Self-help versus state help: Old age pensions and personal savings in Great Britain, 1906–1937

Abstract

Historically, income maintenance has taken the form of private charity or the poor law. These have been typically uneven in their impact, varying from locality to locality, and have been dependent on the generosity and caprices of donors or public relief officials. In the administration of state support, concern for the cost has been paramount, and there has been a lively sense of the possible disincentive to work. The main objective of income support is the relief of poverty. It has been an intermediate objective rather than an end in itself, for example, to avoid civil unrest. Today, there is considerable disagreement about the proper role of income maintenance, but it remains widely accepted that the abolition of poverty is a central objective. The second approach seeks to reduce the multiple values to a single indicator by taking total expenditure and comparing this with a target level of total outlay. The third approach takes total income as the variable to indicate poverty; and it is this approach that is most commonly employed in the studies of poverty. In considering these three approaches to the indicator of poverty, there are two different conceptions. The first, and perhaps the more usual, is concerned with the standard of living, and it points to the use of total expenditure or the consumption of specific commodities. The second is concerned with rights to a minimum level of resources or the opportunity to consume, even if not exercised.