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영어

This paper reviews aspects of the ways in which civil servants addressed the question of poverty and need and the adequacy of the income maintenance system during the two post-war decades following the Beveridge Report. It is based on PRO and departmental records and on interviews with officials. The evidence suggests that through the 1950s officials thought of the adequacy of National Assistance in terms of Rowntree’s original asocial minimum subsistence standards, but that in the early 1960s the Beard and Windsor Reports on the adequacy of the NAB benefit levels reflected an important paradigm shift in some officials’ understanding of adequacy, from subsistence to minimal socially-defined participation. But these reports remained secret and the shift did not receive recognition in other departments or sustained implementation at the policy level.
However fruitless, the attempt by officials to apply social science methods to develop new departmental thinking should not be described in such cynical terms as ‘games-playing’, since failure to acknowledge or respond to change might also be so described.