Why We Need Reform
The welfare state was established after the cataclysms of the Great Depression and two World Wars and designed with paternalistic and industrial assumptions about how to achieve social justice. It was a great social achievement, providing important securities in the provision of health care, income, housing, disability support and education. Yet today the design of the welfare state is out of date.
Too often the welfare state:
- Locks people into poverty - millions are enmeshed in a poverty net made up of over 100 benefits and taxes whose impact is to reduce our natural incentives to earn and save
- Undermines family life - often families are not supported to exercise their responsibility to bring up and educate their children
- Takes away control - many services are only provided at the price of sacrificing freedom and control
- Erodes community life - there is no role for the innovation and creativity offered by local communities, businesses or faith organisations
- Fails the most needy - it is the people who most need help who find that the welfare state is most damaging: women abused by their partners, disabled children and their families, the poorly educated and people with complex needs
This an international problem. Despite some interesting differences welfare systems across the Western world have been designed within the same paradigm - the Professional Gift Model - which sees social problems in terms of needs which must be met by the state or by the professionals that the state employs:
- Individuals are treated as passive - not as active citizens
- Services and responses are defined by the professionals chosen by the state
- Those services are given as a ‘gift’ not as a meaningful entitlement that belongs to the citizen
- Families and communities are reduced to tax-payers, not as essential agents of the social fabric
But we do not need to accept this out-of-date approach to welfare. It is not socially or economically viable to frustrate human and social development in this way. It does not help people to be good citizens, to act responsibly or to make a useful contribution. Instead this paternalistic and inefficient system is in danger of creating more of the social problems that it sets out to treat. Growing numbers of people find themselves unable to work or maintain their families; too many are being lost to crime, drugs, mental illness or hopelessness. The welfare state needs to be radically redesigned.
