Social policy and family life

Abstract

The emergence of a discourse on poverty, emanating mainly but not exclusively from right-wing government circles, has distinguished single mothers and the principle of universalism in social policy as particularly serious problems threatening the post-war conception of the welfare state. The financial costs of both have served to draw attention to, and possibly to scapegoat, unconventional patterns of family life, transforming them into a major social policy problem. There appear to be two distinct areas of social policy debate which serve to underline family relationships as the problem in the welfare state. First, there is a debate which is less concerned with matters of principle and more to do with the interpretation of the quantitative facts of welfare state development. Having experienced a long period of consensus about welfare expenditure and priorities since 1945, it now appears that there is a growing international acceptance that the new agenda for all welfare states in the twenty-first century will centre on the issue of how to limit state obligations at a time when the population is ageing and the productive population available to pay for welfare through taxation is contracting. Second, there has arisen a conceptual debate, clothed much more in the vocabulary of principle and morality, about the proper division of responsibility between the state and the family in the provision of welfare, with the shift in government policy since the 1980s to an explicitly welfare pluralist approach to the delivery of services.