Overcoming Resistance
There is a long history of individuals and organisations advocating radical change to the welfare state. There is nothing new about identifying flaws within the welfare state. The challenge is to identify a feasible process by which those reforms can be realised - living within political and economic realities. The obstacles to reform are considerable and cannot be underestimated:
- The welfare state absorbs over 40% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) - this means there are significant economic vested interests committed to sustaining the current system and opposed to reform
- Democratic politics is highly competitive and focused primarily on a relatively narrow range of middle earners - unsurprisingly the worst aspects of the welfare state tend to be focused on the most needy and upon the more marginal groups.
- Significant social and policy change requires a degree of long-term thinking - analysis, solution and meaningful implementation - which is inconsistent with the short-term focus of the political process.
- Accountability for the current system and its supporting policies is lost within a triangle of busy politicians, competing think-tanks and neutral civil servants - all agree that the current system does not work; but it is nobody’s job to fix it.
- Real change and innovation is carried out at great personal risk and it is rare for anyone to successfully champion innovation - innovators stay at the margins.
All of this means that the current system can seem almost completely immune to innovation or reform. However some innovations have been successful and reform must be possible. The development of Individual Budgets happened outside government and was promoted by disabled people, families and local leaders. Its success depended upon its pragmatic effectiveness as an innovation and the clarity with which the innovation was communicated. It was not a policy but a technology - and technological innovation can happen without official sanction. There is always more room for bottom-up improvement than we think.
Radical reform will require a strategy that can overcome the immunity of the welfare state to innovation and the Centre for Welfare Reform has been designed with this purpose in mind.
