Delivering Welfare

Abstract

It is a common assumption, shared especially by the protagonists of state welfare, that the provision of social services will mean that the benefits of such services will be enjoyed by all those who are the intended recipients of them — if health services, for instance, are provided free at the point of demand, those who need health care will go and use them. In the case of universal services, such as the NHS or education, the intention is that all will indeed benefit from such services, and benefit equally from them. As a result of this, attention in the development, and the study, of social policy has concentrated predominantly on the structure and the funding of welfare provision rather than on the access to and use of the services themselves. The focus has thus been rather more on the producers than the consumers of welfare — a distinction to which we shall return below.