them most, yet still serving everyone. Achieving progressive universalism will not be easy – how do you incentivise service provision towards the voiceless, powerless, and often hidden minority? These people do not protest, do not write to councillors or the local papers, and probably don’t vote.
We need organisations that will work with the grain of excluded communities, not treat them all the same. That is why potential answers lie in the greater involvement of charitable and voluntary organisations, who seem capable of offering services to people that are more tailored to their individual needs without the potentially negative connotations of state organisations.
But the best way of solving exclusion is to get in there early, before difficulties develop into costly and highly damaging problems. We readily accept the logic of preventative medicine, and a similar principal needs to be more thoroughly explored for the social challenges we face as a society. Vulnerable women who become pregnant, people turning up in casualty with a drug-related illness for the first time, youngsters leaving school without qualifications or jobs to go to – these are all people who our public services have contact with before chronic exclusion sets in. Yet often we simply let them go without offering the kind of targeted, tailored and intensive support that could change behaviour and lead to a more fulfilling life, and save the country a small fortune in the long run.
We need to challenge any complacency about how we fail the excluded, for this failure is not a matter of resources. We should investigate the possibilities of publishing comprehensive data on the costs of dealing with chaotic individuals, so citizens can see how society really pays. If an organisation does successfully intervene early, is it possible for them to receive a ‘bonus’ based on the financial savings that we as a society make?
We should think seriously about radically empowering small charities that develop opportunities for the most difficult cases, to the extent where charities can challenge those government services that are under performing. And we must be tougher with services that don’t recognise the early signs of trouble or fail to offer a holistic response – too many vulnerable people are simply bounced from one office to another without ever receiving the overall support that can put an end to their misery.
Measures like these can potentially incentivise public services to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable from the bottom-up. Ultimately, it will come down to what Beveridge called the ‘driving force of social conscience’, and that’s you and me and the rest of society realising that social justice demands a specific public response to the challenges of social exclusion, by shaping our institutions to prioritise the needs of vulnerable people as individuals.