Will Covid‐19 change attitudes towards the welfare state?

Abstract

How the public might swing in favour of improved welfare provision for those of working age “Britain’s welfare state has suddenly been presented with a new challenge – to keep the country afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic” An obvious question that arises is whether and how this experience will change public attitudes towards the two arms of the welfare state: the provision of public services, such as the health service and social care; and the distribution of transfer payments to those on low incomes. Maybe voters will draw the conclusion that the Covid-19 experience has uncovered a country that lacks the resilience needed to cope with misfortune and be willing to support more generous welfare provision. Or perhaps they will prefer to forget what might prove to be a temporary interruption to the regular rhythms of economic life, and look for a return to the status quo ante. The evidence used here comes from the British Social Attitudes survey (BSA). This is a high-quality survey that has been conducted annually since 1983 by NatCen Social Research.1 The survey is undertaken face to face with a random sample of the adult population across Great Britain. Throughout the 35 years from the first survey in 1983 to the most recent one in 2018, BSA has repeatedly asked questions about various aspects of the welfare state, including most notably the health service and various forms of social security. It thus provides us with unique insight into how public attitudes towards the welfare state have ebbed and flowed during the past four decades. As already indicated, the term ‘welfare state’ is usually taken to encompass two different aspects of government activity: the provision of public services and the delivery of transfer payments. The provision of public services can be further divided into: services such as education and childcare, which are primarily intended to open up opportunities for parents and their children to enhance themselves and their productive potential; and the health service and social care, which are primarily aimed at those in need and thus are the parts of the welfare state on which we rely in times of difficulty. Spending on the health service has always been popular. Every year, BSA has presented its respondents with a list of possible items of government spending, and asked them which one would be their first priority. Health has always been the most popular choice – on average running at 50 per cent across the whole period between 1983 and 2018. To that extent, at least, there has always been a widespread appetite for more. Meanwhile, there has never been much support for the idea of limiting the health service to those with lower incomes, rather than running it as a universal service. At 23 per cent, the most recently recorded level of support for that idea (in 2018) is in line with what it has been throughout the past 20 years (when it has averaged 25 per cent). “even though spending on health was protected – relatively at least – during the years of austerity following the financial crash of 2008/09, the public seems to have become increasingly concerned to see yet more spending on the NHS” As compared with the health service, social care has long seemed to be a Cinderella service – not least because the provision made by the state is far from universal. Indeed, this position reflects the balance of public opinion. In 2018, only 44 per cent told BSA that the government should pay for social care, whereas 54 per cent said that government should only pay after the individual had contributed what they could, albeit maybe only up to a capped limit. Meanwhile, although only 26 per cent said they were satisfied with the social care provided by local authorities, only around a third (34 per cent) said they were actually dissatisfied. As many as three in 10 (31 per cent) said that they were neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, while 9 per cent said they didn’t know. At any particular point in time, many fewer people are in contact with social care services than with the NHS – and this may well mean that fewer people have a firm view on the quality of social care provision. Thus, although the Covid-19 pandemic has underlined the vulnerability of older people who need care, it has done so against the backdrop of a mood that does not seem to provide much impetus for an enhancement of what the state currently provides in terms of social care. “If the health service has consistently been at the top of people’s spending priorities, spending on social security has regularly been at the bottom of the ladder of priorities” Yet, as in the case of public services, there are some important distinctions to be made. One is between pensioners and the rest of the population. Over half of social security spending goes to pensioners. And that proportion has increased somewhat in recent years, as the government has sought to curb benefits for the working-age population while keeping in place the relatively generous formula that determines the annual uprate in the level of the state pension.3 It is, however, sections of the working-age population, and not pensioners, whose incomes have been primarily affected by the coronavirus pandemic. The focus on spending on pensioners reflected what until recently appeared to be the public mood. As well as asking people their priorities for public spending in general, BSA has also regularly invited people to state what was their top priority for more spending on ‘social benefits’. Until very recently, spending on old-age pensions was the single most popular choice. Between 1983 and 1995, the relevant proportion hovered around an average of 43 per cent. But between 2000 and 2010, the figure never fell below a half (averaging 56 per cent) – though by 2014 it had returned to 44 per cent. Otherwise, the public’s empathy appeared to be focussed on disabled people (on average between 1983 and 2014, 23 per cent picked benefits for this group) and children (14 per cent). In contrast, benefits for unemployed people, which were selected on average by 16 per cent during the 1980s (when unemployment was relatively high), fell sharply down people’s list of priorities during New Labour’s time in office, with just 4 per cent regarding them as their top priority. “support for prioritising pensioners now seems to have waned, such that it is no longer clearly the single most popular choice for spending” These figures, however, simply give us an indication of the relative priority that the public gives to different social security benefits. Given that benefits for unemployed people have never been particularly popular, there is a risk that any change in attitude towards such benefits may fail to reveal itself in the responses to a question about the top priority for more spending. However, in some years, BSA respondents have been asked whether spending on benefits for unemployed people should be increased, reduced or stay the same, while also being asked separately what they think should happen to spending on benefits for retired people (see table 1). The top half of table 1 confirms that, while still relatively popular, support for more spending on benefits for retired people fell markedly during the period from 1998 to 2017. As recently as 2008, there was still a near consensus on the desirability of more spending on benefits for retired people, with 72 per cent backing the idea. More recently, the figure has fallen to below a half. More importantly, however, the second half of the table shows that there has been a marked change in attitudes towards benefits for unemployed people. Between 1998 and 2008, there was a marked increase – from just over a third (35 per cent) to over a half (54 per cent) – in the proportion who believed that spending on benefits for unemployed people should be reduced. More recently, however, that increase has been almost wholly reversed. However, the apparent change in attitudes towards benefits for unemployed people is even clearer in table 2, which shows how people have responded when in every year of the BSA survey they have been asked whether benefits for unemployed people are too low and cause hardship or are too high and discourage people from finding a job. When the Conservatives were in power in the 1980s and 1990s, the predominant view was that benefits were too low, with typically around half of people expressing that view. But as soon as New Labour took over the reins of office in 1997, the balance of opinion soon tilted in the opposite direction – and remained that way until our most recent survey, when those who thought that payments were too high (39 per cent) now only slightly outnumbered the proportion who felt they were too low (35 per cent). “the advent of a Labour government that, in contrast to the party’s traditional outlook, was keen to reduce the welfare bill (and more broadly was seemingly less concerned about inequality) had a particular impact on the views of those who supported the party” A similar dynamic now seems to be in evidence, albeit in reverse. The level of unemployment was still slowly falling between 2017 and 2018, in line with the trend for the previous half a dozen years or so. Voters cannot therefore be said to have been reacting to a spike in unemployment. Meanwhile, as table 3 shows, the change in the balance of attitudes towards whether benefits for unemployed people are too high or too low has been particularly marked among those who support Labour. Compared with 10 years ago, there has been a 23-percentage-point increase in the proportion of Labour supporters who say that benefits for unemployed people are too low, whereas the increase among supporters of other parties or of none has been of the order of just six to eight percentage points. Labour’s stance in recent years has, of course, been very different from the era of New Labour. The party has engaged in repeated criticism of the Conservative government’s programme of ‘austerity’, including its reductions in welfare support for those of working age. It has also criticised the implementation of the new universal credit system. If those criticisms have proven persuasive, we would expect them to be especially so among Labour supporters – and this indeed is what seems to have happened. Moreover, this trend fits a wider pattern of research evidence, again based on BSA data, which suggests that an increased concern among voters about poverty in recent years has been particularly in evidence among Labour supporters.6 A few years ago, a sudden increase in welfare provision to those of working age would have truly cut across the grain of public opinion. But, as it happens, the past few years have witnessed something of a change in public attitudes towards aspects of the welfare state. Although the provision of benefits for retired people remains relatively popular, voters now seem to be rather more sympathetic to the position of those of working age who find themselves in need. That may make it more likely that the public will accept the cost – in terms of taxation and/or borrowing – that will be occasioned by the government’s attempt to provide relief for workers during the coronavirus public health crisis. Meanwhile, it seems unlikely that there will be much opposition to the inevitable increase in health service spending that will be occasioned by Covid-19 in the short run at least, though whether it will help bring about a change in the funding of social care is less clear. But the more interesting question, of course, is whether the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic will have a longer-term impact on attitudes towards the welfare state. Might we see a further reversal of the critical attitude towards benefits for those of working age that was until recently clearly in evidence? Might there be an expectation that the health service should be made more resilient by running with more (but costly) spare capacity? And might such a change of outlook prove advantageous to Labour as the party that is most strongly associated with the welfare state? Perhaps. But the crucial lesson of 35 years of BSA data is that politics matters. Voters followed Labour’s lead in becoming more critical of welfare at the turn of the century, and now appear to have swung back again somewhat in the wake of the party’s attacks on austerity. That suggests that an opportunity will indeed open up for the party to create a narrative that persuades voters that it should be given the task of running an enhanced welfare state in post-Covid-19 Britain. But it also means that, even though it might currently find itself in an unfamiliar policy position in expanding the welfare state, it is also open to the Conservative party to develop and secure support for its story as to how the welfare state should be run in future. After all, this was already a Conservative government that was inclined to be more interventionist than the governments of Thatcher, Major and Cameron ever were – and perhaps it might yet prove capable of framing and matching a more interventionist public mood on welfare once the pandemic is over. John Curtice is a professor of politics at Strathclyde University, and senior research fellow at NatCen Social Research and the UK in a Changing Europe.