Making Welfare Work: Reconstructing Welfare for the Millennium

The welfare system in the United Kingdom is broken. The number of claims has escalated & so, in consequence, have welfare expenditures. The social system does not encourage welfare recipients to become independent. Half the population of the United Kingdom lives in households drawing one of the major means-tested benefits. Research documents that means-tests paralyze self-help, discourage self-improvement, & tax honesty while at the same time rewarding claimants for being either inactive or deceitful. In Making Welfare Work, Frank Field challenges the current political orthodoxy, particularly its emphasis on the role of legislation alone in bringing about social improvement in a welfare state. Field argues that the impact legislation has on personal character is pivotal to human advance in a welfare state. Welfare reconstruction needs to address & channel the differing roles of self-interest, self-improvement, & altruism, which are among the great driving forces in human character. A successful welfare state must reinforce these important forces which influence our nature because to create an imbalance between these three motive forces will always undermine welfare's objectives. Field discusses in detail aspects of modern British society in dire need of change. These include the drug trade, benefit traps, permanent adolescence, the rise of part-time work, inequality in incomes, excluding the disabled, single parents, & the very elderly, for example. This clearly delineated, well-researched blueprint for success will be important reading for politicians & policymakers in all industrialized nations. Its author is well-positioned to revise & review the welfare policies of democratic societies.

Frank Field has been the Labour Member of the Parliament for Birkenhead since 1979. He has been a front-bench spokesman on education and social security, chairman of the Commons Social Services Select Committee and is currently the chairman of the Social Security Select Committee