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What is Social Policy?

When I tell people I teach Social Policy, a fairly common response is 'Oh! . . . [pause]. What's that exactly?' Social Policy textbooks have sometimes suggested that Social Policy is hard to define. Or else they have contended there is something 'confusing' about the distinction to be drawn between Social Policy as an academic subject on the one hand and the specific outcomes of the social policy-making process on the other; or about whether Social Policy is an interdisciplinary 'field of study', rather than a social science discipline in its own right (Alcock 2008). For my part, however, I don't find the question difficult at all. Social Policy is the study of human wellbeing, to which there can be two kinds of response:

• So it's all about doing good for people?
• So it must be about pretty much everything really?

The answer to both comments is 'Well, yes and no'. More specifically, Social Policy entails the study of the social relations necessary for human wellbeing and the systems by which wellbeing may be promoted or, for that matter, impaired. You may have noticed that I choose the word 'wellbeing' rather than 'welfare' and I shall return to my reasons for this later in the chapter. In using the term wellbeing, however, I am focusing not on how people 'fare' (on their goings or doings), but on their 'being' (on the essence of their lives). Social Policy is about the many and various things that affect the kinds of life that you and I and everyone can live. Think for a moment about the things you need to make life worth living: essential services, such as healthcare and education; a means of livelihood, such as a job and money; vital but intangible things, such as love and security. Now think about the ways in which these can be organized: by government and official bodies; through businesses, social groups, charities, local associations and churches; through neighbours, families and loved ones. Understanding these things is the stuff of Social Policy. In this chapter I aim to illustrate, first, the immense scale of the phenomena with which Social Policy is concerned, but also its quite specific nature; second, the fabulous diversity of the social scientific traditions on which Social Policy can draw, but also the strict rigour of its focus; third, the relevance of Social Policy to everybody's individual, everyday lives; but fourth, the importance of Social Policy to human society in general.

Before I begin, however, let me return just for one moment to the 'confusion' alluded to above between Social Policy, the subject, and the social policy or policies that are the object of our study. As I have already signalled in my Preface, I propose throughout this book to adopt a rather simple convention that is not in general use, but which may, I hope, allay confusion. When I refer to Social Policy with a capital 'S' and a capital 'P', I am writing about the academic study of social policy. When I refer to social policy with a lower-case 's' and a lower-case 'p', I shall be talking about the general or the particular policy or policies that have been determined in the fields of social security, health, education, social care and protection or - as you will see - in any number of spheres that may bear upon human wellbeing.

Hey, Big Spender!

Social Policy is concerned with much, much more than the things that governments spend our money on. Nevertheless, though it refers only to the visible tip of the Social Policy iceberg, the most conspicuous evidence of the importance of social policies is 'social spending'. If we take a country such as the UK, at a time of supposed fiscal austerity in the continuing aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2007-8 (IMF 2009; Farnsworth and Irving 2015), the government planned in the 2018-19 tax year to devote roughly £572 billion to what may broadly be defined as 'social' or social policy spending (see table 1.1 below); that is to say, to things like pensions, hospitals and schools. That amounts to more than two thirds of total public spending and getting on for a third of this particular nation's annual income (or what is usually called Gross Domestic Product or 'GDP'). It is a huge sum of money: more than most people can really comprehend or even imagine. If one were searching for a comparison, £572 billion is over three thousand times more than the biggest ever jackpot on the EuroMillions pan-European Lottery, which was 'only' £171 million in October 2017, but is still perhaps more than any ordinary person could really envisage owning, let alone spending. What the UK spends on social policy is hardly small change!

a?The term 'social protection' refers to all forms of social security provision, including benefits, credits and pensions.

Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/autumn-budget-2017-documents/autumn-budget-2017

And yet, the UK is by no means exceptional. In fact, as a proportion of GDP the UK's social policy spending is rather less than in many other developed countries. When the social policy spending of different countries is compared using comparable methods of calculation, it may be seen that countries such as Finland and France can spend as a proportion of GDP nearly half as much again as the UK, while a mighty nation such as the USA may spend somewhat less than the UK (OECD 2016: table 5.9). Of the world's larger developing economies, the proportion of GDP devoted to social spending in Brazil, for example, falls not far short of that in the USA, while that in India, relatively speaking, is tiny. And, of course, smaller and poorer developing countries can afford to spend very little on social policy at all. In chapter 3 we shall try to understand a bit more about the differences between different countries' approaches to social policy.

Also, the amount governments spend on social policy can go up or down, depending on changing priorities. In democratic countries such priorities will to some extent reflect the wishes of the electorate and the taxpayers who must finance such spending. But it depends just as much on the fluctuating needs of the population and on the state of the country's economy. To take the UK as an example once again, the extent of its social spending had grown from around 2 per cent of GDP at the very beginning of the twentieth century to somewhere around its present level by the 1970s. Since then spending has fluctuated as Conservative governments during the 1980s and 1990s attempted, in spite of a variety of pressures, to 'keep the lid on' (Glennerster 1998). Following this, Labour governments, after an initial period of restraint, allowed social spending to increase again until after 2010, when Coalition and then Conservative governments began once more to try and rein spending back in. We shall try to understand a bit more about the ideological, demographic and economic causes of such variations in the chapters that follow.

For the moment, however, let us focus on the scale and nature of social policy spending. Table 1.1 provides a simplified explanation of the UK government's budget plans for the year in which this book was written. The expenditure headings are very broadly defined, so the picture that is presented is rather rough and ready. None the less, this tells us that the UK government was planning to spend roughly twelve times as much on social policy as it was on defence, and sixteen times as much as on public order. By this criterion we might say that social policy in fact receives a much higher priority than war making or crime busting.

However, table 1.1 also shows us that, for example, the government expected to spend more than eight times as much on pensions and social security benefits as on housing and the environment. In a country such as the UK, that is perhaps hardly surprising these days. The UK is unusual compared to some countries because a high proportion of householders (around 60 per cent in England) own their own homes and so most spending on housing tends to be 'private', rather than 'public'. In other words, it's not that we don't as a nation spend money on housing, it's simply a question of how we organize this. In chapter 4 we shall see that although the government's social policies in respect of housing may not entail massive amounts of public spending, they do, for example, entail the regulation of housing provision.

We shall also see that although governments may spend a great deal of public money on pensions for older people, this may be more than matched by private spending on occupational and personal pension schemes, all of which, like private housing, may be closely regulated by social policy. On top of this, as we shall see in chapters 8 and 9, the definition of what does and doesn't count as a social policy or as social spending is increasingly being challenged. Social Policy is about more than the services governments provide. Even when we take account of the staggering sums of public money that are recorded as being spent on social...