Introduction: Titmuss's account

This article revisits Titmuss's account of the Social Divisions of Welfare (SDW) roughly 50 years after it was first published (Titmuss, Reference Titmuss1958). However, it is difficult to explain the significance of the SDW without acknowledging Richard Titmuss's particular influence on the development of social policy as an academic subject. Titmuss was the first Professor of Social Administration to be appointed in the UK at the highly influential London School of Economics. He trained a generation of social policy scholars, aka the ‘Titmice’ (Lee and Raban, Reference Lee and Raban1988: 72–8), who themselves went on to distinguished academic careers. Despite being ‘quintessentially British’ (Reisman, Reference Reisman2003: 782) or arguably peculiarly English (Rose, Reference Rose1981), there can be little doubt that his influence was felt internationally (Deacon, Reference Deacon1993; Esping-Andersen, Reference Esping-Andersen1990). As David Reisman (Reference Reisman2003) points out, Titmuss was following in the footsteps of Charles Booth, the Webbs and a British tradition of using empirical evidence (or ‘facts’, as Jeremy Bentham and Dickens's Mr Gradgrind might have said) to make the case for social policies that would promote a ‘good society’. He was not particularly forthcoming on what ‘the good society’ might consist of, but social solidarity, unconditional and universal welfare benefits, equality and social justice, and an organic sense of reciprocity and social responsibility, are some of the recurring themes (Deacon, Reference Deacon2002).

Although he was not a religious person, it is reasonable to suggest that ‘a half-forgotten Christianity’ (Reisman, Reference Reisman2003: 782) informed his thinking. John Offer (Reference Offer1999) makes a compelling case for locating Titmuss's thinking within an ‘idealist’ tradition that presumed social policies represented the collective consciousness, or general will, of society as a whole. Just as importantly, however, his normative approach was framed by the experiences of economic depression in the 1930s, witnessing mass long-term unemployment, his work as an insurance clerk, the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, and the sacrifices of the civilian population that he observed during the Second World War (Alcock and Oakley, Reference Alcock, Oakley, Alcock, Glennerster, Oakley and Sinfield2001). His work in general, but the SDW essay especially, is intended to identify divisive social practices, social injustices and hypocrisy, in order to promote social solidarity.

The SDW was first set out by Titmuss in a lecture in 1955. It was initially published in 1956 but the essay is perhaps best known and usually cited from his collected Essays on ‘The Welfare State’ in 1958. From the first, Titmuss places ‘the welfare state’ within quotation marks to indicate reservations about the idea of just one, unitary, system of welfare. Instead, he identified three systems of welfare: social/public, fiscal and occupational. The essay needs to be read as a response to critics on the political ‘right’ of the British Conservative Party who saw the post-war welfare reforms as expensive for the middle classes, unnecessary for many of the working classes and potentially debilitating for all social classes (Titmuss, Reference Titmuss1958: 34–7). Titmuss claimed these views were promoting a misleading stereotype of ‘the’ welfare state and the people who relied on it:

And, quoting Gerth and Mills (Reference Gerth and Mills1953: 88–9), he added:

With the Freud report (Reference Freud2007) in the UK focusing exclusively on public welfare dependency, a continuing debate about dependency and family breakdown in the UK and the US (Cameron, Reference Cameron2007; Gillies, Reference Gillies2007; Neubeck, Reference Neubeck2006), and the media magnate Rupert Murdoch (BBC Radio 5live, 22 January 2006) suggesting that Tony Blair had presided over a nanny state that had simultaneously overtaxed the middle classes and sustained an ‘underclass’, the continuing significance of the SDW essay might be self evident. In the UK all this has occurred despite a raft of policies to tackle anti-social behaviour, reduce passive welfare dependency and to ensure there will be ‘no rights without responsibilities’. Creeping conditionality (Dwyer, Reference Dwyer2004) may now typify social policies in the UK, the US and Australia, but Murdoch's newspapers continue to call for more cuts to public welfare programmes, with feckless fathers and lone mothers identified as the usual suspects promoting crime, moral decline and welfare dependency (for example, The Sunday Times, 21 February 1993, 3 September 2006).

Titmuss was determined to show that the stereotypes of welfare were wrong and that critics of public welfare operated with a definition of welfare that conveniently ignored the benefits that went to all social classes. The failure to see that everyone is welfare-dependent, or interdependent, in contemporary developed societies is portrayed by Titmuss as either intellectual naiveté or political mischief. The SDW essay left no excuse for naiveté and described the politically mischievous as a self-serving clique. The essay should be read, therefore, as an evidence-based polemic and not as a fully developed sociological theory, although it has considerable potential for development and synthesis, as Adrian Sinfield (Reference Sinfield1978) and Hilary Rose (Reference Rose1981) have demonstrated.Footnote ² Moreover, the stereotypes of welfare and dependency that Titmuss challenged appear to be more entrenched and more frequently asserted by journalists, politicians and academics than they were 50 years ago (Bauman, Reference Bauman2007).

Public/social welfare

Social welfare is the public face of ‘the’ welfare state and is seen by the public at large as what welfare ‘really’ is. Following Adrian Sinfield (Reference Sinfield1978), it is more straightforward to refer to social welfare as public welfare given that the other categories are also ‘social’. Public welfare refers to all those services and benefits that have been associated with ‘the’ welfare state. For many people it is the benign hand of the state helping the unemployed, pensioners, school children, the sick and the poor to attain a standard of income, education and health commensurate with society's wealth and development. The focus is on direct payments, universal services and targeted benefits such as the state pension system, local authority/state schools, care services for older people, and publicly funded health services such as the National Health Service in the UK. These are often seen as ‘the’ welfare state, rather than one form of welfare among others. This narrow focus on public welfare encourages the idea that ‘the’ welfare state simply provides benefits for the poorest at the expense of the middle classes. But while some of these services do provide more benefits to the poorest, some are used by all social classes, and the middle classes have often been more adept in accessing some public welfare services than the poorest. For example, in the UK the ability to buy a home close to the ‘better’ local authority/publicly funded schools is facilitated by a higher income thereby giving middle-class parents more choice (Reay and Lucey, Reference Reay and Lucey2003).

Knowing how to access ‘gatekeepers’ to resources (particularly in the health service) and being able to engage with welfare professionals in a manner that they find amenable is likely to influence service provision (Rummery and Glendinning, Reference Rummery and Glendinning1999). Thus, a middle-class academic, for example, is likely to know what they want from public welfare providers and how to get it in a non-confrontational, engaging manner. Consequently, even public welfare is not reserved for the poor (Deacon and Bradshaw, Reference Deacon and Bradshaw1983). But this was not Titmuss's main point; rather, he emphasised the benefits of fiscal and occupational systems of welfare and demonstrated that these were skewed towards the middle classes.

Fiscal welfare

A good example of the welfare that the middle classes receive are the tax incentives (fiscal welfare) for pension saving. Successive governments in the UK, Australia and the USA have tried to promote pension saving by making the contributions, the pension itself and/or the funds’ investments tax free or partially tax free. In Australia in 2001 the Federal government provided fiscal concessions for superannuation schemes that amounted to Aus$8.7 billion per annum, and this was projected to rise to over Aus$23 billion by 2009/10. Remarkably, within a year these substantial sums had to be rounded up to over Aus$31 billion for 2008 (a 36 per cent increase), with future fiscal subsidies also being adjusted upwards by similar proportions (Rothman, Reference Rothman2000; Costello, Reference Costello2006; Australian Treasury, 2006: Table B1, 172, 2008: Table B1, 188).

Tax relief on non-state pension contributions in 2005/6 was estimated by the British government to cost £14.3 billion, but this too was acknowledged to be an underestimate the following year when the figure was revised up to £17.4 billion for the year (HMRC, 2006, 2007: Table 9). Some observers believe that the real cost is much higher and could be as much as £28.9 billion per annum (Silver, Reference Silver2006: 54). These sums need to be seen in the context of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (Brewer et al., Reference Brewer, Browne, Emmerson, Goodman, Muriel and Telow2007) report that concluded that £15.2 billion spent on raising the value of the public pension (basic state pension) would tackle pensioner poverty. They believed their proposals to be expensive, but in contrast to fiscal welfare their proposals are attempting to address the needs of the poorest retirees.

The benefits of fiscal welfare are, however, skewed to the better off: those whose tax liabilities are the greatest get the greatest subsidy. Of course, the benefit to any individual will vary depending on their tax band. The effect is patently regressive, meaning that more resources go to those in the higher-income quintile (the richest taxpayers), and people in the lowest tax band get the least. For people whose income is so low that they are not liable for tax there is of course no benefit at all. In the UK in 2005 it was acknowledged that 60 per cent of this form of fiscal welfare went to taxpayers in the top tax band (Hansard, 2005, col. 52W). Earlier work by Agulnik and Le Grand (Reference Agulnik and Le Grand1998: 410) estimated that a quarter of this subsidy went to the richest 2.5 per cent of taxpayers, while the poorest 10 per cent of income taxpayers got just 1 per cent of the total tax/fiscal handout. Subsequently, this benefit was given to only one in ten of all taxpayers below state pension age and used, in effect, by many of them to avoid the higher rate of tax to build up their retirement savings at the cost of lower-income earners (Sinfield, Reference Sinfield and Powell2007: 136).

Similarly, in 2004 in the USA top-rate taxpayers were getting a subsidy of US$350 for every US$1,000 they contributed, with middle and low earners in the 15 per cent tax band getting only US$150 for their US$1,000, but for those with an income so low that they are not liable to pay tax there was no subsidy (Wasow, Reference Wasow2004). From 2006, pension plans in the US have been ‘liberalised’ to enable participants to add ‘a Roth feature giving plan participants the advantage of paying no income tax on the earnings in their Roth account established within the plan’ (Vaughan, Reference Vaughan2006: 52). These plans add another layer of complexity to the US pension and tax system and are once again regressive in their effects. It has been estimated that the total cost of private pension tax breaks between 2005 and 2010 will be US$330 billion in lost federal revenue (Wasow, Reference Wasow2004; Gale et al., Reference Gale, Iwry and McDonald2006): this at a time when public welfare for the poorest US citizens was increasingly conditional on behaviour or was being cut (Neubeck, Reference Neubeck2006).

It is worth noting that while fiscal welfare is generally regressive it can, and has, been used to address the needs of low-income groups. Since 1999, the British Labour government, albeit with a keen eye on developments in the USA and Australia, introduced fiscal welfare policies that targeted low-income groups. These have attracted less media and political criticism than public welfare has in the past. For example, the 1999 Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) was administered by the Inland Revenue and drew little criticism in comparison to earlier policies with similar goals (helping working families on low incomes).Footnote ³

By 2003, WFTC had been replaced by the Working and Child Tax Credits (WTC and CTC) that extended fiscal support to additional low wage and income groups. Shifting responsibility from the DSS and the system of public welfare to the Inland Revenue and fiscal welfare has seen the number of individuals getting support increase from roughly 199,000 in 1985 to over 1.5 million by 2004 (Dilnot and McCrae, Reference Dilnot and McCrae1999; Adler, Reference Adler2004). The key point here is that targeting via fiscal welfare can be used for progressive purposes and this may be a more attractive option than public welfare for both politicians and recipients. Furthermore, as Adrian Sinfield notes, these policies break the:

Fiscal welfare has been justified by the British government (DWP, 2002; Inland Revenue, 2002) on the grounds that it provides an incentive: a carrot for a change in behaviour. It is intended to promote paid work and prudent saving (Curry and O'Connell, Reference Curry and O'Connell2004; Emmerson, Reference Emmerson2005). The UK system of Mortgage Income Relief at Source (MIRAS) offered similar carrots for private home purchases until 2001. MIRAS made mortgage contributions tax-privileged; although there were limits placed on these, many observers acknowledge this subsidy, and the sale of public/social housing, played a key part in the growth of owner occupation in the 1980s. With a boom in property prices over the last 30 years, many owner occupiers have subsequently also benefited from the fact that their property is exempt from capital gains tax: a benefit that is clearly regressive given that the increase in property values has been greatest for those who could afford to invest more of their income in their home and for those who can buy in affluent areas (Mullins and Murie, Reference Mullins, Murie and Leather2006: 92–3).

There have also been fiscal allowances in the UK in the past for private school fees, private medical expenses and numerous employer-provided perks (occupational welfare is described fully below) that were, or remain, tax-privileged to some degree. Indeed, a great deal of time is spent by accountants trying to minimise the liabilities and maximising the tax relief that affect high earners.

These regressive forms of welfare have been criticised and not just by ‘the left’. One criticism is that it is unclear whether fiscal welfare does in fact change behaviour and activate the low paid. Instead, ‘tax incentives tend to be driven by the vocal middle classes. [And] are a good example of middle class welfare’ (Littlewood, Reference Littlewood1998: 63). Second, and again a criticism accepted by some on the ‘the right’ of the political spectrum, fiscal welfare is not only ‘upside down’ – giving more to those that have the most – but may also distort market behaviour. For example, the mis-selling of pensions in the late 1980s and early 1990s was prompted in part by a £6 billion tax subsidy for those who bought private pensions. In offering the carrot of tax relief/fiscal welfare the government simultaneously appeared to endorse private pensions, subsidised the products and helped to create a ‘sellers’ market’. Subsequently, many of those who purchased private pensions found that they had been misled and that the images used by sales staff and the TV ads of retired couples enjoying their retirement on yachts, riding Harley Davidsons, or sipping champagne on sun-drenched beaches were unlikely to be realised (Mann, Reference Mann2001). Having been bitten once by the sales sharks, consumer scepticism in the UK may now act as a brake on private pension saving (Ring, Reference Ring2005).

Occupational welfare

Occupational welfare was another key feature of the SDW, according to Titmuss. Again, it is rare for those who discuss ‘welfare dependency’ to acknowledge occupational welfare, despite its tremendous significance. For example, the advantages of being in an occupational pension scheme are well known but are rarely seen as part of ‘the’ welfare state. Yet the state plays a crucial role in facilitating and for many public employees providing occupational pensions (Hannah, Reference Hannah1986; Shalev, Reference Shalev1996; Sass, Reference Sass1997; Turner et al., Reference Turner, Drake and Hills2005).

In both the USA and UK, employer contributions to pensions are tax-privileged and believed to be an important employee retention and recruitment tool. In the UK, Australia and the US occupationally related pensions are profoundly regressive. In the UK, company directors have continued to maximise their benefits while claiming a ‘pensions crisis’ means they cannot offer employees access to ‘their’ defined benefit schemes. Thus the TUC (2006) found that of 362 directors, the average director's pension would be more than £168,000 a year, almost 24 times the average occupational pension. The average employer contribution to all directors' defined contribution (DC) schemes was £103,000 a year. While most employees in DC schemes get little or no employer contributions, directors can expect their employers to contribute the equivalent of almost 19 per cent of their annual salary, in addition to any (tax-privileged) contributions they make themselves. In 2004 the British government claimed that many people who ‘failed to save’ for their retirement ‘do not engage with the choices they have’ and ‘are likely to end up with severe under-provision purely because of inertia’ (DWP, 2004: 1). Quite why company directors need such generous incentives to save, both from their employers and the tax system, is not addressed by either the DWP (2002, 2004) or the Inland Revenue (2002).

Other forms of occupational welfare range from minor perks to what many people would regard as luxuries. These can include childcare vouchers, maternity/paternity leave, workplace nurseries, having telephone bills paid by their employer, travel subsidies, company clothes and clothes allowances, the ‘loan’ of a computer, entertainment ‘expenses’, sports and gym club membership, paid leave for sickness and holidays, use of company vehicles, the provision of a chauffeur-driven car, company/employer-provided accommodation (which can range from a simple B&B to an executive city centre apartment, or overseas property that can serve as a holiday home), ‘concierge services’ (including dog walking), the provision of company credit (discounted mortgage rates being commonplace in the finance sector) and company-issued credit cards, discounts on company goods and services, air travel schemes (including the various frequent flyer bonuses and access to airport VIP lounges) and a host of other ‘fringe benefits’ (FRS, 2005: Table 7.6: 150; Brunsden and May, Reference Brunsden, May and Powell2007).

Although some of these benefits may be taxed and individuals will need to carefully assess their liabilities, occupational welfare can often be arranged by employers and accountants to minimise this. For example, performance-related bonuses and ‘golden handshakes’ can be paid into ‘top hat’ pension schemes, company shares or over a long time period to reduce tax liabilities. Fiscal welfare and occupational welfare are, therefore, often closely related and mutually compatible. The value of these benefits varies enormously, depending on the employment sector and status of the individual, but social class is once again a reliable guide with the poorest-paid workers faring much worse than the richest.

An important development in all three countries considered here, that was touched on above, is the privatisation of occupational welfare and, most significantly, employer-sponsored retirement pensions. In short, employers are closing their final salary defined benefit (DB) schemes and moving to defined contribution (DC) schemes but usually with lower contributions, if any, from the employer. DB schemes are widely acknowledged to be more generous, replacing a proportion of former salary, than DC schemes that rely on stock market performance and contribution levels. The shift began in the US in the late 1970s and was led by large corporations, many of whom operate globally. Those covered by a DB plan in the US fell from 38 per cent in 1978 to 21 per cent in 1998, and private sector workers with a DC plan rose from 7 per cent to 27 per cent during the same period. This trend has continued in the last ten years, albeit not at the same pace (Shalev, Reference Shalev1996; EBSA, 2004, in Weller and Wenger, Reference Weller and Wenger2005).

Between 1997 and 2005, full-time employee membership of DB schemes in the UK fell from 46 per cent to 35 per cent. The number of active members of DB schemes in the private sector has more than halved, from just over 5 million in 1995 to between 1.6 and 1.8 million in 2005, while membership of DC schemes rose from 10 per cent of the full-time paid labour market in 1997 to 15 per cent in 2005. There were an estimated 12,000 private sector DB schemes in 2005 compared with 34,700 in 2000. The overall number of DC schemes increased from an estimated 62,600 in 2000, to 70,900 in 2004 (Pension Trends, 2006; Turner et al., Reference Turner, Drake and Hills2005). In both the US and Australia some significant public sector employers (including some universities) have closed or reduced the benefits of their DB schemes to new employees. There is considerable speculation in the UK over the future of public sector DB schemes, with some observers believing that they are untenable in their current form (Clark, Reference Clark, Pemberton, Thane and Whiteside2006).

Informal welfare

The three systems of welfare Titmuss identified, and illustrated above, provide a powerful retort to those who speak only of public welfare. However, this still leaves some vitally important forms of welfare unacknowledged, and a fourth category – informal welfare – is called for (Rose, Reference Rose1981; Lewis, Reference Lewis1997). Care for children, partners, family and friends, and the host of informal, unpaid and often taken-for-granted activities that address our daily needs hardly feature in Titmuss's work generally and not at all in his SDW essay (Offer, Reference Offer1999). Since care is recognised as public welfare when a nurse cares for a sick child in hospital, it is clearly a form of welfare when a mother cares for a sick child at home; the main difference between the two being that care provided by the paid nurse is formally organised and the care provided by a mother is informally organised.

As Hilary Rose (Reference Rose1981) made plain, the question of who provides care has to be addressed, along with the consequences this can have for the carer, particularly in later life. However, the concept of ‘informal welfare’ could be misleading and a note of clarification is required. The term informal welfare should not be confused with the idea that it is unstructured, casual or ad hoc. Indeed, and despite the apparent chaos in many households and the recurring negotiations that may take place, the pattern of caring responsibilities has demonstrated considerable continuity over time and between countries (Lewis, Reference Lewis1986; Morris, Reference Morris1990; Skinner, Reference Skinner2005). Despite some evidence of men taking more responsibility for care of late, particularly childcare, women still undertake the bulk of the caring tasks within households (Breen and Cooke, Reference Breen and Cooke2005; Sayer et al., Reference Sayer, Bianchi and Robinson2004; Craig, Reference Craig2006). This will often impose a ‘pension penalty’ (Ginn and Arber, Reference Ginn and Arber1993) in later life for taking on this commitment. Time out of the paid labour market affects access to pension rights and, in conjunction with lower incomes and contributions (among other factors), has produced a situation whereby millions of women pensioners in the UK have to rely on means-tested public welfare (Turner et al., Reference Turner, Drake and Hills2005).

Rose's revision of Titmuss's essay demonstrates both the descriptive durability of the SDW and its flexibility. Rose focused on the provision of care, advocated a detailed (micro rather than macro) analysis of resource allocation and distribution systems – both formal and informal – and located these within their historical context. For example, the establishment in the nineteenth century of the male ‘breadwinner’ and female carer had profound implications for subsequent public welfare provisions (Rose, Reference Rose1981; Williams, Reference Williams1989). The point that stands out above all else is that caring for children and elders, and working part-time, restricts women's access to public, fiscal and occupational welfare (Ginn, Reference Ginn2003). Thus every aspect of the SDW described by Titmuss is gendered and simultaneously the concept of informal welfare has to be included as a specific form of welfare provision and dependency (Arksey and Glendinning, Reference Arksey, Glendinning and Powell2007).

Dependency

Central to the SDW for Titmuss was the role of dependency in developed societies. What the SDW demonstrated was that everyone was welfare-dependent, but that different social groups rely, more or less, on different elements of the SDW. In fact, it may be more appropriate to speak of inter-dependence given the ‘labyrinth of gifts and transfers’ (Reisman, Reference Reisman2003) and complex web of informal welfare that typifies contemporary society. For Titmuss: ‘All collectively provided services are deliberately designed to meet certain “needs”; they are manifestations, first, of society's will to survive as an organic whole and, secondly, of the expressed wish of all the people to assist the survival of some people’ (1958: 39).

He subsequently claimed that the various divisions of the SDW are designed ‘to meet the needs of the individual and/or to serve the wider interests of society’; and that the different forms of welfare perform similar functions. Social divisions arise as a consequence of previous ‘culturally determined dependencies [but] the dominating operative factor has been the increasing division of labour in society and, simultaneously, a great increase in labour specifity’ (1958: 43). He refers to Durkheim's The Division of Labour in Society (Reference Durkheim1933) and the potential for ‘uncertainty and conflict about the roles’ people ‘are expected to fulfil’ in ‘complex individuated societies’ (1958: 42–4). In line with the functionalism that dominated sociology in the 1950s, there is a tendency on Titmuss's part to play down questions of power, politics and the state (Giddens, Reference Giddens1977: 235–72).

In short, the negative effects of the division of labour are seen to be isolation, social exclusion and estrangement (anomie) and at the same time a decline in traditional forms of social cohesion. This occurs because the moral and ethical principles that are believed to govern traditional societies, and which are largely taken for granted, are undermined by competition, personal fulfilment and the pursuit of self-interest. It is worth noting that there are also some parallels in this account of dependency with more recent sociological approaches to the individuating effects of risk and consumerism in competitive market economies (Bauman, Reference Bauman2007). Thus, despite higher standards of living, with improvements in health, housing and welfare generally, there are now new social risks that undermine wellbeing. Among others, the new risks include divorce, ‘flexible working’, globalisation, an ageing population, ecological and environmental change, the challenges of mass migration, ethnic and religious diversity, along with the fragmentation of traditional communities and political constituencies (Beck, Reference Beck1992; Giddens, Reference Giddens1998; Kemshall, Reference Kemshall2002). For these observers of post-modernity/post-traditional societies, the new risks and challenges require individuals to confront uncertainty and to anticipate their own needs. Thus we must all make active choices in a consumer society about how we plan our lives. The restraints on meaningful choice for the poorest 20–30 per cent of the population may, however, reinforce their sense of exclusion as they are portrayed as passively dependent (Lødemel and Trickey, Reference Lødemel and Trickey2001; Bauman, Reference Bauman2007).

By telling public welfare recipients that they must do more to avoid dependency while ignoring the dependency of those who can access generous fiscal and occupational welfare provisions, academics, politicians and journalists may reinforce the misleading stereotypes and social divisions.

By contrast, universal public welfare services were, for Titmuss, the moral glue that would ensure social cohesion. If everyone relied on the same system of welfare, there would be both a political constituency for improving it (as in the case of the NHS) and a moral dividend because it would be a testament to social solidarity. Altruism was therefore the antidote to anomie. For Titmuss, society had to find organisational mechanisms that promoted altruism and social justice to counter the debilitating effects of a competitive, individuating, hedonistic market (Reisman, Reference Reisman2003).

Revising Titmuss

Titmuss had a benign view of ‘society’ (Offer, Reference Offer1999) and a rather blinkered view of power, vested interests and market forces. These weaknesses will be addressed briefly below but, as Hilary Rose (Reference Rose1981) noted, they have meant that his account has often been seen as ‘merely descriptively useful’, a view she robustly rejected. And with Paul Spicker (Reference Spicker1995, cited in Powell, Reference Powell and Powell2002) describing the SDW essay as possibly the most influential piece of work in social administration, it is remarkable that the analytic potential of the essay has not attracted more attention.

Along with Rose's (Reference Rose1981) article, the most notable exception is Adrian Sinfield's (Reference Sinfield1978) essay that makes a powerful case for considering the close correspondence between class, power and the SDW. His central point is that the power to influence the allocation of resources, the desire to ‘buy’ good workplace relations and the resulting distribution of resources via the SDW are neither random nor meritocratic. Social groups, consumers of welfare and classes organise to protect and extend their relative privileges and in so doing exclude others. Titmuss clearly believed that this situation should, and could, be tackled by the state to prevent wider social divisions. Whereas Titmuss believed that the general will of society would in some way be manifest through universal welfare measures, Sinfield suggests that the SDW reflects the ability of vested interests to influence policy. Thus, and despite Titmuss's detailed examination of official statistics on income distribution that challenged the idea of greater equality in the 1950s (Titmuss, Reference Titmuss1962), he paid less attention to the way that the political economy of capitalism promotes inequality.

However, it was not simply the economic power and privileges inherent within a capitalist market that Titmuss under-estimated. He also overlooked the way that private market welfare providers can influence public policy (Farnsworth and Holden, Reference Farnsworth and Holden2006). Moreover, market providers may on occasion meet needs in innovative ways that provide a challenge to universal public welfare by, for example, offering greater flexibility or being designed to address the needs, or risks, that specific groups confront. In the case of retirement income, this can mean that some people will successfully negotiate the risks associated with private and occupational pensions. They will have saved for their retirement, ploughed their earnings into their homes and complied with the criteria of the new deserving. They will in turn have more options in later life than there were 50 years ago. They will have assets and these will mean they can make constrained choices that will not be available to the poorest 30 per cent of the population who have none on retirement (Rowlingson, Reference Rowlingson2006; Mann, Reference Mann2001; Castles, Reference Castles1997).

In these circumstances, universal public welfare can do little to resolve the inequitable distribution of opportunities over a lifetime. While an assets test might ensure that those who had previously benefited from fiscal and/or occupational welfare were not able to ‘double dip’,Footnote ⁴ it seems unlikely that there would be a sizeable political constituency in the UK for such a policy. The point here is not that this is inequitable, although it clearly is, but that any attempt to address the inequities would confront political problems. The voice of the (mainly but not exclusively) middle classes, rather than the general will of society, would surely prevail. Because the benefits of fiscal and occupational welfare rarely attract attention, and are more usually seen as earned and therefore deserved, the case for equity between the different forms of welfare is rarely heard.

Public welfare recipients are more frequently the focus of political and media attention and, in the USA for example, lone mothers and their children have been identified as the main problem. Kenneth Neubeck (Reference Neubeck2006) has illustrated the obsession that powerful elites have had with lone mothers over the last 15 years or so. Lone mothers who are dependent on public welfare are portrayed as demoralised (literally) by the experience. Whereas tax handouts are given to wealthier groups as incentives, lone mothers have been pushed off public welfare and into low paid work. Neubeck suggests that the imposition of Draconian conditions on lone mothers is part of a broader concern on the part of US welfare policies to stigmatise those who are dependent on public welfare. But while this concern is presented as paternalistic, it reflects class, gender and racial systems of inequality in US society (Neubeck, Reference Neubeck2006: 30–2). Such views are in marked contrast to Titmuss's account. To test them it would be necessary to undertake research into how powerful interests and groups articulate their views and if these have any effect. Thus patterns of collective consumption, business interests, political and interest lobby groups, supra-national organisations such as the OECD (1998; Minns, Reference Minns2001) and World Bank (1994, 2005) and established elites might need to be the focus of social policy research (Blackburn, Reference Blackburn2002; Hacker and Pierson, Reference Hacker and Pierson2002; Farnsworth and Holden, Reference Farnsworth and Holden2006).

The greater visibility of public welfare and public welfare dependents is not simply due to media and political attention. Public welfare recipients are first made visible by administrative and technical mechanisms. They are classified, monitored and observed by public welfare professionals and providers. The mechanism by which they are made visible and monitored corresponds closely to changes in ‘the mode of information’ (Poster, Reference Poster1990). The history of social administration illustrates the way that the mode of information subjects the welfare recipient to the scientific gaze of the provider. Thus in the nineteenth century the Charity Organisation Society developed casework in order to monitor behaviour (Fido, Reference Fido and Donadgrodzki1977) and the workhouse ‘test’ was intended to deter entry, while those that did enter were trained by meaningless tasks and the discipline of the workhouse clock. Similarly, the dole queue of the 1930s registered the unemployed in a highly visible manner, and more recently activation policies, computer information systems, advisors and counsellors try to promote a cultural change in behaviour (Henman and Adler, Reference Henman and Adler2003; Dean, Reference Dean2006).

Social researchers are not immune from ‘watching the defectives’, usually paying much more attention to those who rely on public welfare than to the privileges that occupational and fiscal welfare dependents receive (Mann, Reference Mann1994). For example, simply trying to establish the cost of fiscal welfare in lost revenue is extremely difficult. Adema and Ladaique (Reference Adema and Ladaique2005) have made some comparisons of ‘tax breaks for social purposes’ across the OECD states, but these are limited and the most significant of these (pensions) are excluded. The Australian Treasury is rather more forthcoming than the UK but, as they explained in 2006, ‘unlike direct expenditures, tax expenditures once legislated become part of the tax law with a recurring fiscal impact and do not receive regular scrutiny through the budget process’ (21 December 2006, Content ID1211).Footnote ⁵ Moreover, as Hacker observes of the US, fiscal welfare policy appears to be made in a ‘subterranean world’ in which accounting procedures hide the ways in which governments use the tax system for policy purposes (Hacker, Reference Hacker2002).

Similarly, occupational welfare tends to be treated as ‘non-wage labour costs’ by employers and this is not disaggregated in a manner that enables researchers to find out precisely who gets what. And of course, there are no queues for fiscal welfare, no counsellors enquiring into the behaviour of those who get occupational welfare, and no stigma attached to being dependent upon these forms of welfare.

Finally, power is significant in relation to questions of control and how the SDW impacts on people's ability to express their needs or seek redress. Informal welfare differs, qualitatively, in respect of power and ‘voice’ to other aspects of the SDW in that it is generally provided by ‘significant others’. Care also often involves a high degree of intimacy, both emotionally and physically. This in turn can make it difficult for the cared for to question or challenge the carer. While the other systems of welfare have some formal mechanisms of redress, albeit often ineffectual, informal welfare is arguably less amenable to formal mechanisms and prescriptions. Ensuring that both the informal carer and the cared for can, to some degree, negotiate their relationship is by no means easy, but nevertheless vital (Williams, Reference Williams, Lewis, Gewirtz and Clarke2000).