(*Not for citation without permission.

Remembering and Rethinking the Social Divisions of Welfare: fifty

years on.

Dr Kirk Mann
School of Sociology and social Policy
Leeds University
Leeeds.
LS2 9Jy

Tel +44(00 113 3434424

Email; K.Mann@Leeds.ac.uk

Abstract
This paper revisits Titmuss’s essay on the Social Divisions of Welfare (SDW)
and reflects on its continuing relevance. Titmuss first presented the SDW in
an Eleanor Rathbone Memorial lecture at Birmingham University in 1955 but it
is best known from his Essays on the Welfare State published in 1958.
Titmuss challenged the stereotype of ‘welfare’ as simply public welfare
dependency and illustrated the different elements of the SDW. Some
limitations of Titmuss's approach are identified, notably in relation to how he
saw dependency arising, and revisions offered. The paper provides a number
of examples from the UK but also highlights some significant parallels with the
SDW in the USA and Australiai, the so called ‘liberal welfare regimes’ (Esping-
Andersen 1990). Finally it is claimed that fifty years on we need to be
reminded of the insights and analytical potential of Titmuss’s essay.

Key words; Divisions, welfare, Titmuss, justice.

Remembering and Rethinking the Social Divisions of Welfare: fifty years
on.ii

Introduction. Titmuss’s Account.

This paper revisits Titmuss’s account of the Social Divisions of Welfare (SDW)
roughly fifty years after it was first published (Titmuss 1958). However, it is
difficult to explain the significance of the SDW without acknowledging Richard
Titmuss’s particular influence on the development of social policy as an
academic subject. Titmuss was the first Professor of Social Administration to
be appointed in the UK at the highly influential London School of Economics.
He trained a generation of social policy scholars, aka the ‘Titmice’ (Lee and
Raban 1988:72-78), who themselves went on to distinguished academic
careers. Despite being ‘quintessentially British’ (Reisman 2003:782) or
arguably peculiarly English (Rose 1981), there can be little doubt that his
influence was felt internationally (Deacon 1993, Esping-Andersen 1990). As
David Reisman (2003) points out Titmuss was following in the footsteps of
Charles Booth, the Webbs and a British tradition of using empirical evidence
(or ‘facts’ as Jeremy Bentham and Dickens’s Mr Gradgrind might have said)
to make the case for social policies that would promote a ‘good society’. He
was not particularly forthcoming on what ‘the good society’ might consist of;
but social solidarity, unconditional and universal welfare benefits, equality and
social justice, and an organic sense of reciprocity and social responsibility, are
some of the recurring themes (Deacon 2002).

Although he was not a religious person it is reasonable to suggest that ‘a half-

forgotten Christianity’ (Reisman 2003:782) informed his thinking. John Offer
(1999) makes a compelling case for locating Titmuss’s thinking within an
‘idealist’ tradition that presumed social policies represented the collective
consciousness, or general will, of society as a whole. Just as importantly,
however, his normative approach was framed by the experiences of economic
depression in the 1930s, witnessing mass long term unemployment, his work
as an insurance clerk, the rise of totalitarianism in Europe and the sacrifices of
the civilian population that he observed during the second world war (Alcock
and Oakley 2001). His work in general, but the SDW essay especially, is
intended to identify divisive social practices, social injustices and hypocrisy, in
order to promote social solidarity.

The SDW was first set out by Titmuss in a lecture in 1955. It was initially
published in 1956, but the essay is perhaps best known and usually cited from
his collected Essays On 'The Welfare State’ in 1958. From the first, Titmuss
places ‘The Welfare State’ within quotation marks to indicate reservations
about the idea of just one, unitary system of welfare. Instead he identified
three systems of welfare, social/public, fiscal and occupational. The essay
needs to be read as a response to critics on the political 'Right' of the British
Conservative Party who saw the post-war welfare reforms as expensive for
the middle classes, unnecessary for many of the working classes and
potentially debilitating for all social classes (Titmuss 1958:34-37). Titmuss
claimed these views were promoting a misleading stereotype of ‘the’ welfare
state and the people who relied on it:
 ‘Such is the tyranny of stereotypes today that this idea of a welfare
society, [….] may, paradoxically, widen rather than narrow class
relationships’. [And quoting Gerth and Mills (1953:88-89) he added:]
… if the upper classes monopolise the means of communication and fill
the several mass media with the idea that all those at the bottom are
there because they are lazy, unintelligent, and in general inferior, then
these appraisals may be taken over by the poor and used in the
building of an image of themselves. A second [danger] emanates from
the vague but often powerful fears that calamity will follow the
relaxation of discipline.[….] Such fears inevitably conjure up a demand
for punishment and reprisal; the history of public opinion in recent
years on the subject of juvenile delinquency [is but one example].
(Titmuss,1958:37-38).’

With the recent Freud report (2007) in the UK focussing exclusively on public
welfare dependency, a continuing debate about dependency and family
breakdown in the UK and the US (Cameron 2007, Gillies 2007, Neubeck
2006,) and the media magnate Rupert Murdoch (22.01.2006. BBC Radio
5live) suggesting that Tony Blair had presided over a nanny state that was
simultaneously over taxing the middle classes and sustaining an ‘underclass’,
the continuing significance of the SDW essay might be self evident. In the UK
all this has occurred despite a raft of policies to tackle anti social behaviour,
reduce passive welfare dependency and to ensure there will be ‘no rights
without responsibilities’. Creeping conditionality (Dwyer 2004) may now typify
social policies in the UK, the US and Australia but Murdoch’s newspapers
continue to call for more cuts to public welfare programmes, with feckless
fathers and lone mothers identified as the usual suspects promoting crime,
moral decline and welfare dependency (e.g. The Sunday Times 21.02.1993;
03.09.2006).

Titmuss was determined to show that the stereotypes of welfare were wrong
and that critics of public welfare operated with a definition of welfare that
conveniently ignored the benefits that went to all social classes. The failure to
see that everyone is welfare dependent, or interdependent, in contemporary
developed societies is portrayed by Titmuss as either intellectual naiveté or
political mischief. The SDW essay left no excuse for naiveté and described
the politically mischievous as a self serving clique. The essay should be read,
therefore, as an evidenced based polemic and not as a fully developed
sociological theory, although it has considerable potential for development
and synthesis as Adrian Sinfield (1978) and Hilary Rose (1981) have
demonstratediii. Moreover, the stereotypes of welfare and dependency that
Titmuss challenged appear to be more entrenched and more frequently
asserted by journalists, politicians and academics, than they were fifty years
ago (Bauman 2007).

Public/Social Welfare.
Social welfare is the public face of ‘the’ welfare state and is seen by the public
at large as what welfare ‘really’ is. Following Adrian Sinfield (1978), it is more
straightforward to refer to social welfare as public welfare given that the other
categories are also ‘social’. Public welfare refers to all those services and
benefits that have been associated with ‘the’ welfare state. For many people
it is the benign hand of the state helping the unemployed, pensioners, school
children, the sick and the poor to attain a standard of income, education and
health commensurate with society’s wealth and development. The focus is on
direct payments, universal services and targeted benefits such as the State
pension system, local authority/state schools, care services for older people,
and publicly funded health services such as the National Health Service in the
UK. These are often seen as ‘the’ welfare state, rather than one form of
welfare among others. This narrow focus on public welfare encourages the
idea that ‘the’ welfare state simply provides benefits for the poorest at the
expense of the middle classes. But whilst some of these services do provide
more benefits to the poorest some are used by all social classes and the
middle classes have often been more adept in accessing some public welfare
services than the poorest. For example, in the UK the ability to buy a home
close to the ‘better’ local authority/publicly funded schools is facilitated by a
higher income thereby giving middle class parents more choice (Reay and
Lucey 2003).

Knowing how to access ‘gatekeepers’ to resources (particularly in the health

service) and being able to engage with welfare professionals in a manner that
they find amenable is likely to influence service provision (Rummery and
Glendinning 1999). Thus a middle class academic, for example, is likely to
know what they want from public welfare providers and how to get it in a non-
confrontational, engaging manner. Consequently even public welfare is not
reserved for the poor (Deacon and Bradshaw 1983). But this was not
Titmuss’s main point, rather he emphasised the benefits of fiscal and
occupational systems of welfare and demonstrated that these were skewed
towards the middle classes.

Fiscal welfare.
A good example of the welfare that the middle classes receive are the tax
incentives (fiscal welfare) for pension saving. Successive governments in the
UK, Australia and the USA have tried to promote pension saving by making
the contributions, the pension itself and/or the funds’ investments tax free or
partially tax free. In Australia in 2001 the Federal government provided fiscal
concessions for superannuation schemes that amounted to Aus$8.7bn per
annum and this was projected to rise to over Aus$ 23bn by 2009/10.
Remarkably within a year these substantial sums had to be rounded up to
over Aus$31bn for 2008 (a 36 per cent increase) with future fiscal subsidies
also being adjusted upwards by similar proportions (Rothman 2000, Costello,
2006; Australian Treasury, 2006 table B1; 172 and 2008, table B1;188).

Tax relief on non-state pension contributions in 2005/6 was estimated by the

British government to cost £14.3 billion but this too was acknowledged to be
an underestimate the following year when the figure was revised up to £17.4
billion for the year (HMRC, 2006, 2007. Table 9). Some observers believe
that the real cost is much higher and could be as much as £28.9 billion per
annum (Silver, 2006,.54). These sums need to be seen in the context of the
Institute for Fiscal Studies (Brewer et al. 2007) report that concluded that
£15.2 billion spent on raising the value of the public pension (Basic State
Pension) would tackle pensioner poverty. They believed their proposals to be
expensive but in contrast to fiscal welfare their proposals are attempting to
address the needs of the poorest retirees.

The benefits of fiscal welfare are, however, skewed to the better off, those
whose tax liabilities are the greatest get the greatest subsidy. Of course the
benefit to any individual will vary depending on their tax band. The effect is
patently regressive; meaning that more resources go to those in the higher
income quintile (the richest tax payers) and people in the lowest tax band get
the least. For people whose income is so low that they are not liable for tax
there is of course no benefit at all. In the UK in 2005 it was acknowledged
that 60 per cent of this form of fiscal welfare went to tax payers in the top tax
band (Hansard, 2005, col. 52W). Earlier work by Algulinik and Le Grand
(1998:410) estimated that a quarter of this subsidy went to the richest 2.5 per
cent of taxpayers whilst the poorest ten per cent of income tax payers got just
one per cent of the total tax/fiscal handout. Subsequently this benefit was
given to only one in ten of all taxpayers below state pension age and used, in
effect, by many them to avoid the higher rate of tax to build up their retirement
savings at the cost of lower income earners (Sinfield 2007:136).

Similarly in 2004 in the USA top rate tax payers were getting a subsidy of
US$350 for every US$1,000 they contribute with middle and low earners in
the 15 per cent tax band getting only US$150 for their US$1,000 but for those
with an income so low that they are not liable to pay tax there is no subsidy
(Wasow 2004). From 2006 pension plans in the US have been ‘liberalised’ to
enable participants to add ‘a Roth feature giving plan participants the
advantage of paying no income tax on the earnings in their Roth account
established within the plan’ (Vaughan 2006:52). These plans add another
layer of complexity to the US pension and tax system and are once again
regressive in their effects. It has been estimated that the total cost of private
pension tax breaks between 2005-2010 will be US$330 billion in lost federal
revenue (Wasow 2004, Gale et al. 2006). This at a time when public welfare
for the poorest US citizens was increasingly conditional on behaviour or was
being cut (Neubeck 2006).

It is worth noting that whilst fiscal welfare is generally regressive it can, and
has, been used to address the needs of low income groups. Since 1999, the
British Labour government, albeit with a keen eye on developments in the
USA and Australia, introduced fiscal welfare policies that targeted low
income groups. These have attracted less media and political criticism than
public welfare has in the past. For example, the 1999 Working Families Tax
Credit (WFTC) was administered by the Inland Revenue and drew little
criticism in comparison to earlier policies with similar goals (helping working
families on low incomes)iv.

By 2003, WFTC had been replaced by the Working and Child Tax Credits
(WTC and CTC) that extended fiscal support to additional low wage and
income groups. Shifting responsibility from the DSS and the system of public
welfare to the Inland Revenue and fiscal welfare, has seen the number of
individuals getting support increase from roughly 199,000 in 1985 to over 1.5
million by 2004 (Dilnot and McCrae,1999, Adler 2004). The key point here is
that targeting via fiscal welfare can be used for progressive purposes and
this may be a more attractive option than public welfare for both politicians
and recipients. Furthermore, as Adrian Sinfield notes these policies break
the;
‘traditional link of the social division of welfare with the social division
of labour. For the first time tax welfare has been redistributive
downwards and not regressive. Only the best-off do not qualify for
CTC although WTC is confined to the poorest-paid. The new tax
credits also mean a transfer of resources, often significant, from men
to women (2007:135-136).’

Fiscal welfare has been justified by the British government (DWP 2002, Inland
Revenue 2002) on the grounds that it provides an incentive, a carrot for a
change in behaviour. It is intended to promote paid work and prudent saving
(Curry and O'Connell 2004, Emmerson 2005). The UK system of Mortgage
Income Relief at Source (MIRAS) offered similar carrots for private home
purchases until 2001. MIRAS made mortgage contributions tax privileged,
although there were limits placed on these many observers acknowledge this
subsidy, and the sale of public/social housing, played a key part in the growth
of owner occupation in the 1980s. With a boom in property prices over the
last 30 years many owner occupiers have subsequently also benefited from
the fact that their property is exempt from capital gains tax. A benefit that is
clearly regressive given that the increase in property values has been greatest
for those who could afford to invest more of their income in their home and for
those who can buy in affluent areas (Mullins and Murie 2006:92-93).

There have also been fiscal allowances in the UK in the past for private
school fees, private medical expenses and numerous employer provided
perks (occupational welfare described fully below) that were, or remain, tax
privileged to some degree. Indeed, a great deal of time is spent by
accountants trying to minimise the liabilities and maximising the tax relief that
effect high earners.

These regressive forms of welfare have been criticised and not just by ‘the
Left’. One criticism is that it is unclear whether fiscal welfare does in fact
change behaviour and activate the low paid. Instead ‘tax incentives tend to be
driven by the vocal middle classes. [And] are a good example of middle class
welfare (Littlewood 1998:63)’. Second, and again a criticism accepted by
some on the ‘the right’ of the political spectrum, fiscal welfare is not only
‘upside down’ – giving more to those that have the most – but may also distort
market behaviour. For example the mis-selling of pensions in the late1980s
early 1990s was prompted in part by a £6 billion tax subsidy for those who
bought private pensions. In offering the carrot of tax relief/fiscal welfare the
government simultaneously appeared to endorse private pensions, subsidised
the products and helped to create a ‘sellers market’. Subsequently, many of
those who purchased private pensions found that they had been misled and
that the images used by sales staff and the TV ads of retired couples enjoying
their retirement on yachts, riding Harley Davidsons, or sipping champagne on
sun-drenched beaches, were unlikely to be realised (Mann 2001). Having
been bitten once by the sales sharks consumer scepticism in the UK may now
act as a brake on private pension saving (Ring 2005).

Occupational welfare.
Occupational welfare was another key feature of the SDW according to
Titmuss. Again it is rare for those who discuss ‘welfare dependency’ to
acknowledge occupational welfare despite its tremendous significance. For
example the advantages of being in an occupational pension scheme are well
known but are rarely seen as part of 'the' welfare state. Yet the state plays a
crucial role in facilitating and for many public employees providing
occupational pensions (Hannah 1986, Shalev 1996, Sass 1997, Turner et al.
2005).

In both the USA and UK, employer contributions to pensions are tax privileged
and believed to be an important employee retention and recruitment tool. In
the UK, Australia and the US occupationally related pensions are profoundly
regressive. In the UK company directors have continued to maximise their
benefits whilst claiming a ‘pensions crisis’ means they cannot offer employees
access to ‘their’ defined benefit schemes. Thus the TUC (2006) found that of
362 directors the average director’s pension would be more than £168,000 a
year, almost 24 times the average occupational pension. The average
employer contribution to all directors’ defined contribution (DC) schemes was
£103,000 a year. Whilst most employees in DC schemes get little or no
employer contributions directors can expect their employers to contribute the
equivalent of almost 19 per cent of their annual salary, in addition to any (tax
privileged) contributions they make themselves. In 2004 the British
government claimed that many people who ‘failed to save’ for their retirement
‘do not engage with the choices they have’ and ‘are likely to end up with
severe under-provision purely because of inertia’ (DWP 2004:1). Quite why
company directors need such generous incentives to save, both from their
employers and the tax system, is not addressed by either the DWP (2002,
2004) or the Inland Revenue (2002).

Other forms of occupational welfare range from minor perks to what many
people would regard as luxuries. These can include child care vouchers,
maternity/paternity leave, workplace nurseries, having telephone bills paid by
their employer, travel subsidies, company clothes and clothes allowances, the
‘loan’ of a computer, entertainment ‘expenses’, sports and gym club
membership, paid leave for sickness and holidays, use of company vehicles,
the provision of a chauffeur driven car, company/employer provided
accommodation (which can range from a simple B&B to an executive city
centre apartment, or overseas property that can serve as a holiday home),
‘concierge services’ (including dog walking), the provision of company credit
(discounted mortgage rates being commonplace in the finance sector) and
company issued credit cards, discounts on company goods and services, air
travel schemes (including the various frequent flyer bonuses and access to
airport VIP lounges) and a host of other ‘fringe benefits’ (FRS 2005: Table
7.6:150, Brunsden and May 2007).
Although some of these benefits may be taxed and individuals will need to
carefully assess their liabilities, occupational welfare can often be arranged by
employers and accountants to minimise this. For example, performance
related bonuses and ‘golden handshakes’ can be paid into ‘top hat’ pension
schemes, company shares or over a long time period to reduce tax liabilities.
Fiscal welfare and occupational welfare are, therefore, often closely related
and mutually compatible. The value of these benefits varies enormously
depending on the employment sector and status of the individual but social
class is once again a reliable guide with the poorest paid workers faring much
worse than the richest.

An important development in all three countries considered here, that was

touched on above, is the privatisation of occupational welfare, and most
significantly employer sponsored retirement pensions. In short employers are
closing their final salary defined benefit (DB) schemes and moving to defined
contribution (DC) schemes but usually with lower contributions, if any, from
the employer. DB schemes are widely acknowledged to be more generous,
replacing a proportion of former salary, than DC schemes that rely on stock
market performance and contribution levels. The shift began in the US in the
late 1970s and was led by large corporations, many of whom operate globally.
Those covered by a DB plan in the US fell from 38 per cent in 1978 to 21 per
cent in 1998, and private sector workers with a DC plan rose from 7 per cent
to 27 per cent during the same period. This trend has continued in the last ten
years albeit not at the same pace (Shalev, 1996; EBSA, 2004, in Weller and
Wenger, 2005).

Between 1997 and 2005 full time employee membership of DB schemes in

the UK fell from 46 per cent to 35 per cent. The number of active members of
DB schemes in the private sector has more than halved, from just over five
million in 1995 to between 1.6 and 1.8 million in 2005; while membership of
DC schemes rose from 10 per cent of the full time PLM in 1997 to 15 per cent
in 2005. There were an estimated 12,000 private sector DB schemes in 2005
compared with 34,700 in 2000. The overall number of DC schemes increased
from an estimated 62,600 in 2000, to 70,900 in 2004. (Pension Trends, 2006;
Turner, 2005). In both the US and Australia some significant public sector
employers (including some Universities) have closed or reduced the benefits
of their DB schemes to new employees. There is considerable speculation in
the UK over the future of public sector DB schemes with some observers
believing that they are untenable in their current form (Clark 2006).

Informal welfare.
The three systems of welfare Titmuss identified, and illustrated above, provide
a powerful retort to those who only speak of public welfare. However, this still
leaves some vitally important forms of welfare unacknowledged and a fourth
category – informal welfare - is called for (Rose 1981, Lewis 1997). Care for
children, partners, family and friends, and the host of informal, unpaid and
often taken for granted, activities that address our daily needs hardly feature
in Titmuss’s work generally and not all in his SDW essay (Offer 1999). Since
care is recognised as public welfare when a nurse cares for a sick child in
hospital it is clearly a form of welfare when a mother cares for a sick child at
home. The main difference between the two being that care provided by the
paid nurse is formally organised and the care provided by a mother is
informally organised.

As Hilary Rose (1981) made plain the question of who provides care has to be
addressed along with the consequences this can have for the carer,
particularly in later life. However, the concept of 'informal welfare' could be
misleading and a note of clarification is required. The term informal welfare
should not be confused with the idea that it is unstructured, casual or ad hoc.
Indeed, and despite the apparent chaos in many households and the
recurring negotiations that may take place, the pattern of caring
responsibilities has demonstrated considerable continuity over time and
between countries (Lewis 1986, Morris,1990, Skinner 2005). Despite some
evidence of men taking more responsibility for care of late, particularly
childcare, women still undertake the bulk of the caring tasks within
households (Breen and Cooke 2005, Sayer et al. 2004, Craig 2006). This will
often impose a ‘pension penalty’ (Ginn and Arber 1993) in later life for taking
on this commitment. Time out of the paid labour market affects access to
pension rights and in conjunction with lower incomes and contributions
(among other factors), has produced a situation whereby millions of women
pensioners in the UK have to rely on means tested public welfare (Turner et
al. 2005).

Rose's revision of Titmuss’s essay demonstrates both the descriptive

durability of the SDW and its flexibility. Rose focused on the provision of care,
advocated a detailed (micro rather than macro) analysis of resource allocation
and distribution systems - both formal and informal - and located these within
their historical context. For example the establishment in the nineteenth
century of the male 'breadwinner' and female carer had profound implications
for subsequent public welfare provisions (Rose 1981, Williams 1989). The
point that stands out above all else is that caring for children and elders, and
working part-time, restricts women's access to public, fiscal and occupational
welfare (Ginn 2003). Thus every aspect of the SDW described by Titmuss is
gendered and simultaneously the concept of informal welfare has to be
included as a specific form of welfare provision and dependency (Arksey and
Glendinning 2007).

Dependency.
Central to the SDW for Titmuss was the role of dependency in developed
societies. What the SDW demonstrated was that everyone was welfare
dependent but that different social groups rely, more or less, on different
elements of the SDW. In fact it may be more appropriate to speak of inter-
dependence given the ‘labyrinth of gifts and transfers’ (Reisman 2003) and
complex web of informal welfare that typifies contemporary society. For
Titmuss: ‘All collectively provided services are deliberately designed to meet
certain ‘needs’; they are manifestations, first, of society’s will to survive as an
organic whole and , secondly, of the expressed wish of all the people to assist
the survival of some people (1958:39).’
He subsequently claimed that the various divisions of the SDW are designed
‘to meet the needs of the individual and/or to serve the wider interests of
society’; and that the different forms of welfare perform similar functions.
Social divisions arise as a consequence of previous ‘culturally determined
dependencies ‘ [but] ‘the dominating operative factor has been the increasing
division of labour in society and, simultaneously, a great increase in labour
specifity’ (1958:43). He refers to Durkheim’s The Division of Labour in
Society (1933) and the potential for ‘uncertainty and conflict about the roles’
people ‘are expected to fulfil’ in ‘complex individuated societies ‘ (1958:42-44).
In line with the functionalism that dominated sociology in the1950s there is a
tendency on Titmuss’s part to play down questions of power, politics and the
state (Giddens 1977; 235-272).

In short, the negative effects of the division of labour are seen to be isolation,
social exclusion and estrangement (anomie) and at the same time a decline in
traditional forms of social cohesion. This occurs because the moral and
ethical principles that are believed to govern traditional societies, and which
are largely taken for granted, are undermined by competition, personal
fulfilment and the pursuit of self interest. It is worth noting that there are also
some parallels in this account of dependency with more recent sociological
approaches to the individuating effects of risk and consumerism in competitive
market economies (Bauman 2007). Thus despite higher standards of living,
with improvements in health, housing and welfare generally, there are now
new social risks that undermine well being. Among others, the new risks
include divorce, ‘flexible working’, globalisation, an ageing population,
ecological and environmental change, the challenges of mass migration,
ethnic and religious diversity, along with the fragmentation of traditional
communities and political constituencies (Beck 1992, Giddens 1998; Kemshall
2002). For these observers of post-modernity/post traditional societies the
new risks and challenges require individuals to confront uncertainty and to
anticipate their own needs. Thus we must all make active choices in a
consumer society about how we plan our lives. The restraints on meaningful
choice for the poorest 20-30 per cent of the population may however reinforce
their sense of exclusion as they are portrayed as passively dependent
(Lodermel and Trickey 2000, Bauman 2007).

By telling public welfare recipients that they must do more to avoid

dependency, whilst ignoring the dependency of those who can access
generous fiscal and occupational welfare provisions, academics, politicians
and journalists may reinforce the misleading stereotypes and social divisions.
By contrast, universal public welfare services were, for Titmuss, the moral
glue that would ensure social cohesion. If everyone relied on the same
system of welfare there would be both a political constituency for improving it
(as in the case of the NHS) and a moral dividend because it would be a
testament to social solidarity. Altruism was therefore the antidote to anomie.
For Titmuss, society had to find organisational mechanisms that promoted
altruism and social justice to counter the debilitating effects of a competitive,
individuating, hedonistic market (Reisman 2003).
Revising Titmuss
Titmuss had a benign view of ‘society’ (Offer 1999) and a rather blinkered
view of power, vested interests and market forces. These weaknesses will be
addressed briefly below but as Hilary Rose (1981) noted they have meant that
his account has often been seen as ‘merely descriptively useful’, a view she
robustly rejected. And with Paul Spicker (1995 cited in Powell 2007)
describing the SDW essay as possibly the most influential piece of work in
social administration, it is remarkable that the analytic potential of the essay
has not attracted more attention.

Along with Rose’s (1981) article, the most notable exception is Adrian
Sinfield’s (1978) essay that makes a powerful case for considering the close
correspondence between class, power and the SDW. His central point being
that the power to influence the allocation of resources, the desire to ‘buy’ good
workplace relations and the resulting distribution of resources via the SDW is
neither random nor meritocratic. Social groups, consumers of welfare and
classes organise to protect and extend their relative privileges and in so doing
exclude others. Titmuss clearly believed that this situation should, and could,
be tackled by the State to prevent wider social divisions. Whereas Titmuss
believed that the general will of society would in some way be manifest
through universal welfare measures, Sinfield suggests that the SDW reflects
the ability of vested interests to influence policy. Thus, and despite Titmuss’s
detailed examination of official statistics on income distribution that challenged
the idea of greater equality in the 1950s (Titmuss 1962), he paid less attention
to the way that the political economy of capitalism promotes inequality.

However, it was not simply the economic power and privileges inherent within
a capitalist market that Titmuss under-estimated. He also overlooked the way
that private market welfare providers can influence public policy (Farnsworth
and Holden 2006). Moreover, market providers may on occasion meet needs
in innovative ways that provide a challenge to universal public welfare by, for
example, offering greater flexibility or being designed to address the needs, or
risks, that specific groups confront. In the case of retirement income this can
mean that some people will successfully negotiate the risks associated with
private and occupational pensions. They will have saved for their retirement,
ploughed their earnings into their homes and complied with the criteria of the
new deserving. They will in turn have more options in later life than there were
fifty years ago. They will have assets and these will mean they can make
constrained choices that will not be available to the poorest thirty per cent of
the population who have none on retirement (Rowlingson 2006, Mann 2001,
Castles 1997).

In these circumstances universal public welfare can do little to resolve the

inequitable distribution of opportunities over a lifetime. Whilst an assets test
might ensure that those who had previously benefited from fiscal and/or
occupational welfare were not able to ‘double dip’v it seems unlikely that there
would be a sizeable political constituency in the UK for such a policy. The
point here is not that this is inequitable, although it clearly is, but that any
attempt to address the inequities would confront political problems. The voice
of the (mainly but not exclusively) middle classes, rather than the general will
of society, would surely prevail. Because the benefits of fiscal and
occupational welfare rarely attract attention, and are more usually seen as
earned and therefore deserved, the case for equity between the different
forms of welfare is rarely heard.

Public welfare recipients are more frequently the focus of political and media
attention and, in the USA for example, lone mothers and their children have
been identified as the main problem. Kenneth Neubeck (2006) has illustrated
the obsession that powerful elites have had with lone mothers over the last
fifteen years or so. Lone mothers who are dependent on public welfare are
portrayed as demoralised (literally) by the experience. Whereas tax handouts
are given to wealthier groups as incentives, lone mothers have been pushed
off public welfare and into low paid work. Neubeck suggests that the
imposition of Draconian conditions on lone mothers is part of a broader
concern on the part of U.S. welfare policies to stigmatise those who are
dependent on public welfare. But whilst this concern is presented as
paternalistic it reflects class, gender and racial systems of inequality in U.S.
society (Neubeck, 2006:30-32). Such views are in marked contrast to
Titmuss’s account. To test them it would be necessary to undertake research
into how powerful interests and groups articulate their views and if these have
any effect. Thus patterns of collective consumption, business interests,
political and interest lobby groups, supra-national organisations such as the
OECD (1998, Minns 2001) and World Bank (1994, 2005), and established
elites, might need to be the focus of social policy research (Blackburn 2002,
Hacker and Pierson 2002, Farnsworth and Holden 2006).

The greater visibility of public welfare and public welfare dependents is not
simply due to media and political attention. Public welfare recipients are first
made visible by administrative and technical mechanisms. They are
classified, monitored and observed by public welfare professionals and
providers. The mechanism by which they are made visible and monitored
corresponds closely to changes in ‘the mode of information’ (Poster 1990).
The history of social administration illustrates the way that the mode of
information subjects the welfare recipient to the scientific gaze of the provider.
Thus in the nineteenth century the Charity Organisation Society developed
casework in order to monitor behaviour (Fido 1977) and the workhouse ‘test’
was intended to deter entry. Whilst those that did enter were trained by
meaningless tasks and the discipline of the workhouse clock. Similarly, the
dole queue of the 1930s registered the unemployed in a highly visible manner
and more recently activation policies, computer information systems, advisors
and counsellors try to promote a cultural change in behaviour (Henman and
Adler 2003, Dean 2006).

Social researchers are not immune from 'watching the defectives' usually
paying much more attention to those who rely on public welfare than to the
privileges that occupational and fiscal welfare dependents receive (Mann
1994). For example, simply trying to establish the cost of fiscal welfare in lost
revenue is extremely difficult. Adema and Ladaique (2005) have made some
comparisons of ‘tax breaks for social purposes’ across the OECD states, but
these are limited and the most significant of these (pensions) are excluded.
The Australian Treasury is rather more forthcoming than the UK but as they
explained in 2006 ‘[….] unlike direct expenditures, tax expenditures once
legislated become part of the tax law with a recurring fiscal impact and do not
receive regular scrutiny through the budget process ‘(21.12.2006 Content
ID1211)vi. Moreover, as Hacker observes of the US, fiscal welfare policy
appears to be made in a ‘subterranean world’ in which accounting procedures
hide the ways in which governments use the tax system for policy purposes
(Hacker 2002).

Similarly, occupational welfare tends to be treated as ‘non wage labour costs’

by employers and this is not disaggregated in a manner that enables
researchers to find out precisely who gets what. And of course there are no
queues for fiscal welfare, no counsellors enquiring into the behaviour of those
who get occupational welfare, and no stigma attached to being dependent
upon these forms of welfare.

Finally, power is significant in relation to questions of control and how the

SDW impacts on peoples’ ability to express their needs, or seek redress.
Informal welfare differs, qualitatively, in respect of power and ‘voice’ to other
aspects of the SDW in that it is generally provided by ‘significant others’.
Care also often involves a high degree of intimacy, both emotionally and
physically. This in turn can make it difficult for the cared for to question or
challenge the carer. Whilst the other systems of welfare have some formal
mechanisms of redress, albeit often ineffectual, informal welfare is arguably
less amenable to formal mechanisms and prescriptions. Ensuring that both
the informal carer and the cared for can, to some degree, negotiate their
relationship is by no means easy, but nevertheless vital (Williams 2000).

Conclusion.
Looking at ‘welfare’ through the lens of the SDW illuminates the fact that
some forms of welfare are themselves exclusive and that there are different
assumptions made about the recipients of each type of welfare. Governments
seek to change the behaviour of public welfare recipients by imposing
conditions and a requirement that they accept responsibilities (Dwyer 2004).
Occupational and fiscal benefits in contrast provide incentives to the
recipients and there are few expectations regarding their responsibilities,
whereas providers of informal welfare appear to ‘choose’ to care and in so
doing penalise themselves in later life (Ginn 2003).

Interestingly the SDW in the three countries considered here is being

transformed and in similar, if not exactly the same, ways. The pattern of
informal welfare is changing but very slowly. There is a move to individuate
the risks associated with all forms of welfare with occupational welfare being
reined back as employers attempt to divest themselves of responsibility. The
phenomenal increase in fiscal welfare and its highly regressive nature goes
unnoticed by the media, who persist in producing the sort of stereotypes that
Titmuss condemned. In this context questions of visibility, power and voice
still need to be asked of those involved in the policy making processes
(Hacker 2002).
Most importantly the SDW highlights the welfare dependency of everyone,
including the rich. Titmuss subtitled the SDW essay “the search for equity”
and it appears that either the search has been called off, or it has been recast
in terms of opportunities. As two former British Ministers asserted: ‘The
guiding principles for [..] Europe should therefore be: active inclusion, not
passive welfare: The national welfare state should be a ladder of opportunity
not a safety net’ (Blunkett and Johnson,2005). The search for equity needs to
reveal the hidden benefits associated with some forms of welfare and find
ways of extending these to all. The focus is not only on income inequalities,
as significant as these may be, but also the mechanisms and processes of
welfare delivery that reinforce negative stereotypes, social divisions and
insecurity. As Titmuss made clear there is an assumption that ’ by a natural
process of market levitation; all classes and groups will stand expectantly on
the political right as the escalator of growth moves them up’ (1964;16).
However, the disparities of power, visibility and stigmatised forms of
dependency entrenched within the SDW mean that whilst the rich zip by on
the escalator of growth, the poorest must try to clamber up a precarious rope
‘ladder of opportunity’.

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i
All the policies referred to here are national policies unless otherwise indicated.
ii
I am grateful to Adrian Sinfield, Alan Deacon and Malcolm Harrison for their comments and
observations on various drafts of this paper. I should also thank the Brotherhood of St Lawrence,
Melbourne University for inviting me to present a version of this paper.
iii
There are similarities between the SDW and the idea of the mixed economy of welfare as
Powell (2007) et al. have clearly demonstrated. However, these can not be dealt with adequately here.
iv
There are also tax credits for disabled and older workers that are intended to promote paid
work as the route out of ‘passive welfare dependency’ (DWP 2004) It should also be noted that the
Inland Revenue did attract criticism when it sought to recover overpayments (Adler 2004).
v
‘Double dipping’ is a phrase used in Australia to refer to people who get fiscal concessions
for their superannuation pensions and then arrange their finances so that they qualify for public welfare
via the means and assets tested Age Pension.
vi
An excellent exception to the rule that the media generally ignore fiscal welfare is Peter Martin
(26.12.2006, 25.01.2008) Economics editor for the Canberra Times. He points out for every Aus$4 the
Federal Government collects it now hands out Aus$1 in fiscal concessions. He also notes that releasing
the tax expenditure report a few days before Xmas 2006, (a few days into the New Year 2008) ensures
they received little media or public attention, which given the regressive nature of fiscal welfare may
be a deliberate strategy.