POVERTY, POLITICS AND POLICY

STUDIES IN POLICY-MAKING

General Editor: Anthony King, Professor of Government, University of

Essex

Most books on British politics are concerned with political institutions-with the
cabinet, Parliament, the political parties and so on. This new series of books
approaches the same subject-matter from a different point of view. It is concerned not
with institutions but with processes-with how laws, policies and decisions are
formulated and implemented. It is hoped that the books in the series will, among other
things, make it clearer how the institutions themselves actually function. All of the
books in the series are addressed to the general reader, to academic students ofpolitics
and also to specialists in the fields with which the books deal-suchfields as industrial
relations, the nationalised industries, health and housing.

Already published
The Politics of Industrial Relations Michael Moran
The Politics of Steel Keith Ovenden
POVER TY, POLIT ICS
AND POLIC Y
Britain in the 1 g6os

Keith G. Banting
University rif British Columbia,
Vancouver
 © Keith G. Banting 1979
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1979
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission

First published 1979 by

THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Associated companies in Delhi
Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos
Melbourne New York Singapore Tokyo

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Banting, Keith G
Poverty, politics and policy- (Studies in policy-
making)
1. Great Britain- Social policy 2. Great Britain-
Social conditions- 1945-
l. Title II. Series
300'.941 HN390
ISBN 978-1-349-03612-7 ISBN 978-1-349-03610-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-03610-3

This book is sold subject

to the standard conditions
of the Net Book Agreement
For Marilyn
Contents
Acknowledgements IX

1 Explaining Social Policy 1

2 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 14

3 Family Poverty 66

4 Poverty and Educational Priority 109

5 The Social Policy Process 139

Notes and References 157

Index !83

Vll
Acknowledgements
Research into British policy-making inevitably involves an element of
detective work, and my debts to those who helped shed light on this secret
world are enormous. Dozens of politicians, civil servants, outside advisers,
and interest-group leaders patiently endured my questioning and gen-
erously shared their knowledge of the social policy process. Although they
must remain anonymous, their insights pervade the pages that follow. In
addition, a number of politicians and outside advisers opened up their own
papers and documents to me. In this regard, special thanks are due to'
the late Richard Crossman, who, at an early stage of the research, provided
full access to the unedited transcripts of his remarkable diary for the entire
period from the mid-1950s until 1970. But for such acts of unofficial
openness, this book could not have been written.
This study was first prepared as a D. Phil. thesis for Oxford University,
and warm thanks are due to the Warden and Fellows ofNuffield College
for providing me with an intellectual home during my years in Britain. In
particular, Nevil Johnson and Jim Sharpe constantly encouraged my
efforts and commented perceptively on my endless drafts. The transition
from thesis to book was greatly aided by Anthony King, without whose
guidance the final product would have been immeasurably poorer. I have
also benefited along the way from the suggestions of Brian Barry, D. N.
Chester, S. E. Finer, A. H. Halsey and my colleagues Cynthia Brand, Peter
Busch, George Feaver and W.J. Stankiewicz.
The publisher and I wish to thank the following who have kindly given
permission for the use of copyright material: George Allen and Unwin
(Publishers) Ltd for a diagram from Resources for Education (1968) by
J. Vaizey and J. Sheehan; Cambridge University Press, New York, for a
table in Journal of Social Poliry, Vol. 1, 1972; The Child Poverty Action
Group for a table in 'Family Poverty' a CPAG Memorandum; The
Controller ofHer Majesty's Stationery Office for tables from the Report of
the Committee on the Rent Acts, Cmnd 45of;; General Problems of Low Pay, Cmnd
4648; and Report No. 1- Initial Report on the Standing Reference, Cmnd 6171;
Lloyds Bank Ltd for a table from Lloyds Bank Review No. 83,January 1967;
New Science Publications for a table from 'Education and Opinion' by
David Donnison, in New Sociery, 26 October 1967; and Social Surveys
(Gallup Poll) Ltd for two tables. Unpublished material from the Crossman
diaries is quoted by permission of the literary executors and is copyright©
The Estate of R.H.S. Crossman.
The Commonwealth Scholarship programme and the Canada Council
ix
X Acknowledgements
generously contributed the financial assistance that made the original
research possible.
My largest debt, however, is to my wife and family, whose help and
encouragement sustained me throughout.

August 1978 K.B.

1 Explaining Social Policy
More than ever before, the lives of citizens depend on the social policies of
government. Western nations have constructed a vast edifice of pro-
grammes designed to alter existing patterns of social life. What men can
achieve, both as individuals and as groups, is shaped by the responsiveness
of government to their needs and desires. Their health, education, housing
and general life chances lie heavily in the hands of the state. For many of
the poor and vulnerable, state action may represent the only possibility of
substantial progress. Social policies today consume close to half of public
expenditure in nations such as Britain, and their management consumes a
similar share of the efforts of public leaders. A steady stream of decisions
flows from cabinets, parliaments, public services and courts, shaping and
reshaping the complex structure known as 'the welfare state'.
This study seeks to unravel the political forces that generate changes,
and particularly innovations, in social policy in Britain. In particular, it
examines the re-emergence of poverty as a political issue during the 1g6os
and the way in which the government responded to it. The rediscovery of
poverty in Britain, the United States and other nations in the 1g6os
represented a fundamental shift in the ways in which such societies
conceived of themselves. During the 1950s public attention focused on the
twin forces of affluence and the welfare state; poverty had been eliminated
and inequality was steadily declining-or so it was assumed. Partisans of
both the left and right described the reforms of the 1940s as a social
revolution. The welfare state seemed a permanent solution to the problem
of social justice, and political argument centred less on principles than on
details. Contemporary observers recorded the triumph of the politics of
prosperity and the decline of social protest; and the 'end of ideology'
became a fashionable subject of academic speculation. But in the late
1950s another interpretation of British society began to gain ground and,
in the 1g6os, came to dominate social debate. Poverty and inequality were
reinstated as central features of British society. Political conflict over the
ends of social policy reasserted itself, and changes in policy began to occur.
Income transfers, social services, education, housing, tax policy- all felt
the weight of the poverty question.
The rediscovery of poverty posed problems for those dedicated to social
reform. Economic growth alone was clearly not dissolving the inequalities
of British society. Yet the prospects for reform through politics were
uncertain at best. The growing affluence of the work force seemed to

1
2 Poverty, Politics and Policy
reduce the size of the constituency with a vested interest in social change,
leaving the poor a small, and politically isolated, part of the population.
Reformers were thus forced to search carefully for the levers of change. In
fact the content of public policy did change in the Ig6os. The decade was
one of creative debate, with a proliferation of proposals for reform, many of
which found an echo in government decisions. Yet poverty was not
eliminated, significant reductions in the level of inequality did not occur,
and many of those most active in the cause of reform were disappointed,
often bitterly so.
How, then, can the re-emergence of poverty as a political issue and the
resulting policy responses be explained?

EXPLANATIONS OF SOCIAL POLICY

Explanations of social policy proceed at several levels. 1 Some students

emphasise the importance of broad socio-economic factors in shaping the
evolution of modern social policy. The rise of the welfare state in the
twentieth century, for instance, has been interpreted as a 'natural
accompaniment of economic growth', 2 an obvious and necessary response
to the social problems generated by industrialisation: economic insecurity
during illness, unemployment and old age; unsanitary living conditions;
dangerous working conditions. Political factors usually play a secondary
role in such interpretations. The social strains accompanying rapid
economic growth are broadly similar in different countries, and govern-
ments of starkly different political complexions-democratic and non-
democratic alike- have responded with often similar social security efforts.
Cross-national studies of countries at different levels of economic develop-
ment do confirm that social security expenditures are more closely
associated with economic level than with political differences. 3 In a similar
vein, some students of public expenditures in the American states contend
that levels of income, education and urbanisation are far more important
in explaining differences in spending patterns than the states' political
characteristics. 4
Yet socio-economic changes are only a starting-point, and the need to
examine the role of politics remains. The relationship between economic
level and social policy is far from perfect, and large unexplained differences
remain. When attention is narrowed to economically developed nations,
for example, fascinating differences emerge in the scope, structure and
generosity oftheir social policies, differences which cannot be explained by
reference to economic factors alone. 5 More importantly, such explanations
are incomplete because they fail to provide a satisfactory account of the
connection between socio-economic change and policy response. 6 In-
dustrial development has been an important precondition of the social
security expansion in this century, generating both new social problems
and new resources with which to respond to them. But the emerging
 Explaining Social Policy 3
problems still had to be identified, interpreted and defined as legitimate
political concerns; and new policies had to be pressed successfully upon
and within governments. Politics was at the heart of this transition from
social stress to public policy.
A focus on political processes is particularly important in understanding
social policy in the 1g6os. A persistent structure of inequality can be found
in every industrialised nation, including Britain. But the sheer facts of
inequality did not dictate whether or when the plight of the poor would be
recognised; western governments were quite successful in ignoring them
for years. Nor did the existence of hardship determine which aspects of
their plight would be recognised, how the problems would be defined, or
what the policy responses would be; western governments have differed in
their conception of the problems and in the type of policies they have
adopted. An examination of the ways in which social problems are
identified and interpreted, and the ways in which policy responses are
shaped, is therefore essential.
Other interpretations which emphasise changes in the broad social
structure are similarly incomplete. Marxist and radical writings, for
instance, often depict social security as a response to the class conflicts of
industrial societies. 7 Social security programmes are seen as a mechanism
of social control, designed to integrate the working class more fully into the
existing social order and to undercut the radical potential of the poor.
Social security is thus the 'shock absorber' of an inegalitarian society, 8 a
'kind of insurance for capitalists and corporations'. 9 Changes in social
policy, by this account, result from shifts in the class structure, pressures on
ruling elites from organised labour and radical political parties, or simply
the threat of social disorder.
In assessing this interpretation, it is essential to distinguish between the
causes of and the consequences of social policies. The level of political
unrest in western nations might well be higher if the welfare state did not
exist at all, and in this sense social security programmes may help to
legitimate an inegalitarian social structure. But this does not automatically
explain why such policies were introduced in the first place or expanded
thereafter. Historically, some social policies do seem to have been responses
to social unrest or the threat of it. The introduction of social insurance in
Bismarck Germany was, in part, an attempt to incorporate workers into
the existing social order and to undercut left-wing parties; 10 and some
authors have argued that American poverty programmes in the 196os were
essentially attempts to placate the turbulent black community. 11 But such
an interpretation is not generally applicable. Many social programmes
have been introduced in western nations when the threat of social disorder
or radical political parties seemed distantY
More to the point, this approach is oflittle help in explaining the politics
of poverty in the 1g6os. The poor did not pose any threat to the stability of
British society. Throughout the decade they remained unorganised and
4 Poverty, Politics and Policy
unassertive. Perhaps more would have been accomplished if the poor had
been militant, but they were not. Organised labour did clash with
governments of both major parties in the late 1g6os and early 1970s over
economic policy and industrial relations. But social policy innovations to
help the poor were not adopted in the hopes of ensuring industrial peace.
Most workers had nothing to gain from them, and organised labour took
little interest in them. Conflict over poverty had a very different
configuration.
Understanding the origins of social policy innovations in the 1g6os thus
requires a close look at the role of political processes in interpreting social
problems and designing social policies. This book focuses on the activities
of policy-makers and the institutional and social constraints within which
they operate. It examines how social issues are raised and defined, where
innovative ideas for reform come from, and what political factors shape
government decisions about them. It also examines the strategies of those
committed to reform and the obstacles in their way. This is not the only
possible level of analysis. But it is an essential one.

THE POLITICS OF SOCIAL POLICY

The approach adopted here can be stated simply. The making of policy is
both an intellectual activity and an institutional process. 13 The decisions
that change laws are, in one sense, the products of individual minds.
Problems must be perceived and defined by individual policy-makers, and
new policies have to be imagined before they can be implemented. Yet the
making of public policy is also an institutional process. Policy-makers
possess authority to resolve public issues by virtue of their positions in
political institutions. The structure of those institutions, and their relations
with the wider society, set limits on the deliberations of those who work
within them. Innovations in public policy therefore require change in both
intellectual and institutional processes; and the dynamics of change in the
two processes differ. These two processes, and the tension between them,
are the central concern of this study.
Some students of decision-making focus mainly on the intellectual
activity involved in policy change. Modern policy problems are complex,
contentious and often poorly understood. Accordingly, theorists such as
March and Simon, Lindblom, Deutsch, Vickers and Steinbruner begin
with propositions about how the human mind grapples with complex
problems generally.l 4 They examine how decision-makers cope with
imperfect information, high levels of uncertainty and conflicting values in
decision situations. On this basis, they develop theories of the nature of
policy-making in organisational settings. The image of the policy process
that emerges is of a continuous learning process, in which policy-makers
are constantly adjusting their interpretations of problems and changing
their policies in response to a steady flow of signals from their environment.
 Explaining Social Policy 5
The individual decision-maker develops standard operating procedures
for dealing with familiar situations, and copes with novel problems almost
experimentally, through repeated incremental shifts in policy. Politics,
from this point of view, is not simply a process of constant conflict between
powerful groups, and policy changes are not always imposed on govern-
ment by overwhelming outside pressures. 15 Rather, politics is also a process
of 'social learning' in which policy also changes because policy-makers'
interpretation of the problems and options before them change. Policies
are thus shaped by the perceptions and attitudes ofdecision-makers and by
the information flows that connect them with their environment.
From this perspective, the real source of innovations in public policy is
new information, new ideas and new interpretations of old problems.
Given the high level of uncertainty that characterises governmental
decision-making, policy-makers depend heavily on the steady flow of
policy intelligence to alert them to new developments and to direct their
policy responses. Those who contribute to this flow exercise real influence.
The individuals most capable of developing new theories and ideas, which
form the intellectual basis of policy innovation, are professionals and
academics in the field; and students of the intellectual process of policy-
making often trace the roots of major policy changes to small numbers of
'marginal men' who operate in the twilight between the professional,
academic and political worlds. Political conflict is noisy and distracting;
but often it takes place within a framework of ideas and theories that shape
the range of possible outcomes.
The diffusion of new ideas and information is a central theme in many
interpretations of the history ofBritish social policy. Dicey pointed to such
patterns at the turn of the century; 'the beliefS which have at last gained
such a hold on the legislature as to produce an alternation in the law', he
argued, 'have generally been created by thinkers and writers who exerted
their influence long before the change in the law took place' .16 Historians
have emphasised the importance of new information and informed
activists in eroding the Poor Law of 1834· A stream of detailed
investigations of particular social problems by Simon, Senior, Chadwick,
Booth, Rowntree, the young Beveridge and the Webbs steadily under-
mined the assumptions on which the legislation was based. 17 These people
established a tradition of empirical study of social problems and policies,
and led many of the campaigns for social reform.
Such patterns are not unique to Britain. Heclo, for instance, found
similar processes at work in the history of social insurance programmes in
both Britain and Sweden. Building on Deutsch and Lindblom, he argued
that the development of the welfare state was not simply the product of
power politics which forced decisions on politicians. Rather, policy-
making was a form of collective puzzlement on society's behalf. Changing
attitudes, information and interpretations of social reality, rather than
shifts in the distribution of political power, were the real source of changes
6 Poverty, Politics and Policy
in social policy; and the central actors in this process of societal guid-
ance were 'policy middlemen', intellectuals, policy experts and civil ser-
vants.I8
Such interpretations have become even more common in the modern
era, as professional associations have become more firmly entrenched and
the universities have expanded in all western countries. In the United
States, for example, Price argues that the design of public policy in general
now 'owes less in the long run to the processes of political conflict ... than
to the more objective processes of research and discussion among profes-
sional groups' .1 9 Initiatives in American social policy during the 1g6os
have been interpreted in a similar fashion. The expansion of social services
in the early years of the decade occurred, according to Glazer, without
much obvious political pressure in favour of it; 'the fate of the poor', he con-
tends, is increasingly in the hands of 'administrators and professional
organisations ... who propose ever more complex programmes which
Congress deliberates in the absence of any major public interest' .20 And for
Moynihan, the War on Poverty, launched a few years later, was clear
evidence of 'the professionalisation of reform'; the programme was
essentially the conception of 'liberal, policy-oriented intellectuals who
gathered in Washington, and in a significant sense came to power in the
early 1g6os'. 21 They documented the extent of poverty in affluent America;
and the actual content of the legislation flowed from developments in
sociological theory and related experiments being conducted by major
research foundations in the decaying cores of American cities. 22
In modern Britain, social scientists and professionals with an interest in
social problems also play a critical role in monitoring social change and
generating the new theories and new ideas that are the intellectual
preconditions of policy innovations. 23 This thin stratum of society does not
really form a single group; at best, social scientists and professionals
constitute a series of overlapping social policy communities, primarily
centring on specific policy areas such as housing, social security or
education. The boundaries of these communities are never precise and
some experts participate in several of them simultaneously. But within
each of them there is a continuous debate over the adequacy of existing
policy. Social scientists in universities and the newer policy institutes often
take the lead through their research and writings; but professionals in the
policy area also contribute, and their associations, journals and con-
ferences reflect and amplify emerging trends in expert opinion. The
criticisms and proposals that are heard in Parliament and the press
regularly originate here.
The ideas underlying the major social policy innovations of the 1g6os
can be traced to these intellectual and professional communities. During
that decade, social policy debate was alive with new ideas, many of which
had been developing for more than a decade. The burst of social legislation
during and after the Second World War, which completed the structure
 Explaining Social Policy 7
known as the 'welfare state', had, in effect, caught up with the ideas and
proposals that made up the agenda for reform for the inter-war generation.
The 1950s, therefore, saw a pause, a period of intellectual regrouping on
the left generally, and a period in which a new generation of social
scientists and professionals reassessed the achievements of the 1940s and
laid the intellectual foundations of another phase of reform. The lead in
this process came from a left-wing intellectual movement based in the
universities. One of the most significant events for postwar social policy was
the appointment of Richard Titmuss to the chair of social administration
at the London School of Economics in 1950. Under his guidance, the
discipline of social administration grew steadily, and his own students and
proteges-Brian Abel-Smith, Peter Townsend, David Donnison, Michael
Young and others-came to prominence in it. Together with like-minded
social scientists in other universities, this group devised a new agenda for
reform.
These academics represented the continuation of two powerful streams
in British intellectual life. 24 The first was the tradition of the careful
empirical study of social problems and policies; the legacy of Booth,
Rowntree and the Webbs had found a secure institutional base in the
universities. The second was the egalitarian tradition of the Fabians and
R. H. Tawney. Titmuss and his followers were committed to the case of
equality and convinced of the importance of social policy in achieving it. 25
Titmuss was not only a careful investigator of social life; his work was also a
moral statement, and he became a philosophical leader not only of an
academic generation but also of parts of the Labour party. This group of
intellectuals was convinced that myths about the generosity of the welfare
state were blinding Britons to the persistence of hardship and inequalities
in their midst. They therefore set out in the 1950s to map the contours of
British society, and to generate the ideas and evidence that would
legitimate social reform. Their research was explicitly political; its aim was
to reshape policy-makers' interpretation of their environment. The
chapters that follow trace the extent of their success.
Government decision-making, however, cannot be fully understood as
the product of a steady diffusion of new ideas and information. Policy-
making is also an institutional process, and the organisational framework
of political parties, bureaucracies and interest groups, and their relations
with the wider society, shape decision-makers' criteria of judgement and
the extent of their power. Policy does often change in response to shifting
intellectual currents. But institutional realities also exercise tight control
on the extent to which new ideas penetrate the political world and the ways
in which they influence public policy. Viewed from this perspective, policy
innovations are less the product of new ideas than of political conflict, and
their final shape bears the heavy imprint of bargains struck between
established political interests.
A variety of theories contend here, each pointing to a different
8 Poverry, Politics and Policy
institutional factor as the primary determinant of policy change. The
theory of party government, for example, emphasises the role of party
doctrine. British political parties, argue Beer and others, represent
opposing historical traditions, distinct sets of values and priorities, which
form the basis of their decisions when they are in power. 26 The impact of
other political forces, such as interest groups and the civil service, depends
largely on the congruence of their views with the ethos of the party in
power. In addition, parties have a significant capacity to generate electoral
support for their views. They are important instruments for shaping public
opinion on policy issues and can appeal directly to sections of the electorate
likely to support the broad outlines of their views. On this view, then,
political parties are, to extend Crossmen's phrase, the battering rams of
change.27 Policy innovations are to be expected when the attitudes of the
party in power shift or when another party comes to power.
A second interpretation focuses on the preferences of the public at large
and depicts policy as the product of electoral competition. Downs, for
instance, argues that parties are best thought of, not as guardians ofdistinct
traditions, but as teams of potential rulers united in the primary goal of
winning elections. 28 Government decision-making is thus dominated by
the art of gauging public preferences and anticipating the electorate's
response. Public opinion is often unformed and uncertain on many issues
facing government, 29 and what matters is less the actual state of opinion
than policy-makers' perceptions of it. 30 As a result, other groups-civil
servants, interest groups, the media -can exercise influence indirectly by
altering the government's electoral calculus on a specific issue. They may
be able to shift the government's estimate of the impact of various policies
on the voters; or they may be able to influence voters' views of policies and
even mobilise them behind specific ones. None the less, although a variety
of factors may appear to be at work in policy innovations, the final
governing consideration is the government's electoral calculations.
A third approach emphasises the role of administrators and of
administrative structures. Students of the nineteenth-century expansion of
government, and of welfare provision in particular, have stressed the
importance of the steady pressure for improvement from inspectors and
other officials. 31 And, in the modern period, infinitely more complex
administrative structures loom even larger in the policy process. Their
information systems shape awareness of policy problems; their officials
formulate the analyses on which policy decisions are based; their structures
and capabilities set the policy options readily available; their discretion
over ongoing programmes is immense. 32 The real battles over public policy
are fought within, and between, large departments, well hidden from
public view. Other political forces are crushed under the sheer weight of
the administrative structure. Party and electoral influences are strictly
limited because political office-holders lack the ability to develop and
impose distinctive policies. 33 Ministers become departmental spokesmen
 Explaining Social Policy 9
and the cabinet becomes a committee of department heads resolving inter-
departmental conflicts. 34 Close relations are established with interest
groups, but administrators are far from captives in the process; although
outside groups may influence departmental thinking, administrators also
cajole groups into accepting their preferences. From this perspective, then,
policy innovations result from major changes in administrative attitudes
and structures.
Yet another theory interprets policy as the product of group conflict.
Except in its broadest formulations, 35 group theory emphasises the impact
of organised groups like trade unions, business organisations and agricul-
tural federations. Such groups represent the significant interests in the
population and enter into combat with groups advancing competing
claims. 36 Public policy simply reflects the existing balance of power among
competing groups, and political institutions serve as arenas in which
compromises are ratified. Political parties are seen as relatively neutral
agencies which aggregate group interests, devising compromise policies to
attract large group coalitions; and the civil service is seen as a passive
instrument for implementing the overall balance, resolving only matters of
detail. 37 Thus policy innovations are the product of significant shifts in the
balance of power between organised groups.
These four theories agree on the importance of the institutional
framework of political life for the content of public policy, but they differ
on which factor is critical in policy change. Policy is interpreted as being
primarily a reflection of party doctrine, or of electoral competition, or of
bureaucratic structures or of group conflict. The aim in this book is not to
choose among these theories in the forlorn hope of isolating some 'key'
factor in policy innovation, for such changes are unlikely to be the
unambiguous offspring of a single parent. Instead, the aim is to examine
the role and relative importance of each of these institutional factors:
politicians, administrators, groups and voters. How do they react to new
social policy ideas? How do they interact within the social policy process?
Both the intellectual and the institutional approaches to the study of
public policy are essential. Focusing only on the diffusion of ideas
understates the role of political conflict in the resolution of policy issues.
Focusing only on the institutional process understates the extent to which
the policy goals of policy-makers and politically powerful groups evolve in
response to new theories and ideas, and the frequency with which political
conflict takes place within a common framework of assumptions about
social problems. This study examines the dynamics of change in both the
intellectual and institutional processes, and the tensions between the two,
in order to provide a more complete picture of how innovative decisions in
the field of social policy occur.
10 Poverty, Politics and Policy
REFINING THE ANALYSIS: PHASES AND TYPES

Our understanding of policy determinants can be refined further by

abandoning the assumption that there is a single 'policy process' operating
identically throughout an individual policy change and over all policies.
The balance of forces at work seems to differ systematically in different
phases of the process and in different types of policies.
Phases of Policy-Making. A decision to change public policy is actually the
outcome of a complex set ofjudgements. Policy-makers must be aware of a
situation; they must judge it to be unacceptable and sufficiently important
to warrant attention; they must have some conception of the nature of'the
problem'; they must consider one or more policy responses; they then must
adopt one. 38 These different phases of judgement seldom occur in such a
neat chronological sequence, but they are all essential and can be
distinguished for analytical purposes. The important point is that each of
these phases is open to influence, and political factors have different
impacts on different phases. Certain groups may have a decisive impact at
one phase but may prove quite incapable of exercising any influence at
others.
Accordingly, this study examines the influences at work in each of the
following phases:

Awareness. How are policy-makers made aware of the existence of the

situation? While some issues are virtual constants of political argument,
others must be thrust into the political consciousness. In some cases this
may be the most difficult hurdle of all.
Salience. Why is the situation judged to be a 'problem' and sufficiently
important to be acted upon? The number of possible issues greatly
exceeds the attentive capacity of policy-makers and the available
resources. The selection of problems to be dealt with thus becomes one of
the most critical phases of the process. 39
Definition of the Problem. Do different policy-makers or groups have
conflicting conceptions of the real nature of the problem and its causes
and, if so, which definition predominates? As March and Simon argue,
'choice is always exercised with respect to a limited, approximate,
simplified "model" of the situation'. 40 The prevailing definition of the
problem circumscribes the options considered and the stakes involved;
getting policy-makers to accept a particular definition of the problem is
the first step in getting them to accept a particular type of solution. 41
Specification of Alternatives. Which alternative courses of action are
actively considered and why are others excluded? 42
Choice. Why is one course of action or set of actions finally adopted?
 Explaining Social Policy II

To facilitate the presentation of the material in the subsequent chapters,

this set of categories is employed flexibly. The order in which the phases are
examined is altered where appropriate. And when developments in two
phases were inextricably intertwined, they are examined together; in
Chapter 2, for instance, the salience and the recognition of the housing
problems of poor tenants were so interdependent that they are considered
together. But whatever the order of presentation, the central factors at
work in each are made clear.
Types rif Policies. Cross-national study of the determinants of social policy
is a developing field of academic inquiry. 43 Fewer comparisons exist of
different types of policies within individual political systems. Yet differ-
ences among policies may be as significant as differences among polities:
different types of policies do seem to develop their own characteristic policy
processes and balances of influence. The crux of the problem, however, is
the choice of policy types to be compared. Policies differ in endless ways,
any one of which could be chosen as the basis of comparison. 44 The
simplest typologies are based on substantive policy areas, such as transport
policy, health policy, agricultural policy and so on. But this approach
generates an enormous number of policy types, and undoubtedly obscures
similarities between them. On the other hand more abstract categories,
such as Lowi's distinction between regulative, distributive and re-
distributive policies, 45 are not always easy to operationalise.
An intermediate typology based on the mechanism of state intervention
has been adopted here. Modern governments employ three major
mechanisms with which to alter existing social patterns:

Regulation. The state sets rules, backed by sanctions, which prescribe

certain behaviour within a sector of the economy or society. Govern-
ments introduce or adapt such regulations in the hopes of shifting
relationships within that sector towards a more desirable pattern.
Income Transfers. Each citizen or corporate body is involved in a set of
direct cash transfers with the state. Taxes of various types are paid to the
state and a variety of benefits, grants and subsidies are provided by the
state. The government can alter the position of individuals or groups by
adjusting their taxes or their benefits or both.
Services. Modern states provide a range of services which either
supplement or displace private provision. Governments can alter the
position of groups by adjusting the nature of the services or the
conditions of their access to them.

The idea that each of these types of policies develops a characteristic

political pattern of its own seems plausible. Regulation of market forces
seeks to change the activities of powerful economic groups; income
transfers, on the other hand, are direct exchanges between state and
12 Poverty, Politics and Policy
citizens which by-pass market operations; and services usually involve the
establishment or adaptation of large administrative structures, which
employ professional staffs and which are often under the jurisdiction of a
variety of bodies, both public and private. The politics of change in each of
these three mechanisms of state intervention would seem to differ
significantly; at the very least, reformers face different constellations of
institutional obstacles to surmount.
The chapters that follow analyse an example of policy innovation using
each of these three mechanisms:

1. 'Rents, Regulation and Rachmanism': the exploitation of poor

tenants and the 1965 Rent Act.
2. 'Family Poverty': the family poverty campaign and the resulting
changes in family allowances and the tax system, which came to be
known as 'clawback'.
3· 'Poverty and Educational Priority': the introduction of Educational
Priority Areas (EPAs) in an attempt to compensate for environmental
deprivation among the poor.

Case studies provide a powerful tool for examining propositions of general

theoretical interest and for elaborating alternative ones. But the choice of
cases is obviously critical, colouring as it does the subsequent findings. It is
therefore important to clarify the reasons for the selection of these cases.
The three were selected, of course, to illustrate the three types of social
policy; but in addition these policies represented three of the most
important attempts to help the poor launched during the 1g6os. No single
case can be representative of a general type, and the conclusions about
differences between policy types must be considered tentative. But any
theory of the social policy process that failed to account for these three cases
would clearly be deficient.
In addition, the policies chosen all incorporated innovative elements.
Much has been written of the development of public policy as an
incremental process, with minor adaptations constantly being made to a
changing environment. But, as in any evolutionary process, the sudden
shift to a new course is as important as the subsequent years of adaptation
and refinement. There is no unambiguous criterion by which to judge
exactly when a policy change is sufficiently novel to constitute an
innovation, 46 and the industrious historian can undoubtedly find earlier
parallels to any new policy. In this study, innovations will be conceived of
broadly so as to include all changes that incorporated elements considered
novel by those making the decision. None of the policies examined here
represented a total break with the past. Each maintained some elements of
existing policies. But all three did introduce new elements, shifting the
course of government action in new directions. In some cases the initial
change was substantial, and subsequent experience has largely been a
 Explaining. Social Policy
process of consolidation. In others, the break with the past was smaller, but
some new principle or relationship was established, leaving open the
possibility of continued development in succeeding years.
2 Rents, Rachman and
Regulation
The first major crack in the contemporary image of an affluent Britain
came in the field of housing. The poor faced many problems, but it was the
plight of poor tenants that first caught public attention in the Ig6os.
Throughout the early years of the decade, housing debate was repeatedly
dominated by signals of hardship from the private rented sector of the
market; charges of disgraceful living conditions, intense over-crowding,
exorbitant rents and, in some cases, physical abuse of poor and elderly
tenants echoed in the media, Parliament and Whitehall. Housing
problems gave many Britons their first real glimpse of the other side of the
affluent society.
Rent policy quickly became a nagging embarrassment to the Macmil-
lan and Home Governments, and a priority item for the Labour
Government that succeeded them in I g64. Within five months of assuming
office, the new Labour Minister of Housing, Richard Crossman, was
introducing a major bill designed to reform rent policy in fundamental
ways. The I g65 Rent Act, when passed, greatly expanded controls over the
private market in unfurnished rental accommodation, provided broader
security of tenure for tenants and established a new mechanism for setting
rents. Rent controls, in one form or another, had existed in Britain since
I9I5, but the new legislation was distinctly innovative, representing a new
approach to the public management of the private rented sector. This
chapter examines the politics of this innovative legislation.
In retrospect, the social stresses to which the I 965 Act was a response are
clear} The private rented sector was in a state of decline. At the time of the
First World War it had housed the bulk of the nation, but thereafter it had
been steadily displaced by owner-occupation and council housing, as
Table 2.I indicates, until by I965 only 20 per cent of the population lived
in private rented accommodation.
The private building of new houses for rent had long since virtually
stopped, and the existing stock of houses was slipping into serious decay.
Much of it was a century old and had not been improved to keep pace with
modern standards: the majority lacked a bath, two-fifths lacked hot water,
and over a fifth lacked exclusive use of a flush toilet. 2 Much of it was slum
housing.
Yet in the early Ig6os there was a growing demand for rented
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation

TABLE 2.1 British housing by tenure, 1951-69

Owner- Cour1cil Private Other

occupied tenants tenants tenures

% % % %
1951 29·5 18.o 44·6 7·9
1956 34·4 23-2 35·7 6.6
1961 42·7 26.8 25.0 5·5
1965 46.6 28.2 20.1 5·2
1969 49·2 29·7 15·7 5-4

Source: Recalculated from Report rif the Committee on the Rent Acts, Cmnd 46<J9, Table 34·

accommodation, especially in major conurbations such as London. 3 The

poor, the elderly and immigrants had few other housing options. Home
ownership usually lay beyond their financial means, and council housing
was allocated only to those who had been waiting for years on depressingly
long lists or, more often, who were lucky enough to be displaced by a slum
clearance programme. Consequently, many Britons were trapped in the
decaying private rented sector, with little hope of escape. Chronic shortage
of an essential commodity inevitably generates hardship, and in this case
the hardship fell primarily on the most vulnerable sections of the
community. The 1965 Rent Act was an attempt to cushion that impact.
What were the political dynamics of this transition from social stress to
policy response? The first section of this chapter examines the recognition
and salience of the problem, asking why the plight of tenants, and
especially poor tenants, emerged so dramatically in the early rg6os. The
second section examines the drafting of the new rent bill in the early
months of the Labour Government, focusing on the definition of the
problem accepted in Whitehall and the influences that shaped the major
parts of the new policy. A third section looks at the adoption of the bill in
Cabinet and Parliament, and a final section summarises the findings and
discusses the legislation's impact.

I THE CONTINUITY OF CONTROVERSY

While other aspects of poverty were to lie hidden for years and to be
recognised in political circles only after lengthy campaigns, the pressures
on poor tenants were quickly reflected in political debate. This attentive-
ness was the product of intense political controversy over the fate of the
private rented sector of the housing market. Unlike the other policies
examined later, rent legislation was already an established issue in British
politics. Rents were a subject of protracted conflict between the two major
16 Poverty, Politics and Policy
parties, with major battles having been fought over the issue only a few
years before, and this legacy sensitised politicians to signs of hardship in the
sector. In the early 196os, the probleins of poor tenants, in particular,
became powerful ammunition in party warfare and they were swept up
into political debate with an alacrity denied many other important social
problems.
In part, the long-standing salience of rent policy reflected ideological
differences between the Conservative and Labour parties. The steady
decline of private rented accommodation, and the equally steady
expansion of council housing, raised fundamental questions about the role
of market mechanisms and of the state in meeting human needs. The two
parties had often clashed over the balance between the two, 4 and this deep-
seated conflict re-emerged strongly in the mid-1950s. 5 The Conservatives
had come to power in 1951 promising a major housing drive and, to fulfil
their promise, they had increased government activity in the housing
market, primarily through expanded public housing construction. But
when their overall target of 300,000 houses a year was surpassed and the
acute housing shortages inherited from the war began to ease, the
Government tried to shift the balance and place greater reliance on market
mechanisms to house the nation. The change in direction came in stages
between 1954 and 1957· The Government restricted the general subsidies
for public housing, reduced the council house building programme,
limiting it largely to slum clearance, and announced their intention to
phase out rent controls over the private rented sector completely.
The most controversial step was the last one, decontrol of private rents,
which was begun with the 1957 Rent Act. That legislation had three major
provisions. First, it freed a substantial amount of middle-class housing
through 'block decontrol', that is, the freeing from control of all housing
above a specified value. Second, it raised the rents of the primarily
working-class houses that did remain controlled. Finally, it provided that
these houses should also be decontrolled through 'creeping decontrol', that
is, the freeing of each house when it fell vacant.
The 1957 Rent Act generated bitter debate between the two parties. 6
The Conservative Government argued that since housing shortages were
receding decontrol would not be a painful process and rents would rise only
moderately. But, they insisted, major benefits would flow from the revival
of the private rented sector: landlords would be more willing to provide
accommodation and improve their property, rented housing would be
allocated more efficiently, and historic anomalies in individual rents would
disappear. The Labour party, however, fought decontrol passionately.
Labour MPs denounced the Act as vicious class legislation, and insisted
that landlords would ruthlessly exploit their new freedom, extracting
exorbitant rents and providing no improvements in return. Many tenants
could not conceivably pay the higher rents, and would be ejected into the
streets; others would pay up by skimping on food, with the result,
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation
according to Labour's housing spokesman, G. R. Mitchison, that the
Government would be 'starving a considerable number of people and
increasing the mortality rate' among poor and elderly tenants. 7 MP after
MP rose on the Labour side of the House to attack the legislation as
'inquitious' and 'wicked', and as a 'pay-off to the people who finance the
Tory Party'. 8 Labour pledged itself to repeal the hated Act as soon as it
regained power, and over the next few years the pledge was repeated
countless times in party meetings, pamphlets and Commons debates. For
many of the party faithful, the pledge became part of what Labour stood
for, a symbol of historic differences between the two parties. 9
The intensity of the battle over rent policy flowed not only from
ideological conflict but also from electoral strategy. Politicians of both
parties considered housing special. It touches 'the most sensitive and
intimate part' of voters' lives, 10 Aneurin Bevan argued, and a Conservative
MP agreed:

Governments can pass unpopular legislation, they can increase tax-

ation, they can even cut the social services and be forgiven, but if they
take away a man's home unjustly they will never be forgiven.l 1

Throughout the post-war housing shortages, each party sought to outbid

the other in its housing promises. While the most dramatic appeals centred
on housing production, such as the Conservatives' promise to build
30o,ooo houses a year, the politics of rent control was similarly permeated
by a healthy dose of electoral calculus. Politicians and civil servants
believed that decades of rent control and subsidies for public housing had
altered popular expectations about what rents should be. As a Con-
servative Government White Paper later complained, 'Years of rent
control, years of subsidy too often indiscriminately used, have obscured to
many people the real cost of housing.' 12 Although the average working-
class tenant was paying a smaller proportion of his income in rent than in
1939, regular rent increases had not been a fact of life for generations.
Rents were therefore considered politically sensitive. 'People had come
to think there was something shabby about rent increases', argued one civil
servant; 'politicians have been reaping the whirlwind as a result of their
reluctance to act earlier and more often.' Certainly complete removal of
controls was considered impossible as long as housing shortages remained;
'it would become politically so unpalatable that no party dare
remove rent control entirely', Bevan had told the Commons in 1953. 13
Most policy-makers did, however, accept that rent increases were possible
if carefully managed; for instance Labour's own housing proposals during
the 1950s were based on the assumption that tenants would accept rent
increases as long as they were phased in and accompanied by guarantees
that repairs would be carried out. 14 'What people can't stand is their rent
being suddenly doubled', argued one Labour planner; 'so phasing the
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
increase was important.' A civil servant agreed: 'you can raise rents
gradually; in fact, you can get away with anything except the big squeeze
that actually drives tenants into the streets.'
To the Labour party, the 1957 Rent Act looked like the big squeeze.
'The Tories by their own hand have committed suicide', proclaimed one
happy delegate to the 1957 annual party conference. 16 'Public opinion is
strongly in favour of controls', concurred Hugh Gaitskell, the party's
leader, 'and I do not see why we should not commit ourselves on the
principle pretty completely.' 16 In fact, the Rent Act did not pay the
immediate electoral dividends that Labour expected. The Conservatives
were also nervous about the political consequences of decontrol and their
policy was carefully designed to ease the transition and delay its full impact
until after the next election. Creeping decontrol was, by its very nature, a
gradual process; the more immediate block decontrol of middle-class
housing was hedged with a variety of transitional arrangements that
cushioned the blow for up to three years; and amending legislation was
passed in 1958 to reduce the pain of the adjustment even further. As a
result, there were few evictions or unexpectedly large rent increases as
decontrol came into effect. 17 Even then, the Conservatives took no chances
and their 1959 election manifesto pledged them to take no further action to
decontrol rents in the next Parliament. Gaitskell and other Labour leaders
attacked the Rent Act strongly during the election campaign; but the
Conservatives were returned to office with an increased majority and there
was little evidence that rent policy had worked significantly to Labour's
advantage. 18
The recriminations of the 195os did not end with the election, however.
Housing shortages began to develop again in the 1g6os. Demand for
housing was rising much more rapidly than the Government had expected:
the south-east in general, and London in particular, were experiencing
rapid growth, especially in the service industries which employ legions of
low-paid workers; demographic changes such as earlier marriage and
greater independence in old age were accelerating the formation of smaller
households; and immigration was bringing more strangers to the
metropolis. These groups all depended heavily on the private landlord for
accommodation. But the partial decontrol introduced in 1957 was not
producing a new supply of such housing, and the steady pace of slum
clearance and urban development continued to eat into the existing stock.
The poor, the elderly and immigrants were thus left to compete for a
dwindling amount of decaying property. High rents, homelessness,
evictions and exploitation were the consequences. 19
The pressures in the housing market rekindled the battle over rent
policy. In 1957, both the Conservatives and Labour had confidently
predicted the consequences that would flow from the Rent Act and, as
decontrol increasingly took hold in the early 196os, both watched
anxiously for vindication. The Labour party was particularly attentive for,
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation I9
despite the defeat of I959, the commitment to recontrol never wavered.
The new housing spokesman, Michael Stewart, did try to broaden the
party's housing policies to appeal to a wider range of interests, including
the rapidly growing owner-occupied sector; control of land prices,
increased housing production and, mortgage relief all gained greater
prominence in Labour's housing concerns. 20 But repeal of the hated Tory
Rent Act remained an article of faith within the party and there were still
lingering hopes that the issue might yet become an electoral asset. As a
result, Labour was ready to pounce on even the slightest sign of hardship in
the private rented sector and to blame it on the Rent Act.
Signals of developments in the private rented sector came from a variety
of sources: interest groups, administrative information systems, social-
science research and the media. Interest groups were probably least
important. The two major representatives oflandlords, the Association of
Land and Property Owners and the National Federation of Property
Owners, maintained a low-profile strategy which they had adopted during
the debates over the I957 Act. 21 Since the legislation gave them much of
what they wanted, they remained quiet to avoid adding fuel to the Labour
attack, and this policy continued into the I96os as decontrol took effect.
Tenants, on the other hand, were more vociferous, but not particularly
effective. Tenant associations were generally small groups, lacking a stable
membership. When faced with an immediate crisis they would often
expand quickly, but afterwards they would shrink in size again and lapse
into intermittent activity.
Tenant action had its biggest impact during the summer of I96o, when
the three-year leases signed after the I 95 7 Act by many middle-class
tenants fell due. As the larger landlords mailed out their renewal notices,
the full impact of the build-up of demand for housing in London was felt:
rents were rising by 50, I oo, and occasionally 200 per cent. Groups quickly
sprang up in the larger blocks of fiats to protest, and they joined together to
form an All-London Tenants' Committee, which led several delegations to
see the Minister of Housing, Henry Brooke. 22 The Labour party threw its
full weight behind the tenants, working hard to dramatise the problem and
place the blame squarely on the I957 Act. Labour MPs held meetings for
tenants to voice their objections, organised petitions, made policy
announcements, and repeatedly demanded the Minister's resignation. 23
But the Government refused to intervene and, after the tenants adjusted to
the new rent levels by either paying up or moving out, tenant activity
subsided again.
Except for this brief flurry, the impact of tenant associations on the
evolution of the housing debate was limited. Consultations with
government never became regular and structured; indeed a proposal from
the AU-London Committee for tripartite negotiations between
government, landlords and themselves was summarily dismissed. 24 More
importantly, organisation among poor tenants was virtually non-existent,
20 Poverty, Politics and Policy
and tenant associations never became a major spokesman for the very
tenants who were suffering the greatest hardship. Occasionally the All-
London Committee would protest about the abuse of poor tenants, but
their allegations seldom made a lasting impact on either the national press
or the Government. 25 Certainly the problems of poor tenants did not
emerge because of their own self-assertion.
Administrative information systems provided more indications of the
problems facing poor tenants. The Ministry of Housing and Local
Government did not monitor developments in the private rented sector
comprehensively; 'no one thought it feasible to collect worthwhile
information on a national scale about so diverse and private a matter', the
Permanent Secretary, Dame Evelyn Sharp, later explained. 26 But regular
administrative operations did generate some evidence about the worst
aspects of rented housing. Local authorities surveyed such housing when
they prepared slum clearance programmes; they exercised some
regulatory powers designed to force landlords to maintain minimum
health and repair standards; and the London County Council provided
temporary accommodation for those who could find no housing at all.
Because the various regulations were never enforced comprehensively, the
figures certainly did not measure the problems accurately, 27 but despite-
or perhaps because of- their deficiencies, the data did fuel political
controversy.
The most dramatic concerned homelessness. The statistics produced by
the London County Council on the number of people having to be housed
became, in effect, a barometer of housing stress. The numbers had
fluctuated since the war, but after 1958 they rose steadily, with a
particularly steep jump during the winter of 1961-62. Faced with
overcrowding in its shelters, the LCC conducted a study of the problem
and the report emphasised that, contrary to earlier assumptions, the
homeless consisted primarily of young families trying to exist in London on
low wages. 28
What such statistics actually told one about the housing market was
unclear. At most, they represented the tip of an iceberg of unknown
dimensions. For instance, the total number of homeless in London was
unknown; the LCC statistics recorded only those being helped, but some
categories of homeless people, such as husbands, did not qualify for shelter
and many eligible people almost certainly did not apply. Similarly, the
implications of other local authority statistics were also unclear. Did the
low number of certificates of disrepair being issued by local authorities
mean that landlords were doing repairs or that tenants were not asserting
their rights of redress? Was the low number of compulsory purchase orders
being submitted by local authorities to the Ministry proof of satisfactory
conditions or of an inadequate inspectorate?
Ambiguous information gives full scope to the political imagination. As
decontrol took effect, housing statistics became the centre of party
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 21

controversy, with both sides interpreting them as they wished. The

Ministry's Annual Report assumed that the low number of certificates of
disrepair was proof that the Rent Act was 'succeeding in its aim of getting
rt"pairs done', and Henry Brooke, the Minister, assured the Commons that
the infrequency of compulsory purchase orders belied claims that there
was widespread exploitation oftenants. 29 The Opposition hotly disputed
such convenient conclusions and insisted that tenants were simply not
insisting on their rights. Labour spokesmen, on the other hand, showed no
doubt that the homelessness figures were dramatic proof of the growing
misery caused by the Government's cruel policies. Not so, replied landlord
spokesmen and the new Minister of Housing, Sir Keith joseph; the figures
simply meant that a higher proportion of the poorly housed were being
attracted to the shelter by all the recent publicity and by the more generous
provision being made for them. 3D
Despite their ambiguity, the figures were politically potent. Homeless-
ness in particular became a public issue, with the Labour party working
hard to politicise it. As the figures jumped during the winter of 1961, the
protests became vociferous. The Labour-controlled LCC mounted a
formal delegation of protest to the Minister, from which Conservative
councillors were excluded, and afterwards the LCC leader, Sir Isaac
Hayward, and the chairman of the London Labour MPs, Robert Mellish,
held a joint news conference to attack the Government. Hugh Gaitskell was
invited to the emergency shelters, despite their being closed to the press
and in some cases even to the husbands of women housed, and his visit was
widely covered by the media. 31 The plight of the homeless became a
fashionable cause. Newspapers were filled with poignant stories offamilies
being evicted, searching in vain for inexpensive housing, and sometimes
finally breaking up under the strain. At Christmas two London bishops led
2000 well-dressed people in a torchlight procession 'to challenge the
conscience of London'; the theme of the sermon was 'No Room at the Inn'
and the Lord Mayor read the lesson of the homeless family of Bethlehem.
One commentator observed that 'perhaps never before has the establish-
ment of London associated itself with a social problem' so clearly. 32
Homelessness remained an issue for years: the press continued to carry
heart-rending stories, the bishops continued to protest, 33 and in 1966
'Cathy Come Home', a BBC documentary drama about the break-up of a
homeless young couple, made an enormous impact. Social conscience gave
a sharper edge to party conflict. As one senior civil servant put it: 'parties
argue about which policies are best but there is a genuine feeling with all of
them that such people must be helped.'
A more comprehensive monitoring of the private rented sector could
only have been achieved by means of regular surveys, but the Ministry did
not gather such information. Indeed the surveys that had the greatest
impact were conducted privately by a group ofsocial scientists led by David
Donnison of the London School of Economics. Their national housing
22 Poverty, Politics and PQ!icy
studies provided the first public evidence that the Ministry had seriously
underestimated the extent of decontrol that the Act would bring about,
and that, while rents had risen, few of the promised improvements in
private rented accommodation had come to pass. The sector had
continued to shrink in size and the rate of repairs was still insufficient to
preserve the existing stock. Decontrol, the social scientists concluded, was
bringing about a transfer of incomes but contributing little to the solution
of housing problems. 34 They disseminated their findings through public as
well as academic channels: they wrote a series of articles in The Times and
the Manchester Guardian; they joined the usual roster of civil servants and
housing managers invited to address housing conferences; and they were
added to important studies of housing problems, such as the LCC study of
homelessness and the later Milner Holland Committee established by the
Ministry. 35
The efforts of the social scientists were supplemented in only a modest
way by the Ministry. One survey conducted to assess the impact of the
Rent Act did confirm Donnison's findings, another gathered better
information on the physical state of the housing stock generally, and
revised estimates of housing demand in London were prepared in 1 g62-
63.36 But these occasional efforts did not add up to a continuous and
comprehensive source ofdata on the most controversial housing issues and,
consequently, the Ministry's position in the developing political struggle
over rent policy was weakened. Although officials strongly suspected that
the hardship that captured headlines was atypical of the market generally,
they could only explain repeatedly that they had no information with
which to reply to charges of excessive rents, evictions, homelessness and so
on. 37 In February rg63, the Ministry acknowledged the vulnerabilityofits
position and promised both regular surveys and a special investigation of
London's housing problems. 38 But the results of these were not to be
available for several years.
The various surveys that were done had their greatest impact in
professional and bureaucratic circles. Several officials testified to their
importance in undermining confidence that the aims of the 1957 Act
would be realised and in alerting them to growing stresses in the sector.
'When we finally realised the extent of the build-up of the pressure of
demand', recalled one civil servant, 'it was apparent there would be real
trouble, especially in London.' In comparison, the impact on political
debate was muted, as both parties were reluctant to espouse studies that
clashed in part with their conception of the problem. The Government
were understandably nervous. They acknowledged the existence of their
own report on the Act only after it had been leaked to the Opposition, and
they resisted commissioning more potentially embarrassing research for
several years. 39 More interestingly, the Labour Opposition also did not
rely heavily on survey material. They believed that the studies were out of
date by the time they appeared and that they significantly underestimated
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation
the pressures building up rapidly in the early Ig6os. 40 In addition, the
surveys did not focus specifically on the plight of poor tenants whom
Labour members were convinced were suffering most; indeed the only
study that they quoted extensively was the LCC inquiry into homelessness
which appeared to support the party's position. 41 Essentially the Labour
party already had a clear conception of what they thought the problems
were. 'I do not have to read Professor Anybody's report', asserted one
London Labour MP, Ben Parkin. 42 As Robert Mellish later said of the
expert investigation established in I 963: 'We knew what was happening,
and we did not expect the Milner Holland Committee to tell us anything
about hardship that we did not already know .' 43 When political per-
ceptions harden, the influence of research shrinks.
Tenant protests, administrative statistics and social science research had
clearly demonstrated that all was not well in private rented housing. But,
with the exception of homelessness, the specific problems of poor tenants
had not yet fully emerged. Dry statistics about average rents and average
repair rates did not capture the full extent of the hardship and exploitation
in the worst of the market. In the inner core of London and other large
conurbations, unscrupulous landlords were seizing a golden opportunity
to make great profits by 'sweating' their property. They were able to buy
large tracts of Victorian homes very cheaply because the rents were often
still controlled. Then, sitting tenants who enjoyed rent protection were
driven out by any means, including intimidation and violence if necessary.
The empty houses were either sold to owner-occupiers at a handsome
profit or, more often, crowded with new tenants, sometimes a whole family
to a single room. The houses were not converted for multi-occupation, and
the sanitary and cooking facilities were grossly inadequate. The houses
were filthy and often firetraps, but in overcrowded London the poor and
the immigrant had no option but to pay the exorbitant rents charged for
such squalor. These practices existed even before I 95 7, but the creeping
decontrol provisions of the Rent Act made the process easier, since as soon
as the sitting tenant was forced out the house was completely free from
controls.
The human suffering caused by such housing was incalculable. One
tenant described their situation to a reporter:

A young girl, near to tears, showed the pitifully small room in which she
and her husband had to live. There was no water, except for a cold tap in
the backyard down three flights of dark rickety stairs. The one lavatory
for the I I people in the building was too filthy to use. Cooking facilities
had to be shared.
The house was rat-infested and the walls so ridden with bugs and
beetles that the girl was afraid to replace the ancient wall-paper which
helped to some extent to keep them from crawling into the room ....
Her husband had tried to commit suicide, the girl said. They would
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
have liked children, but in these surroundings 'they would only tum into
pimps and prostitutes' .44

The Government was not completely unaware of the problems posed by

multi-occupation, and in 1g61 legislation was passed in an attempt to
strengthen the powers of local governments to regulate such conditions.
During debate on this bill, Henry Brooke told the Commons of his own
inspection of one such house:

... up dirty steps, through a door with most of the paint off, up a
staircase that was never clean, to three floors of squalor.... There
were no proper kitchens and no lavatory above the ground
floor .... [A] couple of women who were thought to be prostitutes
occupied the basement, and it smelt one degree worse than the rest of
the house. 40

Actual intimidation and violence against the tenants of such houses,

however, had not yet made much impact on political debate. Sporadic
allegations emerged from tenant associations, and from the social workers
who often had to help the victims. One voice of protest, for instance, was
Audrey Harvey, a social worker with a Citizen's Advice Bureau in east
London who in 196o published a Fabian pamphlet, Casualties of the Welfare
State, which highlighted the impact of housing stress on the poor. Later she
returned to the fray, charging that 'terrifying things unknown to the
public' were happening to tenants whose landlords wanted higher rents.
She described the eviction of two women, one of them pregnant, by 'hired
thugs [who] dragged them from the basement where their children were
asleep and flung them out of the house on to the pavement'. 46 Her charges
were picked up by the press and by Labour MPs who added similar stories
from their own constituencies.'?
But such occasional outbursts did not add up to an effective public
campaign. There was no way of proving that the examples were anything
more than isolated instances and a Government White Paper in early 1963
glossed over such allegations by stating simply that 'to what extent this is
happening is not known'. 48 In addition, the press was reluctant to detail
the activities of individual landlords because of libel laws." Consequently
concern about harassment and violence remained only an undercurrent in
public debate, and even the shadow minister, Michael Stewart, seldom
referred to it.
Then the Rachman scandal changed everything. Perec Rachman had
become rich in the 195os by sweating property in the Notting Hill,
Paddington and Shepherd's Bush areas of London, and at its height his
empire consisted of a hundred and fifty houses, perhaps more, crowded
with poor families, West Indian immigrants and prostitutes. 50 Rachman's
methods of dealing with tenants who tried to insist on their rights were not
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation
gentle; in one infamous case, his workmen simply removed the entire roof
from above the heads of stubborn tenants, and more brutal tactics were
also employed. Local authorities and MPs from the area were aware of his
actions; but by constantly shuffling ownership of the houses between at
least twenty-two small companies which he set up, Rachman was able to
lose overworked inspectors in a legal maze. In 1959 Rachman had been
investigated by the police but hard evidence of intimidation proved
difficult to obtain. No charges were ever brought and in 1962 Rachman
died a quiet death.
During the summer of 1963 a chance connection transformed Rachman
into a national symbol of slum landlords. The Profumo sex and security
scandal was raging; a Secretary of State for War, beautiful call girls and
Russian spies were a juicy combination, and anything connected with the
case was news. Ben Parkin, then Labour MP for Paddington, knew that
one of the star attractions, Mandy Rice-Davies, had earlier been
Rachman's mistress; indeed Parkin had alluded to the connection during
the Commons debate on Profumo's resignation. 51 When Rachman was
mentioned during testimony in one of the court cases surrounding the
scandal, Parkin and an enterprising journalist friend collaborated to break
the story. A major feature article in the Sundtry Times detailed the rise of
Rachman's slum empire and the next day in the Commons Parkin added
fuel to the controversy by mentioning a rumour, later proved false, that
Rachman was not dead but that there had been a switch of bodies at the
hospital. 52 Ten days later Parkin attacked again, alleging fantastic
profiteering and fraud in land and prostitution, and implicating a
companion of the Duke of Kent. 5 3
The Profumo scandal suddenly gained new life, as press and broadcast
journalists swarmed over the Paddington area interviewing anyone
involved. Because Rachman was in fact dead, the threat oflibel action was
remote, and for well over two weeks the media treated the public to a daily
diet of the tactics that he and his ilk employed. Hired thugs gave gruesome
accounts of the intimidation of tenants: disruption of gas and power
supply; destruction of their furniture; snakes in the bath and rats in food;
actual beatings. Pictures ofRachman's mansions, his girl friends and the
gifts that he lavished on them were juxtaposed beside those of his slum
properties and their unhappy inhabitants. 54 Britons were seeing a nasty
side of their affluent society, and a new word- Rachmanism- quickly
entered the British vocabulary.
Party conflict reinforced the furore, as charge and counter-charge filled
the air. The turmoil climaxed on 22 July 1963 when Labour forced a major
debate on racketeering in rented property. Harold Wilson, the new
Labour leader, led off with a catalogue offraud and viciousness, and laid
the blame completely on the Government's general approach to housing
and on the Rent Act in particular, adding that 'there must surely be
honoured places for portraits of a Macmillan, a Sandys, a Brooke, a Hill
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
and a Joseph', all Conservative housing ministers, in Rachman's head-
quarters.66 Wilson demanded dramatic action, including the nailing of
government acquisition notices on the front doors of such houses, but in
reply the Government only announced the appointment of Milner
Holland as chairman of the promised committee to investigate London's
housing problems. 56 The Commons debate marked the height of the
controversy and media attention soon fell off.
But, coming on the heels of large rent increases and homelessness, the
Rachman scandal firmly fixed general exploitation in the image of the
private rented sector that dominated political debate. Such an image was
not accurate of rented housing as a whole, as politicians and the media
were focusing on the worst of it. Readers of the press might well be
forgiven for believing that landlord-tenant relations generally had de-
scended to open warfare. In fact, this was not the case, as surveys
conducted for the Milner Holland Committee later in the year indicated;
the vast majority of London tenants pronounced themselves satisfied with
the way their landlords were treating them (see Table 2.2), and the
Committee was to argue that overt abuse and intimidation probably
affected less than 1 per cent of the tenant population each year. 57 This
evidence, however, was not available for several years, and in the
meantime political attention remained riveted on the issue of exploitation.
At the height of the Rachman scandal, property spokesmen did object
plaintively that exceptions were being paraded as the general rule and that
politicians were creating false images of society for their own purposes. 58

TABLE 2.2 Landlord-tenant relations in London 1g63 (unfurnished tenancies)

Controlled Uncontrolled

Level rif tenant Part rif Part rif

satiifaction house house
wiih- landlord House Flat or flat House Flat or flat

% % % % % %
Completely
satisfied 44 51 52 75 64 67
Fairly
satisfied 41 39 31 21 25 21
Rather
dissatisfied I I 6 I I 2 8 7
Completely
dissatisfied 4 4 6 2 3 5

100 100 100 100 100 100

( 172) (77) (237) (57) (106 ) (214)

Source: Committee on Housing in Greater London, Report, Appendix 5, Table 23.

 Rents, Rachman and Regulation
The image was not false, for exploitation certainly existed; but it was
partial, a highlighting of the worst effects of housing stress on the poor.
The balance in housing debate had shifted decisively. Although the
Government insisted that housing shortages, not the Rent Act, were the
root of the problem, 09 their position was politically irretrievable. The
landlord associations adopted a more assertive public posture to combat
what they called the 'arrant nonsense that is being preached and believed'
about landlords. 60 They established a new publicity body, the Property
Council, which issued press statements and published pamphlets defend-
ing the free market. But it was too late. The Council was continually in a
defensive posture and even felt obliged to develop a code of conduct for its
own members, in the hopes of 'shaming the bad ones into behaving'. 61
Despite such efforts, landlords were unable to stem the rising tide of
concern about their properties.
The commitment to rent control immediately regained its prominence
in Labour policy. Party spokesmen felt that their view of housing needs,
their warnings of impending disaster and their policies had been
overwhelmingly confirmed. For those who had fought through the long
housing debates over the years, the signs of hardship took on an aura of
personal vindication: 'This is my moment and I intend to ram it home',
proclaimed Parkin at the height of the Rachman turmoil. 62 The party was
also convinced that they now possessed an enormous electoral asset. The
large rent increases and homelessness had already restored their faith that
housing could be a winning issue for them, but Rachmanism was the
clincher. 'No Government could survive these scandals', insisted Parkin,
and his parliamentary colleagues reported that scores of people 'who have
been Tory supporters all of their adult lives have turned against the
Government because of their experiences which they believe result from
the Rent Act' .63 Housing and rent policy was given great prominence
during the 1g64 general election campaign, and after their victory the
party were convinced that housing and rents had helped push them into
office.
Once in power, fulfilment of its promise to repeal the Rent Act was
of even greater symbolic importance to Labour. As Crossman later told his
own constituency party, they were determined to be able to 'claim that we
have annulled the infamous Conservative Rent Act of 1957' .64 Electoral
strategy also dictated speed. The victory of 1g64 had been a slim one and
another election could come at any time. 'On housing we win or lose', the
new Prime Minister told Crossman when appointing him Minister of
Housing. 65 Rent legislation was to be a central part of their action on
housing.
Whether Labour politicians were correct in believing that votes were
won on the rent issue is difficult to judge. During the 196os housing in
general did meet the three conditions for maximum effect on party support
outlined by Butler and Stokes. 66 Housing was a salient issue for the public,
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
sharing pride of place with economic affairs and pensions; public opinion
was strongly skewed in one direction, towards greater public action; 67 and
housing issues were associated differentially with the parties in the public
mind, with the Labour Party consistently receiving higher ratings than the
Conservatives, as Figure 2.1 makes clear.

~ 70
0
0
"' 60

50
Government

40

30

20

10

1961 1962 1963 1964

FIG. 2.1 Public approval of Government and Opposition handling of housing

problems, 1961--64

Source: Derived from Gallup Poll Index 1g6o-64. Ratings were based on an I I-
point Approve-Disapprove scale, in response to the question: 'How strongly do you
approve or disapprove of the way the Government (Opposition) is handling the
problem of housing?'

In their study of electoral change Butler and Stokes concluded that

housing and welfare issues 'worked strongly to Labour's advantage' during
the 1964 election. 68 But rent control alone could not be considered a
dominant contributor to the electoral importance of housing. Private
tenants were no longer the massive constituency they had once been, and
by the rg6os they were a minority even among manual workers. Nor were
all private tenants suffering hardship, as the Milner Holland Report later
demonstrated. In fact, rent issues were seldom mentioned by survey
respondents, even by those who were private tenants. Other housing issues
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation
consistently elicited greater concern, and undoubtedly much of the
rationale for the attempt to diversify Labour's housing policies in the rg6os
is revealed by Table 2.3.

TABLE 2.3 Most important housing problem by tenure, 1g63

Council Private Owner-

tenant tenant occupier

% % %
Build more houses 64·3 56·7 67-4
Clear slums, etc. 12.0 19·4 15.8
Reduce rents 10.4 12.9 2.9
Higher council rents 1.6 0.8 4-3
Reduce house prices 10.4 9·1 8.6
Other 1.2 I. I I. I

&urce: Data set for Study of Politieal Clumge ill Britsill. Responses are those who mentioned an
aspect ofhousingjirst in reply to question: 'What do you yourselffeel are the most important
problems the Government should do something about?'

On the other hand, Labour's faith in rent controls was not necessarily
fantasy. Surveys might have found more favourable responses if they had
asked about 'greatersecurityoftenure' or the 'repeal of the 1957 Rent Act';
and, as will be seen, opinion polls recorded general public approval when
Labour did reintroduce controls in 1g65. More importantly, even if the
stresses in the private rented sector did not translate automatically into a
demand for rent controls, they undoubtedly contributed to the public
concern about housing and social problems that Butler and Stokes found to
be so important in Labour's electoral victories. Whatever the retrospective
conclusions of voting research, the Labour party were convinced at the
time that they made gains on the issue. Rent control might be only part of
their housing appeal, but it was an important part in their eyes.
Thus, unlike other dimensions of poverty, the pressures of poor tenants
quickly reverberated in the corridors of power. The dynamics of the party
system thrust rent legislation high on the policy agenda; the clash of party
doctrine and the scent of electoral advantage established rents as a salient
issue and made policy-makers particularly sensitive to stresses developing
in the private rented sector. Signals of change that in a less salient policy
area would be too weak or ambiguous to attract much notice in the housing
area commanded immediate attention. Salience also made the recognition
of problems highly selective. As signals flowed in from interest groups,
administrative information systems, social science research and the media,
the parties fought continually over the interpretation of the ambiguous
evidence before them. But, for once, selective attention worked to the
go Poverry, Politics and Policy
advantage of the poor. The Labour party in particular strove consistently
to focus media and public attention on the impact of housing shortages on
the most vulnerable sections of the community. The conception of the
private rented sector generated by this process was hardly complete, but it
was the conception that informed public debate on the issue for the next
few years.

II SHAPING THE RENT ACT

Richard Crossman and the new Labour Government wanted to move
quickly on rent legislation, and they encountered no opposition in
Whitehall. As pressures built up in the housing market, the civil servants in
the Ministry of Housing and Local Government had become increasingly
reconciled to some form of recontrol, whichever party won the 1964
election. 'We just cannot have these poor wretched creatures kicked into
the streets', argued one senior official. 'The Rent Act had to go', Dame
Evelyn later asserted; 'we had to reintroduce control.' 69
The Ministry's ready agreement that priority should be given to rent
legislation was reinforced by their doubts about Labour's other major
housing policies. The promised drive to expand housing production was
simply not on, they believed, in the midst of the economic difficulties that
the new Government had inherited. As Dame Evelyn later told Crossman:
'I just felt that you hadn't a chance with your colleagues .... We'd been
there with Macmillan when he went for his goo,ooo ... and I knew that
No. 11 would never again let the Ministry do this.' 70 Labour's policy of
mortgage relief faced similar economic constraints. Some of the other
major housing policies in the Labour manifesto did not involve public
expenditures, but were contentious in Whitehall; in particular, the
Ministry opposed the party's proposals for a Land Commission. 71 Rent
legislation was thus the officials' preferred candidate for the dramatic
housing initiatives that the new Government wanted.
Accordingly, Crossman found himself 'extremely well briefed' 72 by the
department to argue the case for giving priority to rent control during the
cabinet discussions on the Queen's Speech and the legislative timetable. In
this, he won. During their first weeks in office, the cabinet agreed that a
temporary Protection from Eviction Act should be rushed through to give
interim security of tenure to tenants and that a comprehensive reform of
rent legislation should be prepared with haste and passed in the first session
of Parliament.
Drafting the major bill began quickly and, as it did, the balance of
influences at work quickly shifted. The rent issue had been generated by
party conflict, and in that early stage of the process new information and
expertise made little dent in the existing patterns of political strife. But, as
the new bill began to take shape, the influence of party doctrine and
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation
electoral calculus faded, and the new legislation emerged from an unusual
pattern of consultations in which the command of information and
expertise turned out to be the predominant weapon.
To see this shift clearly, it is essential to examine both the definition of
the problem that came to dominate discussions on the bill in Whitehall,
and the drafting of the bill's major clauses.

THE DEFINITION OF THE PROBLEM

Symptoms of stress in the private sector abounded, but they still had to be
interpreted. What exactly was the problem? How extensive was it? What
were its causes as opposed to its symptoms? How would it respond to
different types of policies? The shape of the I 965 Rent Act depended on the
answers given to these questions.
The I 96os were a period of intellectual flux with regard to housing, as
opinion within the major parties, the bureaucracy and professional circles
was shifting. The marked polarisation of the debates over the I 95 7 Rent
Act was breaking down and, although ideological divisions were not
eliminated, they were taking on a new configuration. Most importantly, a
gulf was developing between the attitudes of party leaders on the one hand
and those of civil servants and professionals in the housing field on the
other. By the time Crossman came to draft his legislation, the intellectual
basis for a clash between party doctrine and expertise had developed, and
the key to the shape of the new legislation was which conception of the
housing problem would be victorious in Whitehall.
To understand the clash over the I965 Rent Act, it is important to look
more carefully at the evolution of ideas about the problem after I957·
British housing debate had traditionally reflected two major conceptions of
the private rented sector. Each was based on a different attitude towards
market mechanisms; each provided a different interpretation of British
housing history; and each had different implications for housing policy. In
simple terms, the two versions ran thus:

I. Market difinition: controls breed dectry and abuse

The market is an efficient mechanism for providing housing. Landlords
are generally honest entrepreneurs who, if given a normal return on
their investment, will provide an adequate supply of accommodation.
Historically, the problems of British private rented housing are the
product of a half-century of rent controls. As rented housing no longer
commands a market price, new resources are not invested in it and,
despite the growing demand for such accommodation, the sector
continues to decay. Efficient entrepreneurs have fled, leaving the
existing stock in the hands of the inefficient or the unscrupulous.
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
To solve the problems, controls should be removed once and for all in
order to rebuild investor confidence. If such a policy were adopted,
tenants and landlords alike would benefit.

2. Social service definition: decay and abuse breed controls

Decay in the private rented sector is primarily the product of market

mechanisms. Private landlordism is inherently exploitative, and there is
an inevitable conflict of interest between landlord and tenant. The
abuses that surface from time to time are merely symptoms of the general
state of market relations.
Historically, controls were the consequence, rather than the primary
cause, of decay in rented housing. Working-class housing in the
nineteenth century was intolerable even by the standards of the time,
and the Government was forced to intervene to protect tenants. Since
then landlords have consistently ignored the needs of their tenants.
The problems cannot be solved by the market. Rented housing should
be a social service like health and education, provided by local
authorities and financed at least in part through taxes. Until then rigid
controls must remain a permanent fixture of the private rented market.

These extreme positions in the British debate provide useful benchmarks in

examining the evolution of opinion during the 196os in the critical centres
of policy influence: the parties, the civil service and the professional
community.
The Conservative Party never totally embraced the market ideology in
the housing field. Conservative Governments introduced rent controls in
wartime, maintained them during long periods of housing shortages, and
accommodated themselves to the creation of the largest stock of public
housing outside eastern Europe. Yet throughout the twentieth century the
market perspective remained a strong element in Conservative thinking
and, whenever housing shortages seemed under control, Conservative
Governments tried to shift back towards market mechanisms. The same
policy of restricting subsidies for public housing and beginning the
decontrol of private rents was adopted in 1924, 1933---9 and again in
1954-7· 73
The 1957 Rent Act, based as it was on the hope that private landlords
could again become efficient managers of rented accommodation, repre-
sented another high point in Conservative faith in markets. In the 196os
this faith receded again. As the evidence of the poor response of landlords
built up, ministerial defences of market solutions became qualified, 74 and
policy began to shift: more powers were given to local authorities to deal
with both the inefficient landlord who neglected his property and the
racketeer who sweated it. By the time of the 1964 election the Con-
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 33
servatives were virtually promising the reintroduction of greater pro-
tection for tenants. 75 The landlord associations, feeling increasingly
isolated, began to criticise Conservative policies, denouncing one Govern-
ment circular as 'offensive to landlords in general' and complaining that
the Conservative Party had 'given up the idea of helping private investors
in houses to let'. 76
In fact, the Conservatives did not completely abandon the market ideal.
During the debates on the 1965 legislation, they insisted on the need for a
private rented sector, and proposed amendments to protect the landlords'
interests. Some Conservatives, such as Enoch Powell, continued to
advocate a rigorous free-market solution to the problems. 77 But Sir Keith
Joseph better reflected the growing ambivalence of general Conservative
thinking. 'It would be perfectly possible', he admitted, 'to take the view
that the free market would be the cure for London's housing need if -only
if- we were to decide to let it work.' He even argued that 'in rejecting the
free market we are, as it were, shackling the giant' that could solve the
problem faster than any other method. But despite this, the low incomes of
many people needing housing and the intense scarcity of land in London
meant that he could no longer 'suggest that a free market solution be
adopted'. 78 The optimism of the late 1950s was gone.
Labour had long been more inclined towards the social service
definition of the problem, but here too attitudes were changing. For
decades the party had denounced the inability of the market to provide
adequate housing for the working classes, and this perspective was again
adopted during the 195os. History, Labour members argued, belied the
claims of the market theorists who applauded the 1957 Act. Housing decay
and slums were the product, not primarily of rent controls, but of a century
of rapacious landlordism. The report of a Royal Commission of 1884 was
repeatedly invoked as evidence that profit-minded entrepreneurs pro-
duced poor housing long before the introduction of controls; indeed
controls, they argued, had only been introduced because landlords were
exploiting the families of absent soldiers during the First World War. 79
Since then, landlords had repeatedly failed; long Labour memories, for
instance, insisted that in 1920 landlords pocketed a 40 per cent increase in
controlled rents without, in jim Callaghan's words, 'putting a penny piece
into the repairs'. 80 The free market was not an efficient mechanism, as the
Tories claimed, but 'jungle warfare of the most appalling kind', 81 and the
only solution was 'municipalisation', the takeover of all rent-controlled
property by local authorities. By taking 'the profit out of private
landlordism' and making 'housing a social service', Anthony Greenwood,
the NEC spokesman, assured the 1956 party conference, rents would be
held to reasonable levels and repairs and improvements would actually be
carried out. 82
At the level of party rhetoric this conception was carried almost intact
into the 1960s. The party automatically interpreted rent increases,
34 Poverty, Politics and Policy
homelessness and Rachmanism as the inevitable consequences of relying
on market mechanisms in the housing field. Denunciations of landlords
became vitriolic. Robert Mellish professed 'nothing but contempt' for
private landlords and declared that 'the right to own property for private
rented purposes has gone forever'. Ha Harold Wilson entered the Rachman
debate with a vengeance, denouncing those 'revolting creatures
... battening on human misery'. Later he declared that 'rented housing
was not a proper field for private profit' .84
Beneath the polemical certainty, however, lurked intellectual un-
certainty. The Labour Party had always been divided on the urgency of
municipalisation, with some advocating an immediate, comprehensive
takeover and others preferring a more gradual approach. The original
proposal had been a careful compromise, with the disagreement, in
Crossman's words, 'neatly blurred in a series of wonderfully ambiguous
statements'. 85 This internal division left the policy vulnerable, however,
and when the party's leadership tried to de-emphasise nationalisation in
Labour's programme generally after the 1959 election, rapid municipalis-
ation was one of their first victims. 86 The policy of eradicating the private
sector went full circle in five short years. Introduced to the 1956 party
conference by the NEC spokesman, Anthony Greenwood, as a 'full-
blooded socialist policy', it was dismissed in 1961 by another NEC
spokesman as being 'of doubtful Socialist validity'. 87
The demise of municipalisation revealed the ambivalence within
Labour's ranks more clearly. The left wing of the party continued to
consider markets as inherently exploitative. They opposed the abandon-
ment of municipalisation in the NEC in 1961 and pressed for its
reinstatement at succeeding party conferences; 88 until such a policy was
carried out, they demanded the reimposition of rigid controls to keep rents
low. But another section of the party was less hostile to landlord interests.
For people like Michael Stewart, the needs of tenants did come first, and
rent controls were needed to restrain greedy landlords. Yet, whereas the
previous spokesman, Mitchison, had insisted that the greed of the 'average
landlord' was the 'root of the trouble', 89 Stewart considered many
landlords more victim than villain. He expressed concern for the plight of
the many decent landlords who had seen the value of their property shrink
because of controls, and privately he believed that the old controlled rents
had been too low. 9o
Given the party's internal divisions, Labour policy remained am-
biguous. The party pledged itself to provide security of tenure and to set
fair rents, but at no time did it clearly state the aims of its control policy or
the future that it envisaged for the private sector. Nor at any time did
Labour say what it meant by a 'fair rent'; for instance, it never resolved
whether rents should remain frozen at their pre-1957 levels, or rise
regularly to compensate landlords for changing monetary values. An
attempt by the left wing to commit the party to restoring rents to their pre-
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 35
195 7 levels met strong opposition in the NEC and at party conference. 91 In
the absence of agreement, it was decided not to decide, and all such
'details' were left to the next Labour Minister of Housing. But, as the next
Minister of Housing was to discover, postponing controversy does not
necessarily eliminate it.
Labour's dispute over policy should not, however, obscure the large
areas of agreement within the party. In contrast to the Conservatives,
almost everyone in the party was somewhat suspicious of market
mechanisms in the rented housing field and preferred council housing.
Landlords were not popular figures in Labour circles; as Crossman told the
Commons in 1965: 'I have a natural prejudice against landlords. I share it
with many hon. and right hon. Members on this side of the House.' 92 The
interests of tenants were paramount, and most Labour MPs regarded the
rent levels emerging in the decontrolled sector of the market as excessive.
Thus, while the ideological distance between the two parties had definitely
narrowed since 1957, important differences remained.
The attitudes of civil servants and professionals in the housing field were
also evolving. Dissatisfaction with the polarised nature of previous housing
debates was pronounced among these people and, beneath the burly-burly
of politics, the intellectual basis of a more consensual approach to rent
policy was emerging. During the early 196os opinion within the Ministry
of Housing had been shifting more rapidly than in the Conservative
Cabinet. Officials largely accepted the market definition of the problem;
they would have preferred to see a healthy private rented sector, and they
accepted the logic of market economics in explaining its demise. Rent
control, a regrettable necessity during periods of acute shortage, was the
culprit: it ran 'through the story of housing like a constant lament',
complained Dame Evelyn Sharp. 93 In 1957 their dash for freedom had
begun. The officials shared the expectations of their political masters. As
Dame Evelyn argued, decontrol would 'of course' encourage repairs,
produce better utilisation of rented housing, and so on; only on the
question of whether it would also stimulate much new building for rent was
she more cautious than ministerial pronouncements. 94
Her faith soon dissolved. As early as 1961, Dame Evelyn was
complaining publicly about the failings of private landlords. Large,
corporate landlords were generally competent managers, but much of the
housing stock remained in the hands of small owners 'neither knowledge-
able about nor interested in their property'; they made 'disappointingly'
little use of subsidies available for improvements in rented housing, and
many evidenced simple 'inertia' or even 'blind unwillingness' to shoulder
the burdens of the sector. 'The system of private ownership of rent houses',
she concluded, 'is very uneven and at points quite incompetent.' 95 This
disenchantment was reinforced as signs of exploitation grew more
numerous. 'There was little faith left by 1965', recalled one official; 'there
was no real future for landlords in the cities.' Another concurred: 'The
 Poverty, Politics and Policy

thinking of officials was that it was too late to revive the private sector, at
least in the old-fashioned form of the single, profitable entrepreneur.'
Declining faith in the private sector, however, did not become support
for municipalisation, at least on a comprehensive scale. The department
disliked the idea of a virtual public monopoly of rented housing. 'Whether
the growing division of society into council tenants and owner-occupiers
can be satisfactory must be very doubtful', contended Dame Evelyn. 96 The
result was a groping for another private supplier of rented housing and, in
the words of one official, 'our alternative was the housing association'.
Non-profit housing associations on the Scandinavian model were en-
visaged as a new 'third arm' between owner-occupation and council
tenancy. The Ministry's enthusiasm for the idea grew quickly and a group
was sent to Scandinavia to study the movement there. While the
Conservative Government was cautiously referring to its support for such
agencies as an experiment, Dame Evelyn was painting a glowing picture of
their future. She hoped to see housing associations flourishing in every
town, much like the building societies. More revealingly, she was already
suggesting that they might take over housing from inefficient landlords and
'transform the present state of ownership and management of older rented
property' .97 The limitations of housing associations in Britain were to
become clear later. But the early interest in them revealed officials'
attitudes towards both the private sector and the impending domination of
rented housing by the state.
While officials considered small landlords ineffective, they did not
consider them all to be villains. They remained sympathetic to the plight of
many small landlords who had seen their original investments shrink in
value, and while accepting the inevitability of some form of recontrol, they
disliked left-wing opposition to any and all rent increases. 'Despite all the
lessons, they never learn', complained one official. 'It is not worth wasting
time on a group which does not accept that the Government has to let rents
rise somehow', said another. The interests oflandlords, as well as tenants,
were important to the department.
Professional opinion outside the Ministry was moving along similar
lines. The professionals most closely in touch with the various problems
were the Milner Holland Committee. While Milner Holland himself was a
lawyer and the deputy-chairman of his committee a retired civil servant,
the core of the committee was composed of professionals with long
experience in housing problems: two senior members of the chartered land
societies; two prominent local authority housing managers; two professors
from the London School of Economics, including David Donnison; the
director of the foundation that funded Donnison's research; the manager of
a large housing corporation; a social worker and a solicitor. The committee
drew heavily on the research of Donnison's group, commissioned new
surveys and studies of housing finance, and conducted an international
comparison of housing policies.
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 37
When published, the Report of the Milner Holland Committee was
hailed as the most advanced professional thinking in the housing field,
setting out as it did a fresh analysis of the private rented sector and
suggesting new directions for public policy. The committee explicitly
rejected the two traditional ideologies that had left their mark on housing
policy over the years. 98 On the one hand, they dissented from the market
definition by arguing that the decline of the private rented sector was not
the product of rent control alone and that other factors, such as the
subsidies available to other types of housing and the structure of financial
institutions in the housing market, were equally important. The problems
of the sector, the committee believed, would not be solved by simple
decontrol, and indeed they might be made worse. On the other hand, the
Report also rejected the social service definition by arguing that the
portion of the market freed since 195 7 was proving satisfactory for the great
majority of tenants involved. Rachmanism did exist in a small number of
cases and tenants needed greater legal protection. But market mechanisms
were not inherently illegitimate and they should be supported as well as
regulated: controls should be flexible, rents should be allowed to rise
regularly, and subsidies should be provided where necessary. The Milner
Holland Report was, in effect, an intellectual mid-point in the hitherto
polarised housing debate.
The committee's full report was not available until the drafting of the
new rent legislation was virtually complete, but their ideas were relayed to
the Minister and the department through private consultations. The entire
committee met with Crossman and senior officials in December 1964, and
contacts with at least two members of the committee were much more
extensive. David Donnison became an important link. He was generally
viewed as on the left wing of politics, but he had no time for many of the
traditional Labour beliefs about housing. Indeed he hoped the work ofhis
research group would bring a little reason into the 'prejudice-ridden
debates' on the subject, and expected that the results would be 'equally
embarrassing to both parties' .99 From Donnison's point of view, there was
nothing inherently preferable about either public or private provision;
both were legitimate mechanisms that could have good or bad con-
sequences. Certainly his group showed no antipathy towards landlords
generally; historically, one of their reports argued, 'the great obstacle to
better housing was not the wickedness of the small landlord but his
impotence' .100 Some recontrol was necessary. But if the Labour party was
unwilling to municipalise the lot, then it should treat landlords fairly;
controlled rents should be allowed to rise regularly and poor tenants who
could not afford the increases should be subsidised by the state, not the
landlords. 101 Traditional Labour anti-landlordism Donnison dismissed as
useless posturing.
A second committee member frequently consulted was C. D. Pilcher, an
ex-President of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Pilcher was a
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
curious adviser for a Labour Government. He was regarded as a high Tory
and his views fell well within the market perspective; ideally private
enterprise should be brought back into housing by scrapping the existing
system of rent controls and council house subsidies. 102 But if controls were
politically necessary, he wanted them to distort the market as little as
possible. Another outside advisor was Arnold Goodman, a successful
London solicitor. Goodman was not a member of the Milner Holland
Committee but his views were certainly compatible with theirs. Goodman
was a supremely pragmatic man; while he had no intrinsic distaste for
market mechanisms, the long-term future of the private rented sector did
not exercise him greatly. His major concern was the state of tension
between landlord and tenant, particularly in London. He did not believe
such conflict was inevitable, and he bent his considerable talents to
reducing the amount of friction within the existing system.
Thus in the early I g6os a common bureaucratic-professional perspective
was emerging, with its central strands being an acceptance of the need for
controls but also an insistence on the legitimacy of markets and landlords.
This point of view was not fully elaborated until the Milner Holland
Report appeared, but it had been developing within the bureaucratic and
professional communities for some time. Individual differences remained.
But the perspective did represent a growing range of shared assumptions
among officials and leading professionals.
The early Ig6os were crucial years for rent policy. The confident
assumptions that characterised the 1957 debates were eroding, giving way
to greater hesitancy. But important ideological differences remained. The
role of market forces and the legitimacy of landlords were still points of ·
potential conflict between. the major parties and, more importantly,
between the newly elected Labour party and their official and outside
advisers. The crucial question thus became whose conception of the
private rented sector would serve as the intellectual foundations of the new
legislation.

DRAFTING THE RENT BILL

The drafting of the Rent Bill was an unusual process, a process that
reflected the uncertainties and suspicions of the new Minister. Richard
Crossman's appointment to the Ministry of Housing and Local Govern-
ment came as a complete surprise to him- as well as to everyone else.
During his years in Opposition he had concentrated on social security and
education, and his experience of housing policy was virtually nil. While
developing the rent legislation, Crossman was highly uncertain about how
to proceed and his diary at this time is sprinkled with anxious comments:

I've had this underlying anxiety caused by my curious lack of

contact ... with the subject.
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 39
This business of having to handle the Rent Bill as one of my first
parliamentary activities is very scaring. It's frightfully ·tricky
legislation-something you have to know an awful lot about, and
something where I can be caught out very easily through my ignorance
and amateurness. 103

In his first months as Minister, Crossman was heavily dependent on the

advice of others, and the balance of the advice on which he chose to rely
effectively determined the shape of the 1965 Rent Act.
Crossman did not find much comfort in official Labour policy. As a
member of the NEC, he had been involved in major housing controversies
over the years. In 1957 he had been amongst those opposing a pledge to
restore rents to previous levels and, as a major drafter of the policy
statement, Signposts for the Sixties, he had participated in the final burial of
municipalisation, much to the anguish ofhis friends on the left. 104 But since
then Crossman had ignored Labour housing debates. On becoming
minister he turned to the party's housing policies, as he later put it, 'with
great interest because it was almost new to me'. He was disappointed.
While the party was pledged to introduce controls, there was a vacuum of
detail and Crossman was soon complaining that 'no serious work had been
done' .106
In such a situation most ministers would rely primarily on their senior
civil servants. Crossman, however, had come to office suspicious of the civil
service. He attributed great power to them, and his fears were heightened
by warnings that Dame Evelyn Sharp was the most powerful Permanent
Secretary in Whitehall and that she would dominate him. 106 Crossman
was determined not to rely on the department alone. He reverted to a style
reminiscent of his days in Opposition when he established working parties
of outside experts to assist him in developing social policies. Now, as a
Minister trying to control the policy process within the department, he
gathered around him a number of outsiders whom he personally trusted.
The first important contact made was with Arnold Goodman. Good-
man was well known in Labour circles. He was Crossman's own solicitor
and had acted as legal counsel to a number ofother Labour MPs as well. In
addition, he had advised the party on a variety of housing issues, including
their Land Commission proposal, during the years in Opposition.
Goodman did not pretend to be an expert in landlord and tenant
legislation, but Crossman admired his practical sense and began turning to
him for ideas soon after becoming Minister. The Minister decided that
Goodman should be 'the centre point of our outside advice on rent
reform' .107 Goodman brought along his colleague, Denis Lloyd, and
together they became a major influence in the drafting process. The other
important adviser, David Donnison, was a new contact for Crossman. On
the advice of Richard Titmuss, the Minister invited Donnison round for a
number of discussions on housing problems, usually over lunch or dinner.
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
Crossman was impressed with Donnison's cogency and knowledge of the
rent issue and by early November was describing him as 'a man I want to
use full-time' .10s After that, Goodman and Donnison were continuously
involved in the deliberations on the rent bill. They were shown
departmental papers at each stage and submitted papers themselves. They
had meetings with the civil servants in the department, at Goodman's
apartment and, in one case, at an airport while Goodman was between
planes. Crossman relied heavily on Goodman's legal and practical sense
and Donnison's knowledge of housing; as one senior civil servant put it,
'When Goodman and Donnison advised it, he decided it must be the best
answer.'
Other advisers were involved frequently but more intermittently.
Several members of the Society of Labour Lawyers, such as Ashley
Bramall, an expert on rent legislation, were involved in the early stages,
and other members of the Milner Holland Committee, such as Denis
Pilcher, were summoned to give advice later on specific issues. The advisers
never constituted a formal group with a fixed membership or regular
meetings. As one of the most active participants described the process:

Crossman liked to run a kind of seminar to provoke intellectual debate

on the policy problems. You never knew when you would be invited
again and you didn't know who you would be matched against. For
instance, on one occasion it might be the Labour Lawyers and he would
try to provoke an argument by saying 'Now what you two seem to
disagree about is ... .'

The closest thing to a general meeting of the advisers occurred in early

December 1 g64 after the basic approach to the act had been developed by
those closest to Crossman. At that point, Crossman convened an evening
session with some fourteen participants, some from inside the department,
some from outside. The Minister wrote later:

I got them round to work on the basis of a paper provided by Arnold

Goodman and Denis Lloyd .... It was a remarkable meeting because
we managed to get something like agreement between some 14 people,
many of them lawyers, all of them knowing a great deal about the
subject. 109

Many important issues still had to be resolved, but Crossman now relied
primarily on Goodman, Donnison and later Pilcher, together with the civil
servants. These three men were involved until the end, and even assisted in
the staffing of the administrative machinery that they had helped create.
Crossman referred to the process as a creative debate between insiders
and outsiders. The Ministry was active in the general deliberations and did
all the detailed drafting, with the burden falling on the Permanent
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation
Secretary, Dame Evelyn, on the Deputy Secretary responsible for housing,
James Waddell, and most heavily on the Under Secretary of Housing
Division B, John Rogerson, one of his assistant secretaries, E. W. Bryant,
and the Ministry's Legal Division. In comparison with many other
departments, the Ministry was a virtual island of stability; all of the officials
involved had spent virtually their entire career in the department or its
predecessor, and collectively they represented a pool of experience that
Crossman could not afford to ignore.
Crossman was, however, undermining the officials' traditional position
as principal advisers to the Minister, and there was friction at the
beginning. The fact that Crossman turned to Goodman for advice one
Sunday, in the Minister's words,

... caused Dame Evelyn absolute consternation .... [She] said she
had never been so insulted in her life and had very nearly resigned when
she heard of my conduct. The very idea of consulting Arnold Goodman
when she should have been consulted was intolerable.I 10

Certainly, as one official conceded, the Ministry was 'not used to working
with outsiders'. But in the end the department did accept Crossman's
advisers and the departure from normal routines. In January rg65
Crossman recorded that it was

... curious to remember how appalled Dame Evelyn was when it was
thought that Arnold Goodman should be brought in and shown a paper
in the office. Now I can take papers to his house and leave them there
without her batting an eyelid although she knows. 111

The officials really had little choice. The outsiders appeared on the scene
within days: 'We turned around and the group was there', recalled an
official. Once established, the outsiders gave the Minister sufficient
confidence to impose his will on officials, as the following diary entry about
an important draft paper for cabinet reveals:

Practically everything that we had achieved with Arnold had been

removed from this paper which was now a civil servant's paper ... I
had to stay and sit with those men and massacre their
paper. ... Whenever one relaxes ... , the civil service quietly re-
asserts itself. 112

Clearly the Minister was determined to have his advisers' way. Better
therefore that they should be brought right in. 'We were certainly in a
better position if we were there when the advisers gave advice', an official
admitted afterwards; 'at least then we could argue with them.'
Once consultations began, suspicions eased as the department came to
 Pover9, Politics and Policy
appreciate the outsiders' abilities and attitudes. 'I initially thought
Goodman was simply a Labour partisan, but he wasn't', remarked one
official; 'he was a fixer; all he wanted to do was to make things work.'
Donnison, who had previously been treated with reserve, was found to be
'eminently sensible'. The department quickly realised that the advisers'
perspective on the problems was remarkably close to their own, and
ideological consensus reduced disagreement to administrative issues. As
one senior official explained, 'Their ideas may have been unworkable but
they were not inequitable.' Another described his reaction:

When I saw there was something in their stuff I said, 'Let's accept this.
There is nothing silly or damaging to anyone's interests in it. Ifwe try to
change it, Crossman won't go for it.' I decided that within the first week.

In fact the department came to see the advisers as a check on the more
radical tendencies of the Labour Party. 'Without Goodman and Co.',
argued one, 'they might not have accepted a bill which essentially gave
equal rights to both the landlord and the tenant.' With regard to specific
aspects of the bill, officials repeatedly insisted that they 'would not have
dared to suggest that one' to a Labour minister.
Cooperation with the outsiders was also eased by the Ministry's own
uncertainty about the mechanics of recontrol. Many of the traditional
control mechanisms and precedents seemed increasingly inappropriate.
The Permanent Secretary was blunt: 'We hadn't an idea in the
department how on earth to do it.' 113 Undoubtedly the department could
have produced a rent bill without the outsiders. But certainly the reception
of the outsiders' ideas was not complicated by a predetermined de-
partmental approach to the bill. In the end public and private expertise
were closely intertwined.
There were remarkably few constraints on the type of policy that the
Minister and his experts could produce. The most important were
administrative, and some interdepartmental consultations were required.
The Lord Chancellor and the Attorney General had the biggest interest.
The rent bill would create a new regulatory mechanism, and their
departments and the legal profession generally had built up strong views
about how such administrative machinery should operate. In 1957 the
Franks Report had made over go recommendations to govern the conduct
of such regulatory activities, most of which the Government had accepted,
and the Lord Chancellor's Department saw its role as ensuring that these
procedureS were adhered to. 114 Crossman and his advisers had to deal with
these bodies during the preparation of the bill or risk conflict in cabinet.
No other central department was deeply involved in developing the
bill's basic principles. The Scottish Office had to be 'brought along' and
the final bill did incorporate some separate provisions for Scotland; but in
general the Scottish Office did not loom large in the minds of the Minister
 Rents, Rackman and Regulation 43
and his officials. Because rent control did not involve substantial public
expenditure, the Treasury had only a general interest. The Financial
Secretary, Niall MacDermott, was a member of the relevant cabinet
committee, and Crossman considered it important to convince him of the
merits of his proposals, but the Treasury as such did not take an
independent line. A few other departments, such as the Valuation Office of
the Inland Revenue, were consulted on specific points, but none left an
imprint on the general structure of the bill. The local authorities
represented the only other administrative obstacle. Some of the proposals
being considered by the group involved greater local authority involve-
ment in rent control, and the opinion of local authority associations on
these items was important.
The constraints placed upon the Minister by interest groups were even
weaker. The tenant associations were not involved at all and repre-
sentations from landlord organisations were ignored. The position of
landlords was weak. Crossman did not need their support and indeed
might have been embarrassed by it; yet the landlord associations could not
attack his bill fiercely without appearing to defend Rachmanism. A
delegation from the Property Council met with the Minister and a
proposal was later submitted to the department, 116 but the main principles
of the bill had already emerged by then and were not changed.
The only other organisations with a general interest in the bill, the
professional land societies, also played a more restricted role than usual.
The important professions were the Royal Institution of Chartered
Surveyors (RICS) and, to a lesser extent, such bodies as the Chartered
Auctioneers' and Estate Agents' Institute (CAEAI). These groups had the
knowledge and status to provide authoritative comment on rent legis-
lation, and the Ministry usually judged it prudent to consult them. 116 In
the case of the 1965 Rent Act, however, the Minister developed his own
network of professional advisers, which included an ex-President of the
RICS, and there was not the same need for elaborate consultations.
Informal discussions were held but were not particularly significant in the
initial design of the bill.
Nor was Crossman's room for manoeuvre limited greatly by political
factors such as the opinion of the Labour party or the public at large.
During the drafting of the legislation, Crossman appears to have had few, if
any, discussions about the details of it with other party members, and
certainly the parliamentary Labour party was not consulted until after the
bill had been introduced. 117 Crossman's group did not think of the public
as having defined preferences on the technical issues involved in the
deliberations, and only during the discussions on the formula for
determining rents did possible public reaction become even a minor factor.
The initiative in shaping the rent bill thus fell almost exclusively to the
Minister and a handful of advisers from inside and outside the Ministry.
This group had extensive flexibility in devising its bill and, not surpris-
44 Poverry, Politics and Policy
ingly, the basic principles of the bill that emerged reflected their views. The
conception of the problem held by the professional and civil service
advisers became the ideological basis ofthe legislation, and the traditional
suspicions of the Labour party, especially of its left wing, made little mark
on it. Crossman's choice of advisers reflected his uncertainties and
suspicions as well as his preferences. He came from a middle-class
background, had been educated at Winchester and Oxford and remained
as an Oxford don for several years. He had never lived in a slum and, as one
senior official put it, 'he didn't know in his gut what it was like to be
evicted'. Indeed he was a landowner and landlord himself, letting several
cottages on his Oxfordshire farm. Crossman did think ofhimselfas an anti-
Establishment man and had absorbed a vague anti-landlord bias during
his career in the Labour party, but this latter predisposition was not deeply
hardened by personal experience or long years ofslogging through housing
debates. Crossman remained an intellectual in office. He was intrigued by
the rents puzzle, contemptuous of past attempts to deal with it, and
attracted by novel solutions. Although nervous about his lack of specific
knowledge about the rent issue, he was generally a self-confident man who
enjoyed intellectual jousting and believed himself good at it. As a
consequence he was readier to consider advice from people whom a more
conventional Labour minister might distrust. The result was a bill based
on expertise, not party traditions.

THE RENT BILL: THE MAJOR ISSUES

The attitudes of the advisory group were reflected in both the general
principles of the rent bill and in the evolution of its major clauses. When
Crossman later came to explain his bill, he did so in terms of his advisers'
perspective. 118 Market mechanisms were not inherently exploitative, he
insisted. The belief of many Labour members that Rachmanism repre-
sented something inherent in market relations was rejected as pure
'prejudice'; most landlords were 'perfectly decent people' and the large
corporate landlords, so often attacked in Labour speeches, were 'the least
guilty'. In fact landlords were less villains than 'victims of the system' of
rent and tax policies. For the vast majority of tenants, the market processes
freed in I957 were satisfactory, and the prevailing level of rents was fair
except in areas of acute housing shortage. As Crossman said of one of the
crucial clauses of the bill:

If throughout all private property today the vast majority of tenants

were groaning under exorbitant rents, and if a fair rent were a dream
laid up in heaven of which only a few pale exemplars were to be found on
this earth below, ... then I would agree with my critics that this clause
is unworkable.
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 45
On the other hand, it was too late to revive the private rented sector,
according to Crossman; the future of British housing lay 'with the owner-
occupier on one side and council housing and the housing association on
the other'.
The essential features of the bill flowed from this definition of the
problem. The market did not have to be rigidly controlled, since landlords
and tenants could be trusted to conduct their business honestly, subject
only to specific restraints in areas of scarcity. Equity was due to both
landlord and tenant. Fairness to the tenant meant, not his 'crack of the
whip', but security of tenure, while fairness to the landlord meant regular
rent increases. The market was not necessarily a jungle and the real
problem, according to James MacColl, Crossman's Parliamentary Sec-
retary, was not exploitation, as had been asserted in so many Labour
speeches, but 'the tradition of hostility' that soured so many landlord-
tenant relations. 119 The new bill would seek to dissolve this legacy of
distrust. As Crossman expressed it privately:

I became convinced it was my job to take rents out of politics, which

wasn't a very left-wing thing to do. But I wanted fairness for both the
landlord and tenant- rather public school, I guess.

The Rent Bill had two major purposes: to provide security of tenure for
tenants and to establish a system of rent regulation. It was a complex piece
of legislation, but only parts of it need be examined in detail here. The
security of tenure and harassment provisions were important, but it was
the system of rent regulation that caused the most controversy. Its two
main elements were the rules for setting rents and the regulatory
machinery for applying these rules in individual cases.
The Rent Formula. The Labour Government was committed to setting
rents on a fair basis. But 'fair rents' was essentially a slogan, and the new
Minister and his advisers now had to specify how fairness was to be
achieved. There are basically two ways of doing this: a national standard or
individual assessment. Under the first approach, the government legislates
a single standard that applies automatically to all regulated houses. For
instance, the government could simply freeze existing rents and use them
as a base for future percentage increases; or another standard, such as the
rateable value of the dwelling, could be used as the base. Under the
alternative approach a special regulatory agency inspects the dwelling and
sets the rent on an individual basis. Both of these approaches had been used
in the past: unfurnished accommodation had been controlled by means of
a national standard, while furnished accommodation had been regulated
through individual assessment.
A crucial step in drafting the new bill was the rejection of a national
standard. There Was virtually no support within the group for a rent freeze,
even if followed by periodic rent increases, because such an approach
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
would have perpetuated and, over time, worsened a host of anomalies that
had crept into the rent structure under progressive decontrol. Rateable
value, the assessment set for property tax purposes, was a more serious
option, however. The 195 7 Act had adopted this approach for those houses
left under controls, setting the rent generally at twice their rateable value.
Since then public debate had been largely cast in terms of rateable value,
with some arguing that the essence of fairness was a low multiple of
rateable value and others arguing for a higher multiple.l 20 Even Harold
Wilson had promised during the Commons debate on Rachmanism that a
Labour Government would set rents on this basis.l 21
Despite its currency in political thinking about rent policy, rateable
value ran into determined opposition from professional advisers both
inside and outside Whitehall. Goodman and Lloyd argued that no single
standard could be both simple enough for universal application and still
fair in all situations, and that the adoption of rateable value would only
generate injustices and controversies. 122 The Milner Holland Committee,
in the words of one member, also 'did its best to kill off rateable value'. Both
in their report and in their private advice, they argued that there were
always inequities in the valuations and that the infrequency of revaluations
ensured that the lists were out of date. While the Committee's explicit
arguments emphasised the technical inadequacies of the valuation lists,
their opposition also reflected ideological concerns. Although accepting
the need for controls, they wanted a flexible system that would allow rents
to rise regularly. Rateable value, from their point of view, had all the
deficiencies of rigid controls: it bore no consistent relation to the costs of
letting property, and experience had shown that Governments were
unwilling to increase such controlled rents on a regular basis. 123
The advisers' arguments were supported by the Government's own
professional valuers, the Valuation Office of the Inland Revenue. In
general, the Office was not enthusiastic about having its valuation lists used
to determine rents. The lists had been designed for the purpose of ensuring
a fair distribution of the rate burden and problems emerged when they
were used for other purposes. Rateable values were set in accordance with
complex statutory assumptions, some of which were inappropriate in
determining rents, and the Office was concerned about dangers to their
lists if they were adopted by Crossman. The bill would be recontrolling
large amounts of middle-class housing, some of it owned by large
companies, and the Valuation Office could foresee more legal appeals
against valuation decisions if rents were tied to them. Revaluation was
already a contentious process politically, and no bureaucracy likes to
complicate its life even more. 1 2 4
Crossman and his officials accepted the objections. Rateable value was
'simply irrelevant, a broken reed', argued a senior official. The department
was nervous about this decision because opting for individual assessment
was going to involve a major administrative undertaking, and one official
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 47
wondered in retrospect whether 'we let the valuers blind us with science a
bit'. But at the time professional advice won out over administrative
complexity. As Crossman later told the House of Commons, 'all the advice
that I took' indicated that rateable value would produce 'mathematical
rigidity without mathematical justice' .125
While professional influence was predominant, the rejection of rateable
value also had important political advantages. Rateable value would have
left the determination of rent levels firmly in the hands of the Government.
As in 1957, the Government would, in effect, have been stating exactly
what the rent increase would be for virtually every privately rented house
in the country, and any subsequent increases would have required new
political decisions. The financial interests of every landlord and tenant
alike would have been affected by the Government's decision, and the
legislation might well have proved a recipe for a renewal, as in 1957, of
bitter debate and class conflict. But by adopting individual assessment,
with independent machinery to set rents, Crossman did not have to specify
exactly what the rents would be. In reply to conflicting advocates of high
and low rents, he could simply repeat that all he wanted was 'fair' rents.
Rent conflicts would no longer pit all landlords against all tenants; instead
conflict would be particularised, with each dispute being settled
separately.
In settling on individual assessment, Crossman and his advisers had in
mind an appeals machinery to which landlords and tenants could apply if
they could not agree between themselves. Little consideration was given to
the possibility of having the regulatory machinery determine the rent of
every privately rented house in the country. Not only would this have been
an enormous undertaking, but it would also have substituted
administrative decisions for market processes completely. The advisory
group wanted to avoid interfering with market forces, save in areas of real
housing scarcity, and comprehensive rent adjudication was dismissed out
of hand. 126
The real issue quickly became what statutory instructions, if any, should
be laid upon the appeal machinery to control their decisions. At one
extreme, there might be none at all, following the example of the tribunals
for furnished housing established by Bevan in 1946. Bevan's tribunals had
simply been instructed to set 'reasonable rents' and left maximum
discretion in doing so. At the other extreme, the legislation could include a
detailed set of directives, or a formula, setting out the relevant factors and
the method of assessment. The choice between these two approaches
generated lengthy argument within Crossman's group. From the time of
the Hunter Report in 1919, the lack of an objective formula had been
considered a drawback to individual assessment. The wide discretion given
Bevan's tribunals had resulted in great variation in rent decisions, and
property and valuation interests had objected strongly that tribunal
members had exercised their political biases in favour oftenants. 127 These
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
objections were now raised by some of the advisers, especially Pilcher .128
The officials were not persuaded. They believed that the problems of
furnished tribunals were not due to the lack of a formula but to the type of
people Bevan had appointed to them. Moreover, their legal advisers told
them that statutory directives would increase the number of appeals to the
courts, with disappointed parties contending that the tribunal members
had ignored the directives in reaching their decision. 'Our own approach
would have been the furnished houses approach', recalled one official; 'you
choose people you trust and leave them to get on with the job.' The
department was strongly supported in this approach by, among others,
that implacable foe of all formulae, Arnold Goodman.
Crossman, however, remained worried about the lack of a formula that
would limit rent increases. He recorded in his diary at the time:

This is the key issue of my Bill and having abandoned the mathematical
formula- some relationship to gross rateable value- it's up to me and
my people to find some flexible formula which doesn't simply hand the
tenant over to the tender mercies of the landlord. 129

Consequently, the Ministry expended much effort in January and

February of 1965 trying to invent a formula. But to devise a formula that
was simple and yet sensitive to the myriad of factors relevant to rents, and
that also avoided additional litigation, was not easy. An initial, complex
formula was rejected by Crossman on the advice of Arnold Goodman. 130
Consideration was also given to guaranteeing a minimum return on the
landlord's capital, as in the New York system which had impressed some of
the Milner Holland Committee. But Pilcher opposed this as an inversion of
classical valuation methods, arguing that since capital value depended on
rent, rent should not be derived from capital value. 131 In addition,
Crossman was uneasy about guaranteeing a return to the property
speculators whom the Labour Party had promised to curb by means of the
Land Commission.132
In the end the search for an elaborate formula was abandoned in favour
of a proposal by Pilcher. He had advocated from the beginning that the
rent tribunals simply be instructed to ignore scarcity in calculating fair
rents; that is, they should estimate what the rent would be if the supply and
demand for that type of accommodation were roughly in balance. To
Pilcher's professional mind these vague words implied an unambiguous
valuation technique for setting rents. His basic assumption was that there
was an adequate supply ofluxury rental accommodation and that, at those
levels, there existed a free-market rent that did reflect current property
values. Given this as a yardstick, an experienced valuer could extrapolate
down to the appropriate rent for poorer-quality accommodation when~
rents had been driven up by acute scarcity .133 Pilcher's proposal was a
reflection of his market perspective. It was basically an attempt to develop
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 49
a hypothetical market in which rents would shift with changes in supply
and demand. Rents would be firmly tied to market values.
No one in the group was as enthusiastic about this proposal as Pilcher
himself. There are logical problems in attempting to estimate supply and
demand independently of price, and certainly the amount that rents
should be reduced to eliminate the effects of scarcity was fundamentally a
matter of opinion, not scientific measurement. But the phrase did have the
political benefit of acknowledging the critical supply situation. 'You had to
have a phrase', argued one senior official. 'We couldn't get away with
leaving everything open', concurred another; 'we were looking for an idea,
a peg on which to hang a few words in the Act.' The other outside advisers
also came to support the idea. As one of them put it, 'The reference to
eliminating scarcity wouldn't do harm and it might help.' The Minister
needed some restriction that would moderate rent increases; without it, he
believed, there would be 'no guarantee that rents would not rise to current
levels in scarcity areas' .1 34 The group thus settled, albeit uneasily, on
Pilcher's proposal and, as a result, the final legislative definition of fair rent
remained only slightly less vague than the approach adopted by Bevan's
tribunals. Crossman remained nervous about this and mused that 'we have
left a curious vacuum in the clause.' 136 But in the crunch he had little choice
but to rely on the advisers he himselfhad selected; as he reflected, 'I trusted
to them in putting it out.' 136
Although engendering far less protracted debate within the group, other
aspects of rent determination also illustrate the influence of these advisers.
Most important was the provision for a periodic review of rents. This was a
major innovation in British legislation; since 1915 no rent control system
had allowed for regular rent increases to reflect changing property and
monetary values, and rents had often remained unchanged for decades.
But the Milner Holland Committee and Crossman's other advisers
believed that fairness to landlords meant that rents should rise regularly, 137
and Ministry officials were only too pleased to second the advice. The
Minister accepted the argument and his rent bill provided that rents could
be reset every three years.
One other touchy issue remained: which houses would be incorporated
in the new system? The bill would obviously recontrol the 8oo,ooo houses
freed since 1957· But the 1957 Act had not introduced universal decontrol;
the rents of two to three million working-class houses were still controlled
and had not been increased since 195 7. Crossman and his people had to
decide what to do about them. Should two control systems operate, with
the resulting anomalies in rents of similar houses, or should the new system
be applied to all houses, even at the cost of significant rent increases for
millions of Labour voters?
Once again, the values of the advisers triumphed over party interests.
They argued that fairness to landlords required that the same principles
apply, and Crossman accepted their logic. The bill provided for the
.)0 Poverty, Politics and Policy
progressive transfer of controlled houses of the new system of regulation:
firstly, when a controlled house fell vacant it was shifted into the new
system; secondly, the Minister was empowered to transfer the houses in
whole areas of the country from one system to the other by statutory
instrument. In effect, Crossman was accepting that the rents set by the
195 7 Act, which Labour had opposed so strenuously, were now too low. As
he admitted in his diary, some old controlled rents might be more than
doubled under the new system.U 8 With the acceptance of this critical
provision, the bureaucratic and professional advisers had transformed the
bill into a mechanism that in the long run would raise far more rents than it
would lower.
One other provision further illustrated Crossman's final acceptance of
market mechanisms. Under Clause 15 the Minister was empowered to free
housing from rent control completely on a regional basis. Once again the
original suggestion came from the outside advisers; as one official put it, 'I
would never have dreamed of suggesting that one to a Labour minister.'
But the proposal was well received in the group and adopted with a
minimum of debate. The assumption was that, as long as tenants had
security of tenure and the market was reasonably balanced, then market
rents would, by definition, be 'fair'. Crossman looked forward to
dispensing with the regulation in 'large areas' of the country. 139
Thus the basic decisions on rent determination- fair rent, periodic
review, and scope of application- were reflections of the dominant
attitudes of the advisory group. The outside advisers were happy:

Crossman accepted the need for higher rents and that the bulk of the
market had to be left effectively uncontrolled. This was a way of
honouring a political promise in the least damaging way.
No other Minister would have had the courage to go for it.
Crossman was like myself- very pragmatic; he did a remarkable job.

The Ministry officials were both surprised and delighted:

It was a bill to raise rents. It was something that the civil service would
never have dared to suggest.
For the first time we had a Minister prepared to put some flexibility into
the rent control system. It's odd that it should have been a Labour
Minister of Housing.

Crossman was taking a gamble. He did not know what rent levels would be
set under his bill, and no precise forecasts were attempted during the
preparation of the legislation. Essentially he was surrendering direct
control over rents to a semi-independent body. The impact of his bill
would therefore depend largely on the nature of the rent assessment
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation
machinery and the people who staffed it.
The Rent Machinery. With regard to the machinery there were effectively
two choices: to use the regular courts or to create a special tribunal. Both
had featured in previous rent control acts; disagreements about un-
furnished housing had to proceed to the courts, while special tribunals
regulated furnished accommodation. From the beginning Crossman and
his group were agreed on the creation of tribunals, and little consideration
was given to the use of the courts. The Labour Party had long regarded
courts as intimidating and expensive institutions with an undue sensitivity
to property rights. 'Appeal to the courts is no protection for the tenant',
Bevan argued in 1953, since 'in a vast number of cases the tenant would
rather pay the increase than expose himself to having to go to court.' 140
Twelve years later another Labour MP echoed his thoughts: 'having to go
into a court ... puts the fear of death' into working-class families. 141 The
party clearly preferred informal rent tribunals. Bevan had established
them for the furnished sector during the post-war Labour Government,
and their subsequent operations reinforced Labour's liking of them.
In this case, party preference was reinforced, rather than opposed, by
Crossman's advisers. Goodman considered the formality and costumes of
the English courts unsuited to landlord-tenant disputes, and Donnison had
been impressed by the role of rent tribunals in the other countries that the
Milner Holland Committee had studied. 142 Others who participated in the
early stages of the deliberations, like Ashley Bramhall, had also long been
convinced of the superiority of the tribunal process. 143 Ministry officials
accepted tribunals but with less enthusiasm, as they were acutely aware of
the potential administrative pitfalls. The early controversy about the
furnished tribunals had not endeared the mechanism to their hearts; as
Dame Evelyn explained to the Franks Committee:

... we are not in love with the Tribunal system. It is expensive as a form
of administration. It is always a problem to know whether you are
getting the right people and where you are to find them. It is much easier
from the administrative point of view obviously if the jurisdiction can go
to the courts.l 44

In the case of the unfurnished sector, these worries were magnified by its
sheer size. The Ridley Report of 1945 had recommended such tribunals
but admitted that they would be a major operation, probably requiring a
thousand qualified members in addition to support staff. 145 The recom-
mendation was never implemented. Bevan apologised for not extending
his tribunals to the unfurnished sector, describing it as a 'formidable piece
of administration' .146 The prospect facing officials in 1964--65 was not
quite as daunting as in 1946, but still it was large. The private sector had
shrunk considerably, and the work of the tribunals could be phased in by
concentrating on uncontrolled housing first and then adding the remain-
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
ing controlled sector progressively. On the other hand, rents would be
open to review every three years, and the procedures under which such
tribunals had to operate had become more elaborate since the days of the
Ridley Report. One official summed it up: 'We had been thinking of a
tribunal system like Bevan's Act but we were worried about the sheer size
of the machinery involved.'
But eventually the officials were reconciled. Individual assessment
inevitably meant tribunals, since the number of cases involved and the
process of inspecting the houses in question would have placed an
intolerable strain on the courts. While preparing the 1957 Act, the
Ministry had briefly considered the possibility that the courts might
assume jurisdiction from the furnished tribunals, but the Lord
Chancellor's Department had demurred. 147 So in 1964-65 the Ministry
conceded that tribunals were the only option. 'There was no real
alternative', asserted an official; 'the county courts simply couldn't have
coped.'
At this point Goodman's ideas had a decisive impact. He argued that
there should be a two-stage process: in the first, an individual rent officer
would talk to the two parties and fix a rent; in the second, a tribunal could
hear an appeal if either party was dissatisfied with his decision. The real
innovation here was the rent officer. He was to be a conciliator who would
bring the two sides together and attempt to achieve a compromise,
preferably conducted over a cup of tea. To Crossman and several of the
advisers the basic appeal of this proposal lay in its informality. The
Ministry was also sympathetic, but for administrative reasons. A rent
officer would reduce the number of cases going to a full tribunal and the
machinery could be smaller as a result. 'We would have had to get many
more people than we did with Goodman's two-stage system. We hadn't
thought of that', admitted an official. Or as another put it more bluntly:
'The hope was that the rent officer would eliminate many cases by a sleight
of hand.'
Although this general administrative structure was accepted quickly,
nervousness about its adequacy lingered. 'Nobody was really confident it
would work well', recalled an official. 'It could only work iflandlords and
tenants agreed among themselves and the machinery was not over-
whelmed.' Basically the issue turned on the dominant conception of the
market. If most tenants and landlords were relatively content, then
recourse to the machinery would be limited. But if landlord-tenant
relations were as strained as so many Labour speeches maintained, then a
much larger proportion might seek a ruling. The Ministry officials
remained uncertain to the end and felt obliged to warn the Minister that
the entire scheme might collapse. But once again Crossman relied on his
advisers' faith in market relations and the ability of most landlords and
tenants to conduct their business amicably. He took comfort from the
Milner Holland survey that showed most tenants satisfied with their
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 53
landlords. 'We took the gamble', he later admitted, 'knowing our
machinery for rent fixing would be completely clogged and unusable if we
were wrong.' 148 But the Minister was also nervous and accepted the
department's advice to proceed cautiously. In particular, there was to be
no major public campaign announcing when the machinery was ready.
Greater conflict emerged over who should run the machinery. Everyone
agreed that the appellate level, the Rent Assessment Committees, should
be independent bodies insulated from politics as much as possible. While
they would be appointed centrally by the government, they would not be
subject to ministerial directives. This procedure was strongly entrenched
in almost all British tribunals and rejection of it would have generated
opposition from the Lord Chancellor's Department. The rent officers
posed problems, however. Crossman wanted the local authorities to
appoint and supervise the officers because no other bodies could mount the
service as quickly. This ministerial preference ran into determined
opposition from Dame Evelyn and the other officials in the Ministry who
argued that the machinery had to be independent of politics in order to
gain acceptance by landlords and tenants alike; delegating the rent officer
service to the local authorities, they maintained, would make it a political
process with endless complications. 'You would have Labour councils
going for low rents and Conservative ones for high ones', one official
contended. This disagreement with the Minister was the sharpest of all; 'I
had a terrible row with Crossman about it', recalled one official. The
officials were supported by most of the outside advisers and by the local
authority associations, who did not want the politically difficult task of
setting private rents. 149
In the face of this solid opposition, Crossman compromised. In England
and Wales the rent officers were to be appointed by the clerk of the local
authority, but the local authority was to have no role in r·ent determination
and the rent officer would not technically be a local authority employee. 150
This attempt to separate the rent officers from local politics was hardly
perfect. The Ministry would have preferred that the Rent Assessment
Committee employ the officers, and the local authority associations were
also unhappy. 151 The Minister's compromise satisfied no one, except
perhaps himself.
Given the discretion built into the process, the personnel and procedures
of the machinery were also crucial. Extensive debate centred on the
qualifications of the three people who would sit on the Rent Assessment
Committees and who would set the precedents within which the rent
officers would operate. Everyone accepted that there should be a
professional valuer such as a chartered surveyor, but the role of lawyers
provoked disagreement. To what extent should the committees be
modelled on the judicial process with legally trained members, court
procedures and parties represented by counsel? Crossman and most of his
advisers wished to maximise the informality of the process, for fear of
54 Poverry, Politics and Policy
biasing it in favour of large landlords, but this preference ran counter to
deeply entrenched administrative norms. The Franks Committee had
emphasised the need for legally trained chairmen and judicial procedures
in such regulatory bodies. Their report had been particularly critical of the
informality of Bevan's tribunals and, when the Government accepted the
basic Franks doctrine, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government
had been forced to reform them. 152 Thus, in drafting the new legislation
Ministry officials accepted that, in the end, the same principles would have
to be adopted. If Crossman did not accept some formalisation, there would
be conflict with the Lord Chancellor and the Attornery-General in
cabinet. 'In the post-Franks world, opinion was very firm on this',
explained an official. 'The Lord Chancellor's Department had built up a
position and we officials couldn't have shifted it. It would have required a
very powerful Minister.'
Crossman's position was modified in the light of the opposition of his
officials and his negotiations with the Lord Chancellor, Lord Gardiner. 153
The Lord Chancellor was given control over the people appointed as
chairmen of the committees and joint control over those appointed as
president to direct the work of all of the committees in a region. His
appointees were to be primarily lawyers and, in the absence of centrally
established procedures, were to determine the degree of formality in the
committee proceedings. Thus the Rent Assessment Committees emerged
as highly professional bodies with two professionals and only one layman.
The procedures that resulted were not as formal as those of the courts, since
the committees could not administer an oath and were not bound by
formal rules of evidence. But in many cases, such as that of the London
Rent Assessment Committees, the Minister was not pleased with the
degree of formality that developed. 154

SUMMARY

The final shape of the draft rent bill reflected primarily the attitudes and
values of a small group of experts on whom Crossman chose to rely. After a
period of initial friction, the officials and the outside experts worked
closely together, partly because of the stubborn insistence of the Minister
but also because of the similarity in their outlooks. Indeed some officials
came to see the outsiders as an ideological check on the more radical urges
of the Labour Party. The major innovations in the bill, such as the fair rent
clause, periodic rent increases, regional decontrol and the rent officer,
came originally from the outside advisers. Officials played a role in refining
their ideas, particularly those on administrative issues such as the
appointment of rent officers and the personnel of the assessment com-
mittees. But, when differences emerged between the officials and the
advisers, as in the flexible formula that the department devised or on the
risk of administrative breakdown, the Minister trusted the outsiders.
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 55
By comparison with the impact of the group of experts, the influence of
other factors was secondary. Administrative and judicial norms about
regulatory procedures constituted the only significant constraint on their
freedom of action. Interest groups left virtually no imprint on the major
principles of the bill, and electoral calculations were, at best, a minor
factor. But more interesting was the muted effect of party ideology. Labour
had strongly denounced the rent levels emerging in the uncontrolled sector
and had long been suspicious of the private rented market; they had also
repeatedly emphasised the need for strict controls to protect tenants. Yet
the basic principle of the new rent bill was that market mechanisms were
not inherently exploitative and that the market forces freed in 1957 were
basically satisfactory for most tenants. The market did not need strict
controls and rent determination could remain largely in private hands.
More importantly, the larger need was for higher, not lower, rents.
For the new Minister, the drafting of the rent bill was a learning
experience. Party politics may have raised the original issue. Expertise
shaped the response.

III PASSAGE OF THE RENT ACT

The ideas produced hy Crossman's advisers still had to be accepted by the
cabinet and Parliament, however, and also to survive the ideological
polarisation that had placed rent policy so high on the political agenda in
the first place. Clearly, the cabinet was the more important hurdle. The
first stage was an ad hoc Committee on Rents, Land Commission and
Leasehold, which included the ministers most directly concerned; beyond
that lay the Home Affairs Committee and the full cabinet. Crossman's
main concern was the ad hoc committee, which included the Lord
Chancellor (Lord Gardiner), the Attorney-General (Sir Elwyn] ones), the
Secretary of State for Scotland (William Ross), the Secretary of State for
Education and Science (Michael Stewart), the Financial Secretary to the
Treasury (Niall MacDermott) and the Chancellor of the Duchy of
Lancaster (Douglas Houghton) .105 The most active members of the
committee were the Law Officers, whose own departments briefed them
fully on Crossman's proposals. Of the remaining members, Crossman
regarded Stewart and MacDermott as the most significant, Stewart
because of his experience as Opposition housing spokesman and
MacDermott because of his role as Treasury representative.
No major challenge to the basic premises of the bill emerged, however.
The Law Officers acted primarily as guardians oflegal and administrative
norms; due process, equity and personnel were their primary concerns
and, in these areas, they were influential. Any fundamental challenge
based on traditional Labour suspicions of markets and landlords would
have had to come from others, perhaps from Stewart and MacDermott.
 Pover~, Politics and Policy
But neither was opposed to what Crossman was doing. Stewart was a
relative moderate on housing issues. Crossman regarded him as an
advocate of rateable value and sensed that the entire committee was a bit
suspicious ofhis proposed formula, but no firm opposition developed. All of
the ministers were busy men. Only the Law Officers received departmental
support on the rent bill, while Crossman was fully briefed and a powerful
expositor. More importantly, there was no way of demonstrating con-
clusively that Crossman's approach would not produce fair rents. 'In such
a situation', observed one committee member, 'the departmental minister,
while not omnipotent, is in a very strong position.'
Of the ministers not on the committee, Crossman was concerned only
about the attitude of the Prime Minister. Crossman had discussed the rent
bill with him during the early weeks of the Government, but Wilson had
never taken a strong interest in it and Crossman was unsure of his
attitude.u 6 But the Prime Minister raised no objections. The remaining
cabinet members had no impact on the bill. Crossman appeared to be
carrying out party policy, and since no unresolved disputes emerged from
the committee, the cabinet as a whole was not called upon to arbitrate
decisively one way or the other.
The relative importance of the various stages ofcabinet deliberation can
be seen in the Minister's reactions to them. A brief outlining the general
policy was submitted to the ad hoc committee in December 1964. Crossman
described the main meeting as 'a pretty severe viva voce' but judged that his
proposals had emerged unscathed. 157 Subsequent stages became increas-
ingly formal. No serious objections were raised in the Home Affairs
Committee, and Crossman was able to parry questions by indicating that
the points had been agreed amongst the ministers most concerned. When
the paper went before the full Cabinet on 18 December, the meeting began
with an account of the main elements of the policy by Crossman. Then, in
his words, Harold Wilson

. . . started by looking at his brief, obviously prepared for him by the

Cabinet Secretariat, and instead of allowing any kind of discussion he
simply listed the items on which he thought a firm decision was required.
Each of the ten items he read aloud and asked me to say a sentence or
two .... One, two, three, four, the points were clicked through at top
speed and those who wanted to criticise me, especially Michael Stewart
on ... my failure to commit myself to a formula linking rents with gross
rateable value, found themselves unable to do so without causing the
kind of friction and resistance which people are unwilling to do in our
Labour Cabinet. So in 52 minutes the meeting was completed, I had
been congratulated by Harold Wilson on excellent progress, and that
was the end. 158

The Cabinet had approved the general outline of the policy, but many
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 57
important details, including the precise rent formula, had yet to be settled,
and another series of meetings of the ad hoc committee were held inJanuary
and February. As Crossman and his advisers finalised clauses such as the
rent formula, the Minister was careful to consult privately with the
important members of the committee, the Lord Chancellor, the Attorney-
General and the Financial Secretary. 159 With these ministers concurring
privately, the committee quickly concluded its deliberations, and on 16
February Crossman recorded his triumph at the final meeting: 'There was
nothing left to dispute. I had won.' 160 The proposals generated by
Crossman and his group had emerged from the Cabinet intact.
Next Crossman had to steer his bill through Parliament, and he planned
his tactics carefully. Crossman was convinced that his rent policies would
be popular with the public and he tried to extract maximum political
mileage from them. For instance, the decision to rush through the interim
Protection from Eviction Act in the autumn had been taken, according to
the Minister, 'largely for political reasons'; and, when polls such as the one
in Table 2.4 suggested general but not overwhelming public acclaim, he
reinforced the impact with an 'Open Letter to Tenants' in the major
conurbations, a ploy that gained widespread press coverage and was
judged a 'tremendous success' by its author. 161

TABLE 2 ·4 Public response to opinion poll on Government rent

policy, December 1964

Question: Do you approve or disapprove of the Government's

policy on housing and rent control?

Approve
Disapprove
Don't Know

Source: Gallup Poll Index, Report No. 55, December 1g64.

When it came to his major rent bill, Crossman took even greater pains.
He persuaded the Milner Holland Committee to speed up their effort so
that it could be published just before the bill. Through a few leaks of its
contents beforehand, he ensured tremendous media coverage, with the
serious press concentrating on its general analysis of housing stress and
the popular tabloids sensationalising its catalogue of Rachman-type
abuses. 162 The momentum was sustained with major speeches on the issue
by the Minister and the Prime Minister, well-publicised meetings at No. 10
Downing Street and a major Commons debate on the report, in which
Crossman delivered what he himself described as a 'ruthless party political
attack on the Conservatives', blaming them for the entire housing mess.I 63
Then, at the height of the media blitz, Crossman introduced his bill.
sB Poverty, Politics and Policy
Crossman's strategy worked. The Conservatives were thrown on the
defensive, and they did not oppose the bill fiercely, despite the Minister's
political taunts. Obviously they could not object too vehemently to a bill
that claimed to prevent Rachmanism. But the Opposition's relative
quiescence also reflected the ideological convergence in rent policy during
the 1g6os; basically the Tories were reconciled to greater protection for
tenants. More importantly, Crossman's bill represented an intellectual
mid-point between the traditional poles of rent debate and, as such, was far
less objectionable to the Conservatives than it might have been. As the
Conservative spokesman on the bill,John Boyd-Carpenter, said, 'this is not
the bill [Labour] led the country to expect at the General Election.' 1 64
Crossman even received an embarrassing compliment from Henry Brooke,
author of the 195 7 Act, who confessed that aspects of the new approach
were better than his own.I 65 Opposition did come from unrepentant
advocates of market solutions, such as Enoch Powell, 166 but the official
Conservative position was one of grudging acquiescence. In the end, the
Conservatives did not even formally oppose the legislation on Second
Reading and, in part, Crossman was right in saying that 'it was the kind of
bill they didn't dare say no to.' 167 But the vote also symbolised the
narrowing of ideological divsions.
As a result, the Conservatives attacked more at the level of detail than of
principles: they contended that the controls proposed were unnecessarily
extensive, that the rent formula would not produce an adequate return on
investment, and that the machinery might break down. 16~ But attacking
techniques rather than principles was a weak strategy, because Crossman
was able to surround his bill with an aura of professional legitimation. At
crucial moments, he would cast himself as simply a well-intentioned
layman who was following the best professional advice available. He
repeatedly invoked his anonymous expert advisers, the Milner Holland
Committee and the professional associations to suggest that the solid
weight ofknowledgeable opinion was against the Conservatives' suggested
amendments. The Conservatives took such professional advice seriously
and felt frustrated by it; they objected to continual references to unnamed
experts and tried to find contrary professional opinion. But this was a game
they could not win, because the Minister had in fact relied on leading
experts in drafting the bill.
The importance of professional legitimation is best illustrated by the
tussle over the fair rent formula. When the bill was first published, much of
the press, some property journals and many MPs complained that it was
too vague and would result in arbitrary judgements. 'Flexible nonsense',
thundered The Times, and later it threw in 'vacuous', 'obscure' and
'scarcely intelligible' for good measure.l 69 The Estates Gazette and the
Rating and Valuation Reporter also agreed that the directive to discount
scarcity would be virtually impossible to apply in practiceY 0 And the
Conservatives picked up the argument in their Commons attack. While
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 59
defending the formula vigorously in public, Crossman's diary shows he was
becoming nervous in private:
Pray God the formula ... works because everyone says it won't.
I'm getting slight collywobbles about whether this bill ... will be the
disaster which many people predict .... Will the fair rent
clause ... work as well as if I'd tied rents to rateable value? 171

The Minister therefore initiated another round of professional con-

sultations. In late April, Goodman, Donnison, Pilcher and Rogerson
gathered once more, this time over breakfast in Goodman's flat, but their
memorandum to the Minister repeated firmly that 'it was neither possible
nor desirable to seek in the Bill any further criteria or elaboration on the
method of determining fair rent' .172 In early May a series of meetings was
held between the Minister and the major professional associations,
including the RICS, of which Pilcher, of course, was a leading member.
While the associations were not entirely happy with the vagueness of the
formula, they could not recommend changes that would clarify rent
determination and still avoid encouraging litigation. The combined
professional judgements stiffened Crossman's resolve and gave him the
ammunition with which to undermine the Conservatives' position in the
Commons committee.17 3 The fair rent formula was not changed.
The real opposition to Crossman's bill came from the Labour back
benches, and particularly from the party's left wing. MPs like Frank
Allaun, Eric Heffer, Lena J eger and Julius Silverman had long years of
experience in housing debates, and several of them had manned the
trenches in 195 7. More importantly, they started from a fundamentally
different ideological premise, one that denied the bill's central assumption
that, except in areas of acute scarcity, market mechanisms were proving
satisfactory. Bad landlordism,Jeger insisted, was 'more frequent than any
other form' .174 Landlords had ruthlessly exploited the freedom conferred
on them in 195 7, they argued, and the resulting rent levels were not
broadly acceptable, as the Minister assumed, but exorbitant and immoral.
The market generated a fundamental conflict between landlord and
tenant, and no amount of conciliation by some well-intentioned rent
officer could really alter the fact. 'There is no such thing as a fair rent', one
left-winger insisted during an interview. 'What's fair for one is unfair for
the other.' Allaun emerged as the most forceful spokesman of this view.
The aim of the legislation, he contended, should be simple: 'to keep rents
down'; the Labour Party should 'resist firmly people who talk airily about
rents inevitably going up'; voters had elected them 'in the belief that they
would keep rents down' and to do otherwise could mean 'electoral
disaster'. 175 Compromises were inadequate. 'It was a straight conflict of
interest and we should have come down on the side of the tenant', one of
them later reflected. The left-wingers were not impressed by Crossman's
6o Poverty, Politics and Policy
professional advisers, some of whom they suspected of having a vested
interest in higher property values. The real problem, from their point of
view, was that Crossman was too much of an ideas man and the bill was not
'sufficiently rooted in working-class experience'.
For the left wing, the fair rent clause was far too vague. These MPs
feared that prevailing rents would become the standard of fairness or that
the tribunals might just 'knock a few bob off' for scarcity, and they
therefore advocated a rigid national standard based on rateable value to
guarantee low rents.l7 6 Following his first private meeting with the
parliamentary Labour party after the Bill's publication, a slightly
surprised Crossman recorded that this clause was 'the thing I should have
to fight for hardest of all' .177
In fact, Crossman was wrong. The bitterest struggle was actually waged
over Clause r 5, which gave the Minister the power to transfer controlled
houses to the new regulatory system and to free whole regions from rent
control completely. The shift from control to regulation, objected the
backbenchers, would ensure that the rents of two and a quarter million
families rose steeply. The party had fought such provisions bitterly in 1957
and now a Labour Minister was suggesting that it betray millions of its
loyal supporters. Similarly the backbenchers objected to the power to de-
regulate specific areas, arguing that a subsequent Conservative Govern-
ment could use it to abolish rent controls throughout the country .178
In one sense, the left-wingers were in a strong position. Labour had
come to power in rg64 with a parliamentary majority of only three, and
when the bill was referred to a committee of the House for clause-by-clause
consideration the majority was only one. If the dissenters voted against the
Government, or even abstained, on crucial votes, the Government might
lose. Yet, in another sense, the left-wingers' room for manoeuvre was small.
Their power was negative only; they and the Conservatives might combine
to defeat a particular clause, but the Conservatives would not support left-
wing amendments. So while the backbenchers could obstruct, they could
not remake the bill in their own image. In addition, the backbenchers still
felt uncomfortable about attacking their new Government, especially
when other Labour members of the committee or the PLP did not actively
support them. 'I raised my objections at meetings of the parliamentary
party', one recalled, 'but the great bulk of the members didn't feel strongly
enough about it.'
Crossman's response to the left combined exhortation, bluff and
concession. He argued with the backbenchers for hours in private before
each crucial committee meeting. At times he tried to assure them that he
shared their left-wing views; at other times, he attacked them, asserting
that he was only fulfilling the manifesto pledge to set fair rents; on other
occasions he simply exhorted them to remain loyal to their Government.
In the case of the fair rent formula, exhortation was adequate. Crossman
spent two and a half hours privately with the backbenchers on the
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 61
clause. 179 He failed to win over the left wing, for Allaun andj eger repeated
their objections later during the committee meeting, but he did steady
other Labour members such as Parkin and Doig. 180 The left-wingers were
unable to prove that high rents would come to pass and Crossman did not
feel obliged to give way. When the critical vote came, the Labour ranks
held, and the fulcrum of the bill was sustained by a single vote.
On Clause 15, however, exhortation and bluff failed. The effects of the
transfer from control to regulation were much clearer; Crossman himself
had to admit that many controlled rents would rise substantially,
sometimes being more than doubled. This clause upset many Labour
committee members, including Parkin and Doig, who had regularly
supported the Minister on other issues. Crossman therefore faced broader
pressure to give way .1 81 He tried to win over the doubters the night before
the committee meeting but to no avail; the next morning there was, in
Crossman's words, 'a major revolt of our own people, with the Tories
looking on in pleasure' .182
Crossman conceded just enough to get by. He promised to reconsider
their objections and revise the clause at the Report stage. This promise
reassured the moderates and isolated the left-wingers; 183 when the vote was
called, they all fell into line. At the Report stage Crossman did amend the
bill. Any rent increase resulting from a regional shift from control to
regulation was to be phased in with an annual limit of a 15 per cent
increase. In addition, the power to eliminate regulation completely in a
region was dropped; instead a new clause empowered the minister to alter
the range of houses being regulated on a regional basis, but new legislation
would be required to dismantle the rent assessment machinery com-
pletely.184 Crossman recorded that his backbenchers had 'genuinely
convinced' him that this second amendment was needed, but he
considered the 15 per cent limit 'a major concession which had rather
taken my breath away' .185 If the new 'fair' rent was double the old
controlled rent, seven years would be required to reach it, by which time
the landlord would have been entitled to have the initial fair rent
reconsidered twice. The possibility remained that, while actual rents
would rise, they would never reach 'fair' rents. The left-wing backbenchers
were not fully satisfied, but in the end they voted with the government.
Crossman's bill had passed its last major hurdle. Three significant
amendments were passed in the House of Lords against the Government's
wishes, but the Labour majority in the House of Commons rejected them
and the Lords did not try to insist. The way was cleared for Royal Assent,
and the 1965 Rent Act became a reality. Some of the flexibility afforded
the Minister in the original bill had been reduced in Parliament, and the
full impact of the legislation on controlled rents was delayed. But the basic
elements of the regulatory process devised by Crossman and his advisers
were now the law of the land. The Minister was pleased with himself and,
with characteristic elan, he informed his diary that 'this was the first solid
 Poverry, Politics and Policy
achievement of the Labour Government and the only thing we shall be
able to take credit for.' 1B6

IV EPILOGUE
The I 965 Rent Act affords a fascinating view of the intellectual and
institutional processes of policy innovation. The recognition and salience
of the problem were governed by intensely political forces; party warfare
turned rents into a prominent issue and made policy-makers sensitive to
the stresses in the sector, especially those confronting poor tenants. In these
early phases of the process, social-science and professional expertise made
little dent in the existing contours of political thinking. But when the rent
bill itself was being drafted, the balance between knowledge and politics
shifted decisively. The final policy, particularly in its most innovative
dimensions, was not dictated by party doctrine, electoral calculus or the
clash of entrenched economic interests. Rather, it flowed from the frame of
reference through which policy-makers interpreted their environment.
Uncertainty in political direction at the critical juncture shifted power to
experts inside and outside Whitehall. Their definition of the problem
structured the policy response, their preferences specified the alternatives
actively considered, and their ideas generated the innovations that the
legislation contained. Institutional resistance was limited. Because the
legislation created new machinery, the administrative room for
manoeuvre was greater than usual; and because of the political importance
of prompt and sweeping action, few major concessions had to be made to
party rebels or interest-group spokesmen. The I965 Rent Act represented
a high-point of professional influence. In other policy areas, the critical
combination of high political salience, uncertainty among key policy-
makers and weak institutional constraints was less marked, and the
influence of expertise correspondingly less.
Crossman and his group had gambled in several ways while drafting the
I965 Rent Act. And in the event their administrative gambles paid off.
Only a small percentage of landlords and tenants appealed and the
machinery was not overwhelmed. Between I966 and June I970, rent
officers received just over I92,ooo applications, representing about I4 per
cent of the estimated I .2 tenancies theoretically regulated. 187 The earlier
fears that a vast number of tenants would appeal soon evaporated and
within two years landlords were making far more use of the machinery
than tenants (see Table 2 .5). In addition only 7 per cent of the decisions
made by rent officers were being appealed against to the Rent Assessment
Committees. 188 There were backlogs in the early months, but nervousness
about the adequacy of the machinery quickly eased.
In effect, much of the private rented sector remained uncontrolled. Even
in the minority of cases in which the act was being invoked, the decisions of
rent officers were often ignored. A study conducted in I969 for the Francis
 Rents, Rllchman and Regulation

TABLE 2.5 Applicants for rent registration: England and Wales, 1g66-7o

Applicant Iyfi6 Igfi] Ig68 Ifli9 1970*

% % % % %
Landlord 32·9 48·4 55·8 59·8 68.6
Tenant 51.2 35·9 28.1 26.1 21.0
Joint 15·9 15·7 16.1 14.1 10.4
100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

* January to June 1970

Source: Francis Report, Table 4, p. 13.

Committee, which investigated the operation of the act, found that in most
regions almost half the tenants were paying significantly more or less than
the rent set for their dwelling. 189 The indirect impact of the legislation on
the vast bulk of the market that did not appeal to the rent machinery is
impossible to measure. Undoubtedly greater security of tenure streng-
thened the negotiating position of tenants, and some landlords probably
moderated their rent increases to avoid provoking tenants into appealing
to the rent officer. But the evidence suggests that a significant part of the
market was largely ignoring the legislation and 'making its own
arrangements.
The pattern offair rents established when appeals were lodged is clearer.
Rents in individual cases of exploitation were reduced, especially in the
first year, but a general pattern of increases soon emerged, as Table 2.6
reveals. Moreover, the breakdown in Table 2.7 shows that increases
were not only more frequent but also larger than decreases. The
Francis Committee found that only for individual rooms with a low
rateable value did the decisions exercise a downward pressure on existing
rent levels; in the larger categories, flats and houses, this was not
happening. 190 The original advisory group that drafted the legislation had
expected rents to rise, especially over the longer term. But several of them,
including Crossman, were privately surprised at the size of some of the
early increases and the speed with which a predominantly upward pattern
became established.
Crossman had also gambled that his bill would take rents out of politics,
but this gamble did not pay offso handsomely. The political reaction to the
experience of the new rent machinery was predictable. Those generally in
favour of higher rents were relatively pleased and pressed to have those
houses still under the old control system transferred to the new system as
soon as possible. 191 Those who were opposed to higher rents and had
expected the 1965 Act to lower them were extremely disappointed, and
resisted such pressures. Within months, the Labour backbenchers who had
criticised the Act during its passage were calling for the resignation of Sir
 Pover!J, Politics and Policy
TABLE 2.6 Level of rent determinations, England and Wales

Ig66 Iyfi] Ig6/J I!fi!J

% % % %
Decreased 45·0 33·6 27·4 24.6
No change I 1.0 8.8 8.9 7·9
Increased 44·0 57·9 63.6 67·4

Souue: Francis Report, Table 13, p. 25.

TABLE 2.7 Registered rents compared with previous rents, 1g66-7o*

Greater England and Wales England and

London (excluding London) Wales

% % %
Decrease
More than so% 3·1 2-4 2.7
Up to so% 29.6 25·9 27·5
No change 9·5 8-4 8.9
Increase
Up to so% 35·9 35·2 33·5
51 to 100% 12.5 15·5 14-2
More than 100% 9·5 12.8 11.3

100.0 100.0 100.0

* January 1966 to March 1970

Source: Recalculated from Francis Report, Table 12.

Sidney Littlewood, president of the London rent machinery, especially

after he retorted that it was 'such a pity they did not understand the Act
they passed themselves' and that the legislation was not designed to cut
rents but to set rents fair to both landlords and tenants. 192 Labour MPs
continued to protest, demanding an urgent review of the entire Act and
redoubling their opposition to the regional transfer of controlled houses to
the new system. 193 Over the next few years, a debate developed in left-wing
circles over 'what went wrong with the Rent Act?' .1 94
The Government steered a cautious path between these opposed views.
The Ministry was pleased with its new machinery, and its 1967--68 annual
report happily concluded that the rent system was 'firmly established' and
well on its way to becoming another modern example of'successfuljudicial
institutions' .1 96 As long as he remained Minister of Housing, Richard
Crossman maintained a spirited public defence of his Act. But in private
his enthusiasm was tempered and, while he believed that Littlewood was
interpreting the legislation correctly, he became concerned about the
formality being introduced into the proceedings in London. When
 Rents, Rachman and Regulation 6s
Crossman left the ministry in I966, he still believed the I965 Rent Act was
good legislation but conceded that it would present his successors with a
'good many problems' when the time came to bring the old controlled
rents into the new system. 196 In fact, subsequent Labour housing ministers
remained cautious about Crossman's bequest. A new Housing Act in I969
did provide for the transfer to the new system of any controlled houses that
were improved to meet modern standards. But Labour never used the
power to shift whole regions of controlled houses to regulation, and a series
of temporary measures extended the principle of phasing in rent increases,
which Crossman had only conceded in the specific case of such regional
transfers, to all rent increases resulting from the Act's operation. 197 .The
final test came in 1970 when the Conservatives returned to power. But they
decided to adopt Crossman's machinery as their own and to speed the
transfer of the old controlled sector to it. The ideological divisions of 1957
narrowed one step more.
The gambles of 1965 paid different dividends. The administrative
machinery survived; 'it has withstood the test of time', was one official's
summary tribute. But the concept of 'fair rent' did not take rents out of
politics. While the 1965 Act represented a narrowing of the range of
disagreement between the two major parties, no magic formula could
completely depoliticise rents in a society accustomed for generations to
political solutions. In the I 97os, controversy shifted to the rents of council
housing, and undoubtedly battles still remain to be fought today over the
private rented sector.
In the early 196os it was the housingplightofthe poor, the homeless and
the victims of harrassment that placed rent policy high on the political
agenda. But tracing the impact of the Rent Act on the problems of these
people is difficult. To gain the full protection of the legislation, tenants had
to act to invoke the machinery. In comparison with middle-class tenants
and the large companies, poor tenants appear to have been ignorant of
their rights and reluctant to use the machinery. 198 The security of tenure
and harassment provisions probably have reduced gross abuse of tenants,
but critics of the Act insisted that intimidation had simply become more
subtle. 199 The rent fixing provisions helped many poor tenants, especially
in the first two years. But by 1969 the overall pattern of rent decisions was
not lowering rent levels, even in the poorer bands of flats and houses.
Regulation of an entire sector of the economy such as rented housing is a
broad mechanism and its impact on specific groups such as the poor is
largely indirect. In essence, the Rent Act was simply a holding operation in
a decaying sector of the housing market. It strengthened the legal
protections available to poor tenants, but it did not improve the housing in
which they lived. It built no new houses, it redistributed no houses. For
more dramatic improvements in their lives, the poor would have to look to
other mechanisms, such as income transfers and social services. The next
chapters look for progress there.
3 Family Poverty
The battle over rents had provided a glimpse of the hardship facing poor
tenants. But even while the new rent system was being put in place a wider
battle was beginning: in December 1965 a major campaign was launched
to focus attention on poverty as a general problem, especially among
families with children. Family poverty quickly became the leading social
issue of the decade, confronting the Labour Government with one of its
most difficult social policy decisions. After a protracted and agonised
internal struggle, lasting from mid-1966 until early 1968, the Government
finally revealed its policy: family allowances would be increased but the
increase would be 'clawed back' from non-poor families through the tax
system. This policy was only a partial response to the problem, and family
poverty remains an important social policy issue. But the Labour decision
did represent an important innovation because, for the first time, an
explicit link was forged between social payments and the tax system; a new
principle was legitimated and the way was paved for much broader
proposals, such as tax credits, in the next decade. Family poverty and
'clawback' both represented critical departures in social policy, and
together they form the subject of this chapter.
The rediscovery of the poverty revealed the persistent inequalities in
British life. During the 1950s social science surveys suggested that poverty
had been all but eliminated, and economists, income statisticians and the
Board of Inland Revenue reported a steady movement towards greater
equality ofincome. 1 In fact, the relative standing oflow-income families
had not improved since the war. Although the general standard of living
had risen substantially, the distribution of income and wealth had not
changed as much as was often claimed. Any trend towards greater equality
in the early 195os had not particularly benefited the poor and after the
mid-195os the distribution of income remained stable with, if anything, a
reduction in the share going to the lowest income groups (see Table 3.1).
Indeed, within the manual occupations the spread of earnings had
changed little since the nineteenth centrury, as Table 3.2 reveals.
Obviously, economic growth and collective bargaining were not automati-
cally improving the relative position of the poorest. 2
Neither had the Welfare State solved the problems facing poor families.
As long as the breadwinner was employed, such families received nothing
from the major income support programmes, national insurance and
supplementary benefits. They did receive the family allowance, which had
66
 Family Poverry 67
TABLE 3-I Distribution of incomes before tax: United Kingdom, I949--{)3

Group rif income

recipients 1949 1957 1959 lf}6o 1g61 1g62 lgl}j

% % % % % % %
Top I% I 1.2 8.2 8.4 8.5 8.I 8.I 7·9
2-5% I2.6 10.9 I 1.5 I 1.4 I I. I I I. I I 1.2
6-w% 9·4 9·0 9·5 9·8 9·7 9·7 9·6
II-40% 34·9 37·6 38-4 38·5 37·6 38.6 39·0
4I-70% I9.2 23-I 22-5 22.I 23·5 22.6 22.6
Bottom 30% I2-7 I 1.3 9·7 9·8 IO.O 9·8 9·7

Source: Nicholson, 'The Distribution of Personal Income', Lloyds Bank Review, No. 83,
January 1967.

TABLE 3.2 Distribution of earnings of male manual workers from I886: Great
Britain (deciles and quartiles as percentages of the median)

wwest wwer Upper Highest

decile quartile Median quartile decile

I886 68.6 82.8 IOO.O I 21.7 I43·I

I906 66.5 79·5 IOO.O I26.7 I56.8
I938 67-7 82.1 IOO.O I I8. 5 I39·9
I96o 70.6 82.6 IOO.O I2!.7 I45·2
I968 67·3 81.0 100.0 I22-3 I47·8
I970 67·3 81.1 IOO.O I22-3 I47·2

Source: National Board for Prices and Incomes, General Problems '!fLow Pay, (London: HMSO,
Cmnd 4-648, 1971), p. 157·

been introduced in 1945· But this programme had always been limited: the
allowance was never paid for the first child in each family; the original
levels were well below those recommended in the Beveridge Report; and,
while other benefits had been increased regularly, increases in family
allowances had been so small and infrequent that they declined steadily in
real value. In 1965 they stood at a modest 8 shillings a week for the second
child, and 10 shillings for subsequent children. The result was as
predictable as it was unnoticed: growing numbers of working families were
worse off than unemployed families living on benefits. Poor housing, rent
arrears, fuel shortages, second-hand clothing, a limited diet and constant
financial anxiety- this was the real meaning of the Welfare State for these
families.
How did British politics discover, and respond to, the plight of these
families? The first section of this chapter examines the rediscovery of
poverty; the second analyses the political salience of the issue; the third
68 Poverty, Politics and Policy
looks at the design of poverty policy, focusing on the prevailing definitions
of the problem and the emergence of two alternative policies in Whitehall;
the fourth examines the Labour Cabinet's agonised choice between the
options; and a final section compares this chapter's findings with those of
the rents case and assesses the new policy's consequences.

I THE REDISCOVERY OF POVERTY

Unlike rents, family poverty was not an established issue in post-war
politics. Indeed throughout the I950S the dominant assumption was that
the problem had largely been eliminated. In the I950 and I95I elections
the Labour Government proclaimed its success in banishing destitution,
and as late as I956leading Labour writers were repeating the argument. 3
Their Conservative successors reaped the political rewards of economic
growth and insisted well into the I 96os that, in the words of Sir Edward
Boyle, 'we have a better and fairer distribution of incomes today than we
had ten or eleven years ago.' 4 Residual distress amongst the elderly, the
widowed and the disabled was admitted, and often heated political battles
were fought over their problems. But these, argued john Boyd-Carpenter,
were simply

the peripheral points of the greatest expansion of social service provision

that this country has ever seen ... , the most massive general advance
of the standards of life of the great mass of our people ... [and] the
remarkable shift in income from the lower into the middle brackets. 6

The rediscovery of poverty in the I 96os involved nothing less than the
overturning of these established images of society. This was a formidable
task, since political perceptions, once entrenched, resist change. Unlike in
the rents case, policy-makers were not already sensitised to the problems of
low-income families, and ambiguous evidence was ignored rather than
seized upon. Only elaborate documentation and an extensive public
campaign were able to thrust family poverty into the realms of political
consciousness. This campaign was not waged by the poor; throughout they
remained unorganised, unassertive and unconsulted. Nor were political
parties the major agents of change; even Labour in Opposition shared the
prevailing belief that hardship was concentrated amongst the old and the
sick. 6 Nor did established groups such as the TUC play more than a
secondary role. In fact, poverty re-emerged as a result of information
generated by professional groups. In Britain 'poverty' was essentially a
statistical concept. The poor did not make themselves visible; they were
discovered at the bottom of income tables by social scientists.
 Family Poverry 6g
THE PROFESSORS AND THE POOR

Throughout the late 195os and early 1g6os there was a dearth of
information about low-income families, a fact that made raising their
problems at political levels virtually impossible. The dozens of tables in the
annual reports of the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance and its
successor, the Ministry of Social Security, reflected existing conceptions of
hardship. They reported the number of recipients of existing benefits but
were silent on the problems of others. Left-wing critics who wanted to
emphasise the extent of hardship in Britain were reduced to adding up the
numbers receiving benefits- the sick, the elderly, the unemployed- and
claiming that they were living 'near' poverty. 7 This was hardly a radical
critique. Statistical categories based on established perceptions do not
readily generate evidence with which those perceptions can be challenged.
At best, administrative programmes provided indirect hints of the
problems facing low-income families. For instance, during the winter of
1g62--63 the number of'wage stop' cases virtually doubled. 8 The wage stop
stipulated that, when an individual's unemployment benefit exceeded his
normal income, the benefit was cut back accordingly. The jump in 1g62-
63 indicated that a significant number of families were living below
assistance levels even when the breadwinner was employed, and for some
officials this was what one of them called 'the first real glimmerings' of the
problem. A year later discussions between the Ministry and the TUC
about the possible introduction ofearnings-related unemployment benefits
pointed to similar conclusions, since the benefit levels being discussed
would be well above the incomes of many low-paid workers. This
realisation prompted the TUC to insist on greater help for low-income
families, marking the first significant representation that the Government
received on the problem. 9
But ambiguous evidence of this sort could not overturn conventional
wisdom. It revealed that some families were living below assistance levels
but gave no concrete indication of the extent of the problem; and, more:
importantly, the officials involved failed to take the politically emotive step
of labelling the families as 'poor'. The sudden increase in wage stop cases
did prompt some questions in the House of Commons, 10 but failed to put
the plight of low-income families firmly on the political agenda. Fuller
evidence and greater determination were required.
The central figures in the rediscovery of poverty were Richard Titmuss,
Professor of Social Administration at the LSE, and his proteges, Brian
Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend. While a number of academics were
working on poverty, it was these men who effectively forced the issue into
political debate. They were convinced that myths about the generosity of
the Welfare State had blinkered discussion of social policy, and in the late
1950s they set out to gather the evidence with which to challenge the
comfortable assumptions of the day. Their research was explicitly political~
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
they were setting out to reshape policy-makers' interpretation of their
environment.
Their major intellectual innovation, from which all else flowed, was the
establishment of a new and higher poverty line. In any discussion of
poverty, the choice of the poverty line is critical, since the higher the line,
the larger the proportion of the population classified as poor. In Britain,
the concept of poverty had long been influenced by the work of Seebohm
Rowntree, who had developed a poverty line based on the cost of the
necessities required for bare 'subsistence'. His approach had become
widely accepted, to the point of being adopted in the Beveridge Report
and influencing the initial assistance rates set after the war .11 Titmuss and
his followers, however, struggled to change this way of thinking about
poverty. They were sceptical of the scientific claims made for Rowntree's
approach and, more importantly, regarded the subsistence concept as
excessively static. As general living standards improved throughout the
century, the proportion of the population falling below the line naturally
fell, until in 1951 Rowntree's final survey confirmed that poverty had been
virtually eliminated. 12 The continued use of the same poverty line in the
196os would have generated similar conclusions. For Titmuss, the
subsistence approach had ceased to be 'politically constructive' .1 3
Beginning in the 195os, the social scientists began to advocate a relative
conception of poverty . 14 According to this view, the poor were simply those
least well-off in any society, and the poverty line should rise with general
living standards. This approach reflected the academics' left-wing views
since, potentially at least, it transformed poverty into a permanent
problem in all but a completely egalitarian society. But, by abandoning
Rowntree's search for an objective standard, the relative approach made
setting a poverty line explicitly arbitrary. The academics needed a
standard that would command widespread political acceptance and they
settled on the level of benefits paid by the Supplementary Benefits
Commission (SBC). (In 1966 the National Assistance Board was renamed
the Supplementary Benefits Commission. To avoid confusion, the new
name is used throughout.) This standard had two major advantages: first,
the benefit level had risen with average wages since the war; and second,
Parliament itself had established this as the minimum acceptable for
welfare recipients. Supplementary benefits had not been thought of as
constituting a general poverty line in the past but, as a result of the efforts of
Titmuss and his colleagues, they gradually came to be so accepted on all
sides of the social policy debate.
Armed with this new standard, Abel-Smith and Townsend reanalysed
existing information on family expenditures in 1954 and 196o. Their
expectations were confirmed: poverty had not been eliminated. The actual
size of the problem was powerfully influenced by the line chosen. When
only the basic supplementary benefit levels were used, the problem seemed
reasonably small: 4· 7 per cent of all households, representing 3.8 per cent of
 Famiry Poverty 71
the population, were poor. But the academics preferred a higher line, 140
per cent of the basic rates, which covered additional payments often made
by the SBC for special needs and small amounts of income disregarded
when benefits were calculated. When this standard was used, the poor
population expanded dramatically to q per cent of the population, or 7!
million Britons. In addition, despite the aura of affluence in modem
Britain, poverty appeared to have actually increased between 1954 and
1960. But the data that had the greatest impact involved children.
Conventional wisdom insisted that such poverty as existed was found
overwhelmingly among the elderly; but, in fact, 2-l- million children were
shown to be trapped in poor households. 15

TABLE 3·3 Percentages of households and persons with low mcome: United
Kingdom, 1960

Income as a percentage of
National Assistance scale Households Persons

% % %
Under So 1.3 0.9
Bo--89 1.0 0.9
90-99 2.4 2.0
100--{)9 4·7 2.8
110-119 3·1 2-4
120-129 2.7 2.5
130-139 2.8 2.7
140 and over 82.1 8 5 .8

100.0 100.0

Source: B. Abel-Smith and P. Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest (London: Occasional Papers
on Social Administration No. 17, 1g65), Table 15.

Employing the classic Fabian tactics of elite persuasion and public

campaigns, the social scientists used their new data to shift the prevailing
images of society. The Titmuss group already had close links with the
Labour party, dating back to the I 950s when they had been co-opted on to
the party's study group that drafted the proposals for National Super-
annuation. They continued as Labour's chief advisers on social policies
until the 1964 election and, even before the full results of their study were
available, they raised their concerns about low-income families. This
reliance on private persuasion continued for a while even after Labour's
victory in the 1964 election; a memorandum was sent to Douglas
Houghton, the cabinet minister co-ordinating social security planning. 16
But private persuasion alone paid limited dividends. Labour continued to
concentrate on the problems of the old, the sick and the unemployed, and
 Poverry, Politics and Policy
its 1964 manifesto made no reference to family poverty as suchY Progress
was little faster after the election. Occasional questions were raised in the
House of Commons, and Margaret Herbison, the new Minister of Social
Security, ventured that 'the worst type of poverty seems-and I do not put
it higher than "seems"- to exist where there is a low wage earner with a
fairly big family.' 18 But such comments were seldom more than asides in
speeches devoted to other issues.
A more dramatic effort was required, and in December 1965 a new
Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) launched a public campaign.
CPAG was formed by a small number of social scientists and welfare
professionals who had been meeting for some time to discuss social
problems, but the primary initiative behind it came from Abel-Smith and
Townsend. 19 Their tactics were carefully planned. The campaign began
just before Christmas, when its emotional impact would be highest and
competing news lowest; on 22 December Abel-Smith and Townsend
published The Poor and the Poorest, which set out the full findings of their
study, and on 23 December CPAG presented a memorandum on family
poverty to the Prime Minister. To enhance the authority of their
submission, the group had obtained the endorsement of 42 prominent
academics and professionals, including Lady Wootton, Lord Simey, Dame
Eileen Younghusband and Sir John Maud. 20 And to enhance its media
appeal, they held a press conference, during which they supplemented the
dry statistics with graphic stories of the plight of individual families; for
example:

One mother had £1 a week for each child after rent and fuel had been
paid for. Even small things like soap could not be provided. The
children were verminous, their clothing far from adequate. They had
never possessed anything they could call their own and the younger ones
did not even know what a pencil was. They often had to share a bed with
the parents because of a shortage of blankets. The father had a regular
job.21

This initial effort was a media success. Most of the major papers gave full, if
not always front-page, coverage: 'Many British Children Living in
Hardship and Poverty' (The Times); 'Poverty Group Brings a Christmas
Story to Mr Wilson' (Guardian); 'Poorest Homes "Should Get Higher
Grants"' (Daii:J Telegraph); 'Wilson Told: Aid Poor Children' (Dairy
Mi"or); 'Poverty Plea to Wilson' (Dairy Express). 22 In addition, The Poor
and the Poorest was soon reviewed prominently in papers ranging from The
Economist to Tribune, 23 and quickly became required reading for anyone
seriously in teres ted in social policy.
The difficult task facing CPAG was to sustain the momentum. Members
of the group wrote articles for the press and periodicals, addressed lecture
groups and, as the election of March 1966 approached, pressed the parties
 Family Poverty 73
to clarify their policy on family poverty. In the autumn, the campaign
24

took on new life. With the help of a foundation grant, an office was opened;
Tony Lynes, who had earlier been Titmuss's research assistant and then an
official in the Ministry of Social Security, was appointed full-time
secretary; a journal entitled Poverty was launched; and a fee-paying
membership with regional affiliates began to be built up. Lynes proved an
effective organiser and propagandist. In October he organised a CPAG
rally at the annual conference of the Labour party. 25 In November
Titmuss, Abel-Smith and Townsend presented a major series oflectures to
well-attended meetings of the Fabian society, criticising the Government's
social policies. 26 In December Lynes organised a large 'teach in' on family
poverty at the LSE. In each case, the group were able to use their old
contacts and attract Labour ministers who replied for the Government,
which naturally increased their media coverage.
The CPAG campaign was first and foremost a media campaign. With
the British media so highly concentrated in London, even a small group
based there can aspire to a national role through effective public relations.
CPAG assiduously cultivated the media, writing major articles themselves
and helping in the preparation of newspaper features and television
programmes on poverty. 27 Their materials became standard references
and close relations developed between Lynes and some of the newspaper
men, especially on the Guardian, which Lynes occasionally referred to as
their 'house journal'. The group's second major target was politicians,
particularly those in the Labour party. They pressed their friends in the
Cabinet and assisted any MP willing to raise the issue in the House of
Commons. CPAG's efforts were, of course, reinforced by others. Rach-
manism had begun the process of focusing attention on the poor; evidence
of malnutrition among large families was appearing; 28 and later the
introduction of an incomes policy forced politicians to consider again the
special claims of the poorly paid. In the words of one minister, 'the whole
thing acclimatised the cabinet to discussing the low-wage earner; we had
endless discussions about people being worse off at work than on benefit.'
While not solely responsible, CPAG played a leading role in this
educational process. The group were creating a new issue and entrenched
images of society were shifting.
But a problem revealed is not a problem solved. CPAG were not rich in
conventional political resources; they operated from two attic rooms with
meagre financing and a miniscule staff. Through astute use of the resources
that they did possess- information, the academic status of their leaders,
their contacts in the Labour party- they were able to change political
perceptions of social problems. But they could not command a specific
response. The fate of the poor depended not only on their data but, more
importantly, on the reaction to that data amongst politicians, civil servants
and the wider society.
74 Poverry, Politics and Policy

II THE POLITICS OF POVERTY

POLICY-MAKERS AND THE POOR

In comparison with rents, the political response to social-science data

about poverty was not complicated by already intense party conflict. The
CPAG campaign made an impact throughout the political world, and
family poverty attained an almost immediate salience. Within weeks
Crossman recorded that it was a 'very successful campaign' and 'some-
thing we must deal with' .29 Government spokesmen were soon insisting
that the problem was receiving urgent attention, and the Labour
manifesto for the March election promised 'a drive to seek out, and
alleviate, poverty whether amongst children or old people'. 30 After the
election, Peggy Herbison christened poverty 'the biggest problem in
social security', and Harold Wilson concurred, arguing that it was
'foremost amongst social problems'. 31 The Conservative Opposition also
responded. In February the new leader, Edward Heath, demanded an
'end to poverty once and for all' and the Conservative election manifesto
promised 'more generous help to children in families whose income is
below minimum need'. 32
The rapid rise of family poverty eclipsed other social issues previously
considered paramount, and the Labour Government found that some of
the policies prepared in Opposition were now considered secondary. The
promised reform of sickness and unemployment benefits and the
reorganisation of the social security ministry were both criticised in
Parliament and the press because they failed to deal with family poverty. 33
Even the claims of the elderly, hitherto sacrosanct, were undermined. In
1967 much of the press questioned the Government's priorities in raising
pensions before poverty was dealt with, provoki,ng a heated response from
Herbison that the poverty issue did not 'obviate the need to keep the faith'
with the aged. 34
Political sensitivity to family poverty largely reflected attitudes current
within the two parties at the time. Within the Labour Party there was a
pervasive assumption that- whatever else it stood for- Labour was 'about
poverty'. Poverty was a common touchstone for Labour MPs who
disagreed furiously about virtually everything else. The issue spanned the
ideological divisions between left and right that had racked the party
throughout the 195os; for Aneurin Bevan, poverty was one of the great
social forces in conflict with modem society, and for Anthony Crosland the
basic definition of a socialist was one who gave exceptional priority to
overcoming 'poverty and social squalor'; Harold Wilson argued that there
was strong commitment 'among Labour Party members at all levels to end
poverty', and Crossman contended that 'as socialists we care more about
[poverty] than anything else' .as Even when due allowance is made for
 Family Poverty 75
rhetorical excess, concern for the poor was clearly part of Labour's self-
identification; they regarded it as one of the dividing lines between the
parties and Conservative pronouncements on the issue in 1966 were
greeted with charges of hypocrisy. 36 CPAG consistently aimed its
campaign at what it took to be the conscience of the Labour Party, and the
strategy worked in part. 'It was remarkable how effective they were',
mused one minister. 'But then we felt very sensitive about all this.' And
during a much later attack by CPAG on the Government's failure to
eliminate poverty, Crossman worried that 'it damages us with the party
[and] it damages our self-esteem' .37
While concern about poverty was widespread in the party, its intensity
should not be overstated. Only a few MPs actively pressed the issue.
Within the cabinet, the lead was naturally taken by the social security
ministers, especially Peggy Herbison. But within the parliamentary party,
only a small minority were vocal, and MPs like David Owen and Lena
Jeger waged often lonely crusades. Early Day motions on the issue never
attracted more than 25-30 signatures and, at the height of the controversy,
attendance at a meeting of the PLP dwindled to 25 before the start of the
social security discussion. 38 Similarly, poverty never became a dominant
question at Labour party conferences. 39 One Labour minister went so far
as to describe the party's reaction as 'automatic lip-service but not much
steam'. As a bi-partisan issue, poverty lacked the excitement of party
warfare, which had drawn so much attention to rents, and the Labour
back benches accepted the Cabinet's assurances that something would be
done in due course. Had the Government continued to procrastinate,
backbench stridency might have increased; 'a small group, if continually
frustrated, can grow', argued another minister. But the point remains.
Concern about poverty was widespread within Labour, but even there it
was not a leading issue of the day.
Conservative attention to family poverty also reflected party traditions
and interests. Concern for the poor was oflong standing within the party,
with roots back to the 'Tory democracy' of the nineteenth century. During
the 194os the Conservatives had accepted the main lines of the Welfare State
and the idea of a national minimum, below which no one should fall,
and interest in family poverty represented the continuation of this
tradition. 40 But the issue's prominence in Conservative rhetoric also
reflected more immediate party interests. The party were in the process of
elaborating a selectivist approach to social policy: they argued that the
existing universal benefits and services were often wasteful, their costs so
high that not enough could be done for the truly needy, and that the
solution was greater selectivity to concentrate spending directly on the
poor. This doctrine had been developing within the party for several
years, 41 but it received a major boost from the CPAG campaign. For
selectivists, here was dramatic proof that hardship was being ignored
despite vast expenditures on social programmes; child poverty was quickly
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
linked in Conservative speeches with deman~s for the reintroduction of
prescription charges, reform of council house subsidies and reliance on
occupational rather than state pensions. 42 Poverty gave a moral urgency to
party doctrine. 'It was a prime example', recalled a Conservative MP
involved in their social planning: 'We used it to beat the general drum of
selectivity.' Yet again, while family poverty gained a berth in Conservative
pronouncements, active interest was primarily confined to the party's
social security spokesmen and the issue never became a central part of the
Conservatives' attack on the Labour Government.
The response within the Ministry of Social Security was one of guarded
support. Prior to the CPAG campaign, the Ministry had done little to push
forward the plight of low-income families, believing that such problems
had to be raised in public first. 'The sensible civil servant won't do
overmuch until he thinks ministers would be interested in having results
emerge', explained one official. One of his colleagues was blunter: 'Titmuss
and Co. forced the thing into the politicians' noses; there wasn't any
chance of the civil service doing that.' Even the deficiencies in the
department's information on the subject were not remedied until mid-
1966, well after the CPAG campaign had begun; at that time the Ministry
conducted a major survey to gather up-to-date evidence on the problem. 43
While the department generally supported action on family poverty,
they were not completely uncritical of the social scientists' case. Some
officials were uncomfortable with the relative conception of poverty. 'If it's
a relative thing, then it's foolish to talk about abolishing poverty,' one
argued; 'you never can, short of establishing complete equality, and that's
not likely to happen.' Another official went further: 'I don't believe that
many children were starving or even hungry. Certainly there were
children in substandard conditions, but it's a misuse of the term to call it
poverty.' More importantly, officials were not completely happy with the
use of supplementary benefits as a poverty line. They realised that every
increase in the benefits level would increase the number of working families
classified as poor; even if they took action to solve the problem, it would re-
emerge with the next increase. Administrators regarded that prospect with
distinctly less enthusiasm than did the academics. The Ministry never
formally acknowledged a poverty line or used the word 'poverty' in their
publications, 44 and in 1967 one of the social security ministers, Patrick
Gordon Walker, publicly criticised 'the continual raising of the standard
and definition of what we mean by poverty .' 45
These reservations had their greatest impact on the size of the problem
officially recognised in Whitehall. Administrators rejected Abel-Smith and
Townsend's use of 140 per cent ofsupplementary benefit levels, contending
that CPAG was deliberately overstating its case, and in the Ministry's own
survey only the basic levels were used. The inevitable result was that a
much smaller proportion of the population were deemed to be in low-
income families: 7 per cent of all families with children fell below the line
 Fami{y Poverty 77
but many of these were already receiving, or were eligible for, sup-
plementary benefits; only 4 per cent of families with a father in full-time
work fell below the Ministry's line. 46 While the academics angrily accused
the officials of reducing the problem by an administrative sleight of hand,
they could not prevent the use of the smaller numbers in official estimates
and in internal Government deliberations.
Despite such disagreements, however, CPAG received general, if not
intense, sympathy amongst policy-making elites. But how much would be
done about poverty also depended on the response of British society more
generally.

PRESSURE GROUPS, THE PUBLIC AND THE POOR

The greater the distance from Westminster, the less resonance the CPAG
campaign had. Poverty did re-emerge in the leader writers' vocabulary,
and the group received editorial support from most of the major
newspapers, representing a wide range of views; two of the most persistent
advocates of action, for instance, were The Economist and Tribune.n But
CPAG lacked natural alliances with other powerful groups. The campaign-
ers felt they enjoyed the moral support of most social workers and other
professionals in the social services, and certainly many of these people were
active in CPAG itself. But the social work professions as such were only
starting to organise themselves effectively. While they proved to be an
active lobby in advancing their own professional standing during the
reorganisation oflocal services in I970, 48 they played only a peripheral role
in the family poverty campaign.
Nor were the more powerful economic groups involved in a major way.
British trade unions have traditionally concentrated on wage bargaining
as the primary method of improving their members' economic position,
and the impetus for social policy innovations has generally come from
elsewhere. The unions' role in social policy deliberations has been a
reactive one; usually they have supported reform efforts, although they
have occasionally been quite cautious, especially when dealing with
income supplement programmes. 49 This pattern continued into the I g6os.
Although the TU C supported action on family poverty and made its views
clear to the Government, the unions did not campaign strenuously on the
issue and no links were established between them and CPAG. In part, this
was because the mix of socialist intellectuals and trade unionists was not
always an easy one; certainly there had been tension between the two
during the drafting of Labour's National Superannuation plans in the late
I95os. 50 But more importantly, the TUC's attention was consumed by
other major issues, such as incomes policy and the reform of industrial
relations, which were far more important to the unions than family
poverty.
Other sectors of the British economy were even less supportive. While
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
the financial and business communities took little interest in poverty as
such, they were opposed to higher levels of public spending generally.
Labour had inherited a major balance of payments deficit and faced
repeated crises in sterling, culminating in the devaluation of November
1g67. The weakness of sterling left the Government particularly vulner-
able; 'every action we took,' Harold Wilson later wrote, 'had to be
considered against a background of the confidence factor, particularly
against our assessment of what the speculators might do', a position he
considered 'not only inhibiting but humiliating.' 51 The Bank of England,
as the Government's link to the financial community, was a major bearer
of the message. 'We had to listen night after night', Wilson recalled, 'to
demands that there should be major cuts in Government expenditure and
particularly in ... the social services.' 52 The opposition to increased
social spending did not focus specifically on the poverty issue, and some of
the financial press, including the Financial Times, echoed the Con-
servatives' argument that help for poor families was possible if greater
selectivity were adopted throughout the social services. 53 But the overall
reaction was hardly encouraging.
With only limited support amongst organised groups, the response of the
public at large became even more critical. But poverty never became a
major concern for the electorate; the problem was seldom mentioned in
surveys conducted in the 1960s to determine what the public considered
were the most important issues facing the government. 54 There is little
systematic evidence available about public attitudes toward~ the poor in
the 1g6os, but a study conducted by the ECC during the 1970s paints a not
very reassuring picture. In comparison with many other European
countries, UK respondents were less likely to believe there were people
'really in poverty' around them, much more likely to attribute poverty to
personal failings of the poor themselves rather than to social injustices, and
more likely to think that the authorities were doing enough, if not too
much, already. Indeed, as Table 3-4 shows, only 36 per cent of the public
felt that the government was not doing enough for the poor. This picture is
not necessarily transferrable to the mid-1g6os, but it does caution against
assuming automatic public sympathy for the plight of poor families.
More importantly, policy-makers in the 1g6os believed that the public
was not much interested. As judith Hart, Herbison's successor as Minister
of Social Security, complained to the Commons:

I wish that there was always such a keen awareness outside the House
about this. The difficulty is that poverty can be unobtrusive, however
desperate it may be. It does not always force itself upon the attention of
the man in the street. 55

Other politicians and civil servants agreed. 'It never became a concern of
the public at large' ,judged one Labour Minister. 'The great British public
 Family Poverry 79
TABLE 3·4 Public perceptions of poverty: United Kingdom and Europe, 1976

Are there at the present time in your town, part of town or village, people whose
general standard ofliving you consider to be very bad compared with that of other
people, that is, people really in poverty?
United Kingdom All ECC
% %
Yes 36 47
No 49 35
Don't know 29 18

What are the three most common causes of poverty?*

United Kingdom All ECC
% %
Laziness 45 Deprived childhood 46
Chronic unemployment 42 Lack of education 39
Drink 40 Ill health 37
Ill health 36 Old age 34
Too many children 31 Laziness 28
Old age 30 Drink 28
Lack of education 29 Chronic unemployment 27
Lack of foresight 21 Too many children 27
Deprived childhood 16 Lack of foresight 18

Do you think that what the authorities are doing for people in poverty is about
what they should do, too much or too little?
United Kingdom All ECC
% %
Too much 20 7
About what they should 35 29
Too little 36 54
Don't know 9 10

* Total exceeds 100% because of multiple replies.

Sour": Commission of the European Communities, The Perception rif Povn9 In Europe
(Brussels: 1977).

isn't interested in this very much', confirmed a senior official. Older

ministers detected a long-term shift:

There has been a great change since I came into politics. The poor- the
very poor- are now a small minority. They tend to live in the inner city
and the others get out of touch with them. You can't work up that feeling
of the 193os, which drove many people to the party. The problem is
falling in its power to move people.
Bo Poverry, Politics and Policy
Policy-makers repeatedly insisted that the public distinguished between
the 'deserving' and the 'undeserving' poor. 'The old and the sick are
emotive groups; they evoke compassion', argued a minister; 'but it is a big
step from there to giving help to fit and healthy people.' Sir John Walley,
Deputy Secretary in the Ministry, also insisted that the public's 'notion of a
"poor family" does not include that of a man in regular work.' 56 Policy-
makers perceived a clear disjunction between elite and mass opinion.
Active concern about family poverty, they argued, was largely restricted to a
stratum of the population that they variously described as 'informed
people' or 'readers of the quality press'. In comparison, the Government
felt little pressure from the general public to respond generously.
More ominously, public opinion was increasingly opposed to higher
social spending generally. The first half of the decade had been marked by
broad support for more generous social security programmes, but after
1964 this eroded steadily, as Table 3·5 reveals. Labour ministers were

TABLE 3·5 Public support for social expenditures

Do you feel that the Government should spend more on pensions and social services
or do you feel that spending should stay about the same as now?
Autumn Spring Summer
1g64 Ig66 I!Jfi9
Should spend more 77 54 43
Should stay about as it is now 20 42 52
Don't know 3 4 5
Source: D. Butler and D. Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd edition, (London: Macmillan,
1974), P· 299·

particularly worried by the growing resistance to social spending among

their own working-class supporters. Before the Second World War, few
workers paid much income tax, but with post-war affluence the tax
threshold was creeping steadily down the social scale (see Table 3.6). As
the tax burden of the working class grew, politicians sensed resentment
spilling over on to social programmes. 'You get the most bitter comments
from ordinary workers in the constituency', observed one social security
minister ruefully. After a meeting with his constituency association in
January 1968, Crossman recorded: 'The trade unionists want to see us
spending less on social services so there'll be more for wage packets. That is
what they really value.' 57 And the next year George Brown warned the
party conference that 'there is widespread feeling in our party as well as
outside of it that the tax burden that the ordinary person faces is too
high.' 58 Survey evidence, presented in Tables 3·7 and 3.8, confirms the
politicians' perceptions; the preference for tax cuts over expanded social
services was growing steadily in this period, and the shift was occurring in
 Family Poverty 8!

TABLE 3.6 Tax threshold as percentage of average earnings:

married man with one child aged under 1 1

rear %
1938 !63
1950 75
1955 74
IgOO 56
1965 57
1970 51

Source: A. Atkinson, 'Income Maintenance and Income Taxation',

Journal of Social Policy, Vol. 1 (1972).

TABLE 3. 7 Preference for tax cuts or social service increases

If the Government had a choice between reducing taxes

and spending more on the social services, which should it
do?

Tax cuts 52 55 6g
Social service increases 41 36 21
Don't know 7 9 10

Source: Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd edition, p.

459·

TABLE 3.8 Percentage of respondents preferring tax cuts over social service
increases (by occupation)

Occupation*
I II III IV v VI
1963 45·3 5!.6 55-4 54·2 49·3 56·7
1966 51.0 65.6 00.4 59·6 52·7 5!.3
I96g 64·5 63.6 66., 72.2 64.0 7!.4
1970 62.0 63·3 00.4 70·3 00.7 6!.7

* I Higher managerial or professional

II Lower managerial or administrative
III Supervisory non-manual
IV Lower non-manual
v Skilled manual
VI Unskilled manual
Source: Data set for Butler and Stokes' study, Political Change in Britain.
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
all social classes, including the manual workers whom Labour regarded as
their natural constituency.
The electoral scope for income redistribution was clearly narrowing.
While the full extent of these trends was not yet apparent in 1 g66--68, when
Labour was grappling with family poverty, concern with them was
growing. The Government dared not ignore the signs completely. As its
economic problems piled up, its public support declined; after April 1967
the Conservatives went into a steady lead in the Gallup Poll, the size of
which assumed startling proportions in 1g68; and Labour had to endure a
depressing string of by-election defeats, some in hitherto safe seats. The
Government could not separate its response to family poverty from the
pressing need to regain lost political ground.
Thus the political base of the poverty campaign was a narrow one.
Sensitivity at elite levels ensured that the problem would not be completely
ignored, but without more powerful support amongst organised groups or
the wider public a major response would be difficult. Labour was in for a
much more agonising set of choices than in the case of rents.

III POVERTY POLICY

The party had come to power without an agreed policy on family poverty,
and settling on one generated a protracted battle within the Government.
This conflict did not flow primarily from different definitions of the
problem for, in comparison with the rents dispute, there was little overt
ideological debate about the nature and causes of poverty. But intense
conflict did emerge over the specifics of the policy to be adopted.

DEFINITION OF THE PROBLEM

Poverty would seem tailor-made for ideological politics. It fairly begs for
clashes over why such destitution persists in an affluent society and what
society's responsibilities should be. Yet in Britain of the 196os virtually no
attention was paid in political debate to why people were poor, and very
little political breath was expended on the balance of public versus private
responsibility. Political discourse took place within a broad consensus,
which stifled debate over primary causes and narrowed conflict to
mechanics. Wider debate was clearly not impossible, for at least three
distinct conceptions of the problem of family poverty had roots in British
thinking:

1. Liberal Definition: Poverty and the National Minimum

Poverty is residual hardship in an otherwise prosperous society, and is
caused by a variety of factors: personal misfortune, low wages, large
 Family Poverty
families and so on. Poverty and inequality are clearly separate issues. It
is legitimate for people to attain different standards ofliving, but no one
should have to live in conditions dramatically poorer than those
generally enjoyed in the society. The solution is straightforward: a
national minimum standard ofliving should be set and no one should be
allowed to fall below it.

2. Egalitarian Definition: Poverty and Inequality

The plight of low-income families is a reflection of social inequality.
Those called 'poor' are an arbitrarily designated category at the bottom
of the income scale, and the real cause of the problem is the entire social
structure, which creates unequal distributions of income and life chances.
The problem cannot be really solved short of an egalitarian society, but
it can be mitigated by policies that narrow the range of inequalities.
Programmes should not concentrate solely on the poor, however. A
fundamental reconstruction ofsociety is required, and restrictions on the
advantages of the affluent are equally an attack on the basic problem.

3· Family-Needs Definition: Poverty and Family Poliry

Poverty is one result of the lack of an adequate family policy that assists
all families with children. The basic cause of the problem is that the
wage system does not take the size of a worker's family into account; the
bachelor and the father of six doing the same job receive the same
income, despite their very different needs. Family poverty is simply the
extreme consequence of this general bias in the wage structure against
families. The problem can be solved by horizontal redistribution of
income from single persons and childless couples to families with children
at all income levels. Such a policy would have a wide range of benefits,
one of which would be helping poor families.

While advocates of each of these perspectives were active in the mid- 1g6os,
there was remarkably little clash between them. In part, this was because
the different ideological positions were not always incompatible; bringing
low-income families up to a national minimum, for instance, would also be
a contribution, however small, to reducing inequality. Partisans could
agree on helping poor families while disagreeing on why. Unlike in the
rents case, the ideological configuration muffled, rather than stimulated,
debate on first principles. More important, however, was the pre-
dominance of the liberal definition. The relief of poverty through a
national minimum was an ancient tradition in British social policy, with a
history dating back to the poor laws of the sixteenth century. In the
modern period, this tradition had received its fullest expression in the
Beveridge Report, 59 and the post-war reforms entrenched this approach
even deeper in British thinking. For liberals such as Beveridge, poverty
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
could be eliminated short of an egalitarian society, and when the plight of
low-income families surfaced again it was natural for many to think in such
terms. The pervasive assumption was that an income supplement that
brought such families up to the level of other welfare beneficiaries would
solve the problem.
This conception was held most strongly in the Conservative Party.
Edward Heath and other leading spokesmen, like Anthony Barber,
repeatedly invoked the image of 'islands' or 'pockets' of poverty left behind
in an otherwise 'middle-income society', while the party's social security
spokeswoman, Miss Mervyn Pike, insisted that 'poverty no longer
coincides with social class or types of employment. Need is increasingly a
matter of circumstance.' 60 But this conception was not confined to
Conservatives. Patrick Gordon Walker, a Labour minister, also advocated
'an increasing concern with the pockets of poverty', 61 and a former Labour
minister explained poverty thus:

... there's probably a certain amount that results from people's own
silly activities and stupidities, this sort of thing. But on the other hand,
there is a certain amount which arises out of sheer misfortune. 62

A similar picture emerges from a systematic survey of the beliefs of MPs,

including their perceptions of various policy issues, conducted in the late
xg6os by Robert Putnam. British politicians, he concluded, do not
generally see poverty as deeply embedded in their social structure; rather
they see the problem as one of

... isolated individuals or 'problem families' who have eluded the

safety net of the welfare state. The most frequently cited causes of
poverty were low wages, individual laziness or stupidity, 'problem
families,' and old age. It seems natural, therefore, to conceive of this
problem as a technical one involving patching holes in the net. The
impact of this patching operation on the interests of other groups is, it
seems, too distant to cause those groups (or the politicians) concern. 63

These assumptions were sufficiently pervasive to choke off ideological

debate. Advocates of the family-needs approach, in particular, felt
overwhelmed. This latter perspective is dominant in some other European
countries, such as France; it had earlier roots in British social policy debate,
and it found occasional advocates in the Ig6os. One of these was Sir John
Walley, who argued that the tradition of focusing on the poor was socially
divisive and that an adequate family policy was preferable. 64 Yet
throughout the decade he and other like-minded people felt frustrated by
the consistent lack of interest in helping families unless they were poor.
Egalitarians were better placed to challenge the liberal predominance
in the social policy debate but, by and large, they avoided doing so, for
 Fami!J Poverty
tactical reasons. CPAG's intellectual leaders, Titmuss, Abel-Smith and
Townsend, all saw the problem as one of inequality. 'The central choice in
social policy', Townsend argued in 1959, 'lies between a national
minimum and equality', 65 and the academics hoped that their campaign
would reinstate inequality as a central issue in British politics. 'We are not',
Titmuss explained in 1g65, 'defining poverty and devising separate laws for
the poor, but embarking on a dialogue about equality and measures to
redistribute income.' 66 Yet the social scientists borrowed the liberal
language of the national minimum; they campaigned against poverty and
measured the problem according to the supplementary benefits standard.
Their reasons were straightforward: 'Presenting the problem as poverty
would result in wider currency', one of them explained. 'Public sentiment
may be in favour of abolishing "poverty" but it is not really in favour of
major reductions in "inequality".' A civil servant concurred: 'A campaign
based on a demonstration that inequalities had not changed greatly since
the war would not have had as great an impact.' Labour politicians
generally accepted CPAG's approach. While some insisted that the
problem was essentially the unequal distribution of wealth in society, the
Government's spokesmen were cautious; to polarise the debate would
undermine bi-partisan support on the issue and, in a period of economic
difficulty, compromise the chances of action. Thus when Judith Hart, a
minister normally considered to be on the party's left, finally introduced
the government's legislation, she insisted that 'Beveridge's premise, his
analysis, his arguments and his conclusions are as relevant today as they
were in 1942'; and, she continued, 'redistribution of income is a very
different matter.' 6 7
Thus clashes over the nature of the problem were mild in comparison
with the polarised debate over rents. For the most part, ideological
divisions remained latent, and an uneasy consensus narrowed the range of
dispute significantly. Conflict, even intense conflict, was still possible
within that consensus, however, and more immediate political and
bureaucratic interests in Whitehall provoked a major battle over the
specifics of the policy response. An understanding of this battle requires a
close look at the proposals in dispute and at the major protagonists: the
Ministry of Social Security on one side, and the Treasury, the Inland
Revenue Board and the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the other.

DESIGNING THE POLICY OPTIONS

The Ministry of Social Security. From the 1964 election until the creation of
the Department of Health and Social Security in November 1968,
ministerial responsibility for social security was divided. The Minister of
Social Security, Margaret Herbison, was not in the cabinet, and a non-
departmental cabinet minister, Douglas Houghton, was supposed to co-
ordinate the social services and supervise a major review of social security
86 Poverty, Politics and Policy
policy, which had been announced in Labour's First Speech from the
Throne. This was a frustrating arrangement, especially when the de-
partmental minister and the cabinet co-ordinator disagreed. 68 'Hopeless'
was one minister's blunt description. Everyone involved agreed that the
division of responsibility weakened the social-security case in the cabinet,
and it certainly complicated the handling of the family poverty issue, as we
shall see.
The Ministry of Social Security itself was directed by the Permanent
Secretary, Sir Clifford J arret, and one Deputy Secretary, Sir John Walley.
Immediate responsibility for family poverty fell on Douglas Abbot, Under-
Secretary ofDepartment A, which administered family allowances, and on
the new planning division, Division D I, which had been created to carry
out the social security review under the direction of an Assistant Secretary,
Herbert Lewin. The work on family poverty followed the standard
procedures adopted for the social security review. The planning division,
together with the relevant administrative division, drafted a major paper
on the problem and the available options, which was then circulated
within the ministry, discussed at a general meeting of the officials, and then
submitted to the minister and the cabinet co-ordinator.
This process was a remarkably closed bureaucratic one, in marked
contrast to the way in which the rent bill was drafted. The social security
ministers did not involve themselves as deeply in the initial structuring of
the options as did Crossman; outside experts were not brought in at senior
levels; and there were virtually no consultations with outside groups. In
part, this reflected differing levels of uncertainty. The rent bill was
complex, and both the minister and his senior officials were unsure of how
to proceed. Family poverty, in comparison, was considered a fairly
straightforward question of how to pay out money, and certainly the civil
service had no doubts about its ability to handle it. The personalities of the
different ministers reinforced this. Crossman was suspicious of the civil
service, at home with intellectuals, and sufficiently aggressive to impose his
advisers on the department. Herbison and Houghton, on the other hand,
had concentrated on social security issues in Opposition and felt less
vulnerable; they were impressed with the civil service; and they were far
more discreet, less inclined to disrupt normal channels. A particularly close
relationship developed between Herbison and her officials. 'The
department loved her', recalled one official; 'it would have worked its guts
out for her.' Another agreed: 'We adored her; she was a great listener.' 69
As a result, social scientists now played a far less central role than in the
rent case. Abel-Smith and Townsend could advocate specific policies
through CPAG, but neither participated in the critical departmental
deliberations. Abel-Smith advised the department briefly on the design of
its survey, but he did not become a major internal adviser until after
Crossman became social security minister in Ig68. Tony Lynes did enter
the Ministry in I g65. He had expected to join the minister's personal office,
 Family Poverty
but the officials objected and Herbison accepted their advice that he be
offered a junior position in the new planning division. While there, Lynes
worked on the basic paper on family poverty and ensured that CPAG's
proposals were included as one option; but he felt frustrated by the lack of
regular contact with ministers and departed a year later to take over the
CPAG campaign. Lynes did maintain contact with his ex-colleagues;
indeed a series of informal policy seminars attended by both academics and
middle-level officials was held in his flat. These contacts proved important
in co-ordinating Ministry and CPAG strategy at a critical juncture, as will
be seen. But they did not represent a direct involvement in policy making.
In comparison with the room for manoeuvre enjoyed by Crdssman and
his group, the Ministry of Social Security had to surmount major obstacles,
in and out ofWhitehall. Both the Treasury and the Inland Revenue Board
had a deep interest in the issue, and they proved to be formidable
opponents. The family poverty debate took place in a period of mounting
fiscal restraint, during which the fulfilment of campaign promises was
being postponed and existing programmes held back. Any major proposal
would have to circumvent the Treasury, the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
and other spending ministers in the cabinet. In addition, some of the
policies being advocated involved linking the social security system to the
tax system, an idea to which the Inland Revenue was strongly opposed.
But the obstacles in the Ministry's path were not confined to Whitehall. As
long as it focused on direct income transfers, there were few organised
groups with a vested interest in the details of the policy. Only CPAG took a
continuing interest and they could not force the Ministry to adopt their
proposals. The external constraint that loomed largest in the minds of
officials was the electorate; the troublesome question was whether
taxpayers, especially the middle-income groups, would tolerate a major
redistribution of income to poor families.
From the beginning, the range of policies considered inside the Ministry
of Social Security was narrow, with active discussion limited to direct
income transfers. The social scientists had defined the problem as income
deficiency, and this orientation was reinforced by administrative
boundaries within Whitehall. The Ministry was responsible for income
security programmes, but other approaches to poverty would require
moving into the jurisdiction of other departments and into the orbit of
major economic groups. Regulation of the wage structure through a
minimum wage or additional provisions for the poor in the Government's
incomes policy fell outside the Ministry's purview and were not included in
its deliberations. 'We have not time to wait until the negotiations can
take place between individual trade unions and employers', Herbison
insisted; 70 and the Minister ofLabour, Ray Gunter, was only too happy to
agree that family poverty was a social security problem, not a wages one. 71
Similarly, a social service strategy along the lines of the American War on
Poverty was ignored. The American programme was influencing other
88 Poverty, Politics and Policy
departments such as Education and the Home Office but, in the words of a
social security official, 'We did not regard that as part of our remit.'
Different approaches to poverty thus remained compartmentalised in
different ministries.
The focus on income transfers greatly simplified the available choices,
since there are really only three types of income transfer programmes. First
is a universal benefit such as family allowances, paid automatically to
every member of designated categories irrespective of income. Secohd is a
means-tested benefit such as Supplementary Benefits, paid only to those
who apply and whose income falls below a prescribed amount. Finally,
there is some type of negative income tax to allocate benefits automatically
to those with low incomes.
CPAG proposed versions of two ofthese. 72 Their first recommendation
was for a major increase in family allowances, to be paid for through the
abolition of child tax allowances. Titmuss had long argued that tax
allowances were as much a social benefit as cash paid directly through
family allowances, but that tax allowances were of much less value to the
poor than to the prosperous who paid higher marginal tax rates. 73 Given
the group's egalitarian aims, the elimination of a regressive benefit like
child tax allowances and the expansion of a universal one like family
allowances was doubly attractive. CPAG's second proposal was for a form
of negative income tax, a 'Tax Adjustment' that would be added
automatically to the pay of low-income employees. These proposals
structured much of the ensuing debate, as early political and media
comment revolved around the group's ideas and Lynes' work in the
Ministry ensured they were not ignored there. More critically, the group's
campaign against child tax allowances significantly expanded the range of
options that would likely have been considered otherwise.
Within the Ministry, all three types of programmes were considered.
The initial working papers discussed the possibility of an increase in family
allowances (together with the elimination of child tax allowances), a
means-tested benefit for low-income families, and a version of a negative
income tax. This last option was popular in the 1g6os. Many hoped that it
offered a solution to the dilemma posed by other forms of assistance;
universal programmes were expensive and did not concentrate assistance
on the poor, yet means tests were thought degrading and ineffective. A
negative income tax seemed to offer a humane way of being selective.
Much of the press was enamoured of the possibility, and the proposal found
supporters in both major parties, including Douglas Houghton, who was
now cabinet spokesman for the social services. 74 But the idea foundered in
Whitehall. Such a reform, involving an extensive overhaul of both the tax
and benefit systems, would have been a major, long-term task even if all
policy-makers were fully committed to it. Throughout the 1g6os, however,
the Inland Revenue was opposed to the use of the tax system for any such
purpose, and this was sufficient to stall the proposal. Interest in a negative
 Fami!J Poverty 89
income tax lingered on within the Labour Government until an inter-
departmental committee established to examine it more fully submitted its
report in 196g. 75 But in the summer and autumn of 1966, when the
Ministry of Social Security was looking for a quick response to family
poverty, a negative income tax was never really in the race.
The means-tested approach, ministers continually assured the Oppo-
sition, was being considered, 76 and the task of designing such a scheme fell
to the Ministry. While there were several possibilities here, the main
suggestion was for a special means-tested benefit for low-income families
administered by the Supplementary Benefits Commission, along the lines
of the Family Income Supplement (FIS) subsequently introduced by the
Conservative Government in 1970. In order to preserve some incentive for
the poor to increase their income, the benefit would taper off as earnings
rose: families would apply for help, and those who qualified would receive
a percentage, probably 50 per cent, of the difference between their
earnings and a defined poverty standard. As several ministers asserted in
interviews, 'It was FIS'; and when the Conservatives actually introduced
FIS in 1970, it was, as Crossman told the Commons, 'an old friend of
ours'. 77 The means-tested solution had advantages. It would be in-
expensive; if all the eligible families applied, the cost would be about£ 1 3
million. 78 It would not provoke a great fight with the Treasury over
expenditure or with the Inland Revenue over tax allowances. Politically it
would head off the selectivists- in effect, stealing the Conservatives'
clothes- and it would involve no electoral risks. There were objections,
however. Many argue that means tests stigmatise the recipients; many
eligible people fail to apply; and no assistance is given to those just above
the poverty line who are still hard pressed.
Officials within the Ministry of Social Security were divided. Lynes was
negative and his position had the support of several senior officials,
including Sir John Walley. 79 But means tests had their defenders. The
Under-Secretary responsible for family allowances, Douglas Abbot, was
regarded by his colleagues as a staunch means-tester; indeed, the means-
tested approach later came to be known as 'Mr Abbot's Alternative'. 80 He
also received support from officials of the Supplementary Benefits
Commission who advised that the technical difficulties of such a pro-
gramme could be overcome. With senior officials thus divided, no single
departmental line emerged.
Houghton and Herbison, however, rejected the means-test approach
out of hand. 'I am dead against means-testing low-paid workers at work-
absolutely implacably opposed,' insisted Houghton; 81 and Herbison's
opposition was equally intense. The ministers were reflecting a tradition
deeply embedded in the psychology of the Labour party. The means-
testing of payments to the unemployed during the depression was a bitter
memory; it was one of the issues that destroyed the Labour Government in
1931, and the party continued to denounce its effects on working-class
go Poverty, Politics and Policy
families. 'For too many people in our movement, especially the older ones',
explained one minister, 'the means test recalls the horrors of the
depression. It was very cruel.' The intensity of Labour's hostility did
diminish in the 1940s, as unemployment fell and the test itself was made
more humane; but a desire to minimise the importance of means-tested
benefits still underlay the party's social policy. Their National Superan-
nuation proposals were designed to raise insurance benefits and thereby
reduce pensioners' needs for means-tested supplements. And in both the
1964 and 1966 elections Labour leaders presented the issue as one of
fundamental disagreement between the parties, arguing that the Con-
servatives wanted a 'means-test society'. 82
The party's attitude was, however, more ambivalent than the election
slogans suggested. The traditional battle-lines between means-tested and
universal benefits were being broken down in the 196os by the growing
interest in solutions involving the tax system; as Crossman admitted,
Labour's proposed Income Guarantee for pensioners was a means-tested
benefit, albeit of a new variety. 83 In addition, the Labour Government was
also making great play of its 'humane' restructuring of means-tested
provision in its establishment of the Supplementary Benefits Commission;
and the concept of'positive discrimination' in the education field was also
changing the shape of the old debate. But the traditional means-testing of
working men was still widely considered illegitimate within the party.
There was determined opposition from those backbenchers who were most
vocal about family poverty, including MPs on both the left and right of the
party; Lenajeger and David Owen, for instance, were equally opposed. 84
At one PLP meeting on the issue, only one of the forty members present
showed any interest in the means-tested solution. 85 Social security
ministers recall being approached in private by occasional backbench
supporters of means tests, but no Labour MP campaigned for them
publicly. Even ministers who supported the means-tested option admitted
its unpopularity within the party: 'There is a residue of dislike about any
major increase in means-testing', explained one: 'This would have made it
difficult on our side.' Later, during the cabinet deliberations, the Chief
Whip made it clear that a means-tested benefit would not go down well in
the party. 86
The social security ministers opted for a family allowance approach, and
the Ministry of Social Security was not unhappy. Family allowances were
an administratively simple solution, as no new machinery would be
required. 'If you have a weapon to hand, you use it', explained one official.
'It was an overnight solution', added another. Little serious consideration
was given to a straight increase in family allowances financed through
general tax revenues. An effective anti-poverty policy would require
raising family allowances close to the amounts paid for children under
Supplementary Benefits, and this would cost an additional £635 million. 87
Officials and ministers knew that they could not hope for so much in a
 Fami!J Poverty
period of severe restraint, so they pinned their hopes on the CPAG idea of
reorganising family allowances and child tax allowances. The abolition of
child tax allowances would allow either the graduated allowance sug-
gested by CPAG or else a flat 30 shilling allowance for every child,
including the first. 88 That would be a major step towards the elimination of
poverty.
Yet there were major problems. The Inland Revenue was strongly
opposed, as will be seen. But even more worrisome was the probable public
reaction. CPAG's proposal ran directly counter to both the growing
resistance to expansion of social security spending and the marked
preference for tax cuts. In the first place, conventional political wisdom
insisted that family allowances were far less popular with the public than
any other social benefit. According to policy-makers, many voters believed
that they were dissipated on bingo, cigarettes and drink, or that they
encouraged irresponsibly large families. 'Family allowances so quickly and
generally became accepted as a vote loser', argued Sir John Walley, that in
a quarter-century neither party 'found the courage at a general election to
promise to increase them' .89 Another official agreed: 'While other benefits
had become accepted almost universally, there was no softening of the
dislike of family allowances.' Labour politicians believed that an increase
in family allowances would be unpopular among their own working-class
supporters. Richard Crossman's local party association told him that 'we
would lose thousands of votes if we were to give any family allowance
[increase] at all', and the Prime Minister later conceded that family
allowances were 'unpopular with many of our own people'. 90 Even the
backbenchers pressing for an increase shared this perception; 'I could
never get up at a constituency meeting without getting tremendous stick
for talking about family allowances so much', recalled one. Such survey
data as exist do suggest that, while family allowances were less popular
than other benefits, the actual percentages of hostile respondents were low
and demands for actual cutbacks limited. A survey conducted for New
Society in 1rfi7, for instance, found only 11 per cent of respondents opposed
to family allowances, although it did note that manual workers were rather
more likely to be critical than non-manual workers. 91 But even a minority
of critical voters induced caution. While successive governments never
actually cut back on existing payments, 92 neither did they increase them;
in effect, they allowed inflation to do the cutting for them.
This uneasiness was compounded enormously in 1966-67 by the tax side
of the CPAG proposal. The elimination of child tax allowances would
mean a direct tax increase on families with children. Although the family
allowance collected weekly at the Post Office would increase, the tax
deducted from the weekly pay slip would also increase. For poorer families
the gain would exceed the loss, but the losers in this redistribution of
income were not restricted to the rich and the upper-middle class. Far from
it: as Table 3·9 makes clear, families would begin to lose if their incomes
92 Poverty, Politics and Policy
were around £18 a week for smaller families and £30 a week for larger
ones. By I g68, when the new policy would come into effect, the earnings of
the great majority of men in manual, clerical and service occupations
would fall within this range. 93 Families in this range were paying tax at the
standard rate and would feel the impact of the elimination of child tax
allowances. The actual net losses, ranging from 5-10 shillings a week,
might not be large, but they were enough to make politicians pause.

TABLE 3·9 Net change in annual income resulting in CPAG proposal

.No. of Weekry EaTTIIId Income

Children £10 £18 £3o

£ £ £
I + 14 -18 -21
2 +58 -4 -18
3 +97 +9 -18
4 + 136 + 33 -18
5 + 175 + 72 -19
6 +214 +Ill -16

iSource: Calculated from Table II of the CPAG Memorandum, 'Family poverty'.

Opposition to hurting these families grew. Many argued that the full
burden of the anti-poverty effort should not fall on families, with no
contribution from single people or childless couples: advocates of a family
policy, such as Sir John Walley, were particularly opposed. Editorials in
the national press began to express concern, and the Conservatives served
notice they would oppose any worsening of the position of the average
family man. 94 In addition poll data suggested public opposition (see Table
3.10). While it is unclear how well the question was understood by
respondents, the answers were not at all encouraging.
Policy-makers relied less on poll data than on their own intuitive
judgements, and in late 1966 they decided that taking money from the
average family to help the poor was just not on. 'We were afraid of
offending not just the middle class, but the artisans, the clerks, the skilled
workers', explained one minister; 'a little money is still important to these
people.' A ministerial colleague agreed: 'The standard rate taxpayer
wasn't doing so really well; he just couldn't be hurt too much.' Backbench
supporters of the CPAG approach, such as David Owen, conceded
publicly that the position of'middle income groups' must be protected. 96 A
civil servant summed it up: 'The full-scale change was not on. The
Government had already raised taxes. It wasn't likely to do something that
would hurt the average family man even more.'
 Family Poverty 93
TABLE 3.10 Public response to CPAG proposal

Question: It is suggested that (i) income tax allowances for

children should be abolished; (ii) instead, family
allowances should be paid for all children and at an
increased rate. Do you approve or disapprove of this
proposal?

December 1g66 April1¢7

% %
Approve 39 29
Disapprove 42 49
Don't know 19 22

Source: Gallup Poll, Report No. 84, p. 67 (April 1967).

The Government backed off. Inside Whitehall, the proposal underwent

continuous refinement in order to protect the interests of the standard rate
taxpayer. A series of meetings was held in the autumn of 1966 with officials
of the major departments involved, plus Nicholas Kaldor, a Cambridge
economist serving as a special tax adviser to the Chancellor. Unlike the
permanent officials of the Inland Revenue, Kaldor was sympathetic to the
CPAG proposal, and he developed the modified version that came to be
known as 'clawback' .96 Child tax allowances would be reduced only
enough to ensure that the tax increase paid by the standard rate taxpayer
was exactly the same as the increase in family allowances. The middle
income family would be left in a net neutral position while the poor would
benefit.
This modified version was an innovation with great political attraction
for the social security ministers. It avoided the traditional means test; it
protected the interests of middle-income families; and it stole the
Opposition's thunder. By using the tax system to claw back payments from
the non-poor, they could pose as humane and sophisticated selectivists.
The idea still faced formidable opponents. The Inland Revenue would
oppose the cuts in tax allowances, and the Treasury would be worried
because, with most families in a neutral position, a larger contribution
from general revenues would be required. In theory, tax allowances could
still be abolished and family allowances set high enough to compensate the
standard rate taxpayer, but this would require a complete triumph over
the Inland Revenue and the Treasury. Faced with this, the social security
ministers lowered their sights. Their speeches increasingly adopted the
example of a 1 o shilling increase in family allowances, and this was the
highest level actively considered inside Whitehall. This would not
eliminate poverty; a 10 shilling increase would lift only 57 per cent of the
children then in poverty above the line. 97 But the political attractions
predominated. 'It would not be 100 per cent perfect', conceded Houghton,
94 Poverty, Politics and Policy
'but it would be 100 per cent acceptable.' 98 In the autumn of 1966 the
social security side lined up behind the 'clawback' and prepared to do
battle with the Inland Revenue, the Treasury and james Callaghan, the
Chancellor of the Exchequer.
The Chancellor, the Treasury and the Inland Revenue. The Chancellor of the
Exchequer was a formidable opponent. While responsibility for social
security was divided between two junior ministers, one of whom was not
even in the cabinet, Callaghan was a senior minister, one of the leaders of
the party and a future Prime Minister. As Chancellor, his economic
strategy had a powerful impact on all other aspects of Government policy,
and he was fully briefed by two major departments, the Treasury and the
Inland Revenue, both of which had important stakes in the family poverty
issue. In addition, Callaghan stood out in a cabinet otherwise studded with
Oxford and Cambridge firsts. As a man who had never been to university,
and who had worked as a junior clerk and a trade union official in the
Inland Revenue before entering politics, he was closer to the mainstream
of the Labour party than many of his colleagues. He was cautious,
pragmatic and profoundly sceptical of many of the schemes dreamed up by
middle-class intellectuals in the party; he tended to assess such ideas by
asking how they would look in the working men's clubs in his Cardiff
constituency. Callaghan had shrewd political instincts, and by 1967-68 he
was increasingly convinced of one overriding point: as labour's problems
continued to grow, and their popular support to decline, they could not go
on antagonising their political base, the manual working class. As Peter
Jenkins later put it, Callaghan was becoming 'The Keeper of the Cloth
Cap' inside the Government. 99
From the beginning of the family poverty debate, the Chancellor
strongly opposed the clawback and advocated a means-tested solution.
Callaghan's position reflected the congruence of two powerful forces:
administrative resistance to clawback from the Inland Revenue and the
Treasury, and his own reading of the electoral dangers of income
redistribution.
The Inland Revenue Board rejected the entire CPAG case. According
to tax orthodoxy, the child tax allowance was not a social benefit like
families allowances, but simply a mechanism for adjusting tax to the
capacity to pay. Their perspective was summed up by Lynes, who had
numerous encounters with Revenue officials while in the Ministry:

The various allowances incorporated into the income tax code over the
years were, the Inland Revenue argued, a wholly justifiable way of
apportioning the total tax burden among individual taxpayers in
accordance with their taxable capacity. At a given level of income, a
childless couple has a higher taxable capacity than a couple with
children. Therefore it is proper that the latter should pay less tax than
the former .... 100
 Family Poverty 95
For egalitarians like the CPAG leaders, the distribution of tax liability
within the more affluent categories was not a major concern. But the
Inland Revenue focused solely on the taxsystem's internal equity and, from
that point of view, a fair distribution of the tax burden between those with
and those without family responsibilities was essential at all income levels.
Their attitude was a long-standing one. When family allowances were
first introduced in 1944, both Beveridge and the then Chancellor of the
Exchequer pointed to the different purposes of the new benefits and the
child tax allowances; and in the 1950s the Royal Commission on Taxation
and Profits rejected similar arguments that the value of tax allowances
should not increase with income and, in fact, had recommended that the
existing child tax allowances be increased for the better-off. 101 This
attitude persisted into the 196os. From the Inland Revenue's point of view,
clawback was not a sophisticated use of the tax system to concentrate
benefit on real need; it was a universal increase in family allowances
primarily financed through an inequitable tax increase on all families.
The Board's opposition reflected a strong tradition about the legitimate
uses of the tax system. This more 'ideological position', as one social
security official described it, held that the tax system was a revenue-raising
mechanism only, and that its use for other social purposes could only
disrupt its efficiency and equity, and jeopardise its public acceptability.
During the Second World War, the Board objected to proposals to finance
social programmes through new luxury taxes on the grounds that 'the
purpose of the income tax is not the redistribution of income', and in the
1950s the Board had argued to the Royal Commission that 'the
redistribution of incomes can be achieved by other and better means.' 102
The clawback proposal ran smack up against this tradition. 103 'Inland
Revenue had always seen the~nselves as the guardians of equity', explained
one minister. 'They always thought that once politicians were allowed to
mess around with the tax system, tying it to all sorts of social ends, it would
be the beginning of the slippery slope.'
Callaghan accepted the Board's interpretation of tax allowances. In the
Commons he struck at the heart of the CPAG proposal by arguing that 'I
do not think that tax allowances ... can be compared with an allowance
that is given by the State out of general taxation'; 104 and in cabinet he
consistently opposed 'tinkering' with the child tax allowances. 105
The Treasury also objected to clawback, but for its own reasons. While
government expenditures are the product of a continuous series of cabinet
decisions on programmes, tax changes have become the preserve of the
Chancellor, his Treasury advisers and usually the Prime Minister. They
are based on the Chancellor's general economic strategy and announced as
a package in the Budget, with the Cabinet being informed only shortly
beforehand. 106 The clawback violated these prerogatives completely. It
would formally link a tax with an expenditure change, thereby reducing
the Chancellor's flexibility in the future; in addition, it would involve a
g6 Poverty, Politics and Policy
collective cabinet decision on a tax issue and its announcement some eight
months before the Budget. From the first cabinet discussion of the issue in
November 1966, Callaghan objected that clawback usurped a budget
decision and represented an intolerable fiscal procedure. 107
This conflict was even manifested in the system of public accounts and
therefore in the costing of the proposal. From the social security point of
view, the real cost was simply the net cost to the Exchequer after the
reduction in tax allowances, or about £32 million. But from the Treasury's
point of view, the tax link was illegitimate and the real cost was £I6o
million. The lower figure was important to the social security minister who
was appealing to a cabinet full of other spending ministers with
expenditures to protect. But the Treasury knew that, even if the net figure
was used internally, the change would appear in the public accounts as a
universal increase in family allowances and another increase in taxation-
thereby undermining its carefully cultivated appearance of restraint. The
result, as Patrick Gordon Walker told the Commons, was a 'great deal of
argument' about costing. 108 In effect, costing became part of the general
argument about the legitimacy of claw back, with competitive estimates of
costs being presented to the cabinet. 109
For Callaghan, these administrative objections to clawback were
reinforced by his acute electoral sensitivity. Leaving the standard-rate
taxpayer in a net neutral position might seem intellectually neat, he
argued, but it ignored the realities of working-class life. Family allowance
increases would still not be uniformly popular; and, to make matters worse,
claw back involved a compulsory transfer of income from the husband, who
paid the higher tax, to the wife, who collected the higher family allowance.
Callaghan was worried that this would generate conflict in working-class
homes and angry encounters with local tax officials. 'He thought it would
be unpopular with the working man', explained one of his advisers.
Gordon Walker also expressed concern publicly about this 'unknown
psychological factor' .no While the social security side rejected this 'cloth
cap image of working-class families', as one of them described it, they had
to admit there was little electoral mileage in giving with one hand and
taking with the other.
Having dismissed clawback, Callaghan insisted that the real choice
before them was a universal increase in family allowances or a means-
tested benefit. When the choice was framed in these terms, the cost
difierence loomed much larger: a means-tested allowance would cost£ 13
million at most, whereas even a 10 shilling increase in family allowances
would cost £I6o million. A difference of this magnitude became a
significant item in the Chancellor's expenditure strategy and his approach
to social policy more generally.
The poverty issue also became enmeshed in a broader reappraisal of
Labour thinking on social spending, a reappraisal being initiated by
Callaghan. Throughout its long years in Opposition, Labour had
 Family Poverty 97
committed itself to major improvements in the social services, and at each
election the Conservatives charged that a Labour victory would mean big
tax increases. Labour leaders denied the charge and insisted that the
necessary revenues would be generated by the economic growth that their
planning would produce. Gaitskell's pledge during the 1959 election not to
increase income taxes was strongly ridiculed by the Conservatives, 111 but
Labour clung to the basic position. In 1961 Crossman recorded that the
drafters of Signposts of the Sixties carefully deleted all references to restraints
on private consumption in order to finance new social programmes, and in
1964 the party's election manifesto stated that, with the single exception of
the income guarantee for pensioners, all improvements in social
programmes depended on the rate of economic expansion. 112 As long as
the economy was growing, Labour was not forced to choose between
private consumption and social spending. 'Equality without tears', it was
later dubbed. This easy answer, however, had disappeared by now. The
endless balance of payments crises and the reluctance to devalue led to
deflation and the postponement of the growth strategy. Low growth
persisted throughout Labour's period in office, and the question of how
to finance the social services became more difficult. 113
Callaghan as Chancellor had to answer this question. His economic
strategy in 1966-67 was aimed at encouraging a revival of industrial
investment and, to accommodate it, he argued that either private
consumption or public expenditure would have to ,he restricted. The
choice, he told the Commons, was to restrain govermpent spending or 'to
impose swingeing increases in taxation' .114 In choosing between such
alternatives, Callaghan was obviously sensitive to the reactions of the
financial community; he had, after all, committed much of his personal
standing to the defence of the pound. But, in fact, he saw the choice
primarily as an electoral one; the 'political problem', he argued, was to
balance 'the social needs of the community' with its 'willingness to accept
consequential burdens in taxation'. 115 Or, in the vernacular of the time,
did the voters want more public services or more 'half-crowns jingling in
their pockets'?
The question goes to the heart of the prospects for income redistribution
in a low-growth economy. Callaghan's own answer was clear: he sensed
the current of public opinion turning against social spending and in favour
of tax cuts, and he argued that middle-income groups, including skilled
manual workers, were unwilling to sacrifice their standard ofliving so that
social security could be improved. 'It would be wrong,' he told the party,
'to impose additional taxation to the point that the man in the street turned
around and said "What the devil are you doing?" ' 116 In cabinet, the
argument was that the Government had shifted the balance towards
public expenditure and now private spending should have its share of the
national cake; or as one minister complained, 'I was always hearing that
workers wanted more money jingling in their pockets.' As the PESC
g8 Poverty, Politics and Policy
process entered another cycle in the fall of 1966, Callaghan mounted his
drive to restrain public spending; he was, in Crossman's words, 'now
pledged irrevocably, deeply and personally to cuts in government
expenditure.' 117
Callaghan was simply responding to the shift in public preferences more
rapidly than some of his colleagues, for even those who opposed him
acknowledged the electoral danger. In November 1966, Crossman insisted
that 'in peace-time the gap between private affluence and public squalor
cannot be corrected without a fairly rapid rate of economic growth.' 118 Roy
Jenkins argued in a similar vein before the London Labour party in May
1g67. 11 • More revealing, perhaps, was Anthony Crosland. Crosland
began by strongly opposing the Chancellor's attempt to shift the balance
more towards private consumption, stating his case publicly in an
important speech in Norwich in July 1967; 120 but immediately after the
1970 election, Crosland told the Fabian Society:

I do assert dogmatically that in a democracy low or zero growth wholly

excludes the possibility [of redistribution]. For any substantial transfer
then involves not merely a relative but an absolute decline in the real
incomes of the better off half of the population (which incidentally
includes large numbers of working class voters) and this they will
frustrate. 121

Cabinet debate over family poverty coincided precisely with Callaghan's

struggle to restrain expenditure, and the issue became one test case in the
battle. The Chancellor insisted that low growth meant that Labour must
rethink many of its traditional attitudes towards the social services,
including its dislike of means-testing. 'It is clear to me', he told the
Commons, 'that a great deal more help can be given if assistance is
concentrated where it is genuinely needed'; and, he noted, income tests
were already accepted without shame for student grants, rate rebates and
council house rents. 122 During cabinet discussion of family poverty,
Callaghan raised his support for the means-tested allowance to the level of
general principle. Crossman quoted the cabinet minutes as follows:

In [the Chancellor's] view the choice lay in the adoption of a new and
more selective approach, relating approved provision closely to
need ... [rather than] the perpetuation of the policy of making
universal provision irrespective of need, with the consequence of having
increased taxation on the one hand or reduced services elsewhere. 123

Thus within Whitehall the battle-lines had formed. The conflict centred,
not on fundamentally different definitions of the nature of poverty, but on
the specifics of the policy response. The process ofdesigning the choices had
been a closed one; social scientists campaigning in public were able to
 Family Poverty 99
influence the range of options considered, but the final choices were
developed within the secret world of officials and ministers. Inside that
world, the two camps were responding to the same trilogy: party
traditions, bureaucratic opposition/and electoral fears. But each balanced
the contending forces different~. The social security ministers gave
priority to traditional Labou~ opposition to means-testing, adapted
partially to the electoral dange~ by protecting the standard-rate taxpayer,
and prepared to do battle wit}1 the Treasury a1_1d the Inland Revenue. On
the other side, the Chancellor accepted the bureaucratic opposition to
clawback, emphasised the wider electoral dangers of redistributive
policies, and prepared to do battle with party doctrine. By the autumn of
1966, the two camps were ready.

IV CHOICE
The final battle over family poverty was agonised and protracted, ranging
for well over a year. But it was not a public battle; it was not fought out
between the major political parties, nor waged by powerful interest groups
intent on imposing their will on Government. It was a hidden battle,
fought out in the corridors of power, its ebb and flow invisible to all but the
most perceptive outside observers. Only in the final stages did conflict
radiate outwards and only then as the internal contestants sought to
mobilise political support for their cause.
Family poverty first emerged in the social services cabinet committee in
November 1966 in conjunction with several other welfare proposals. But,
given the strongly opposed views, little was resolved at that level, and the
first major discussion in full cabinet took place on 20 December. The two
sides of the argument were outlined by Callaghan, Houghton and
Herbison (who, although not a member of cabinet, did attend these
meetings). While a few ministers echoed Callaghan's concern about
cutting the tax allowances of middle-income families, the majority
generally favoured the clawback scheme. They rejected a proposal to
delay the decision until after consultations with the TUC and the CBI and
the publication of a White Paper on the issue. The final decision was to be
made in early January, and in the meantime the two sides were instructed
to work out an agreement, if they could.l 24
But the balance in cabinet began to shift in the new year. On 6January
1967 a minor cabinet reshuffle removed Houghton and transferred his
social service duties to the new minister without portfolio, Patrick Gordon
Walker. Although the poverty issue did not precipitate the change, the
balance in cabinet on the issue was fundamentally affected by it, as Gordon
Walker favoured the means-tested solution. The solidarity of the social
security side was breached and the battle intensified. The Treasury paper
on the costings was delayed, both sides began to sound out support, and the
100 Poverry, Politics and Policy
momentum shifted to the Chancellor. In addition to Gordon Walker, Fred
Lee, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, implied support for the
means-tested proposal in the House of Commons; while Lee was no longer
in the cabinet, he was close to several of the economic ministers.1 25 More
importantly, there were rumours that other spending ministers were under
pressure to reconsider; the Chancellor was demanding serious public
expenditure restraint, and the pre-emption of £160 million, according to
the Treasury costings, by a single social security programme would only
increase their difficulties. 'If there is a big increase in family allowances,
their departments will suffer', Crossman recorded at the time.l 26 The
battle was carried into the press, and a rash of'informed' stories announced
that ministers were having second thoughts. Typical was that of David
Wood of The Times, who quoted a senior Labour minister as saying that
'the goodwill of part ofthe middle classes is all the difference between being
in Government or being out' and that 'Miss Herbison will not be allowed
to ruin a good thing.' 127
Margaret Herbison now began to mobilise outside support to offset the
erosion of her support in cabinet. She let her back bench supporters know
that pressure would be appreciated, and they responded with vociferous
demands for the family allowance approach, especially during Question
Period. 128 'She must have been desperate', one of them remarked, 'because
normally she was very discreet.' The party was hardly in revolt: only 30
MPs signed an Early Day motion on the issue, and at a PLP meeting in
early February only 25 stayed for a special discussion of social security
issues. 129 But certainly the Minister ofSocial Security did enjoy the support
of a vocal minority.
A second source of support was the CPAG. Lynes was quietly informed
of the situation by his contacts in the Ministry of Social Security, and the
group redoubled its efforts. CPAG was still promoting its original proposal
for the complete elimination of the tax allowances but, after being briefed
by the Ministry, it shifted to support the Minister's position. On 15
February CPAG submitted another memorandum, this time to the
Chancellor of the Exchequer, in which it argued strongly for clawback. 1311
More importantly, the group stepped up its media campaign in favour of
the approach, working hard to counter the impression that middle-income
families would suffer. 131 CPAG essentially took on the role of public voice
for the Minister's position.
A third source of support mobilised by Herbison was the TUC.
Historically, the trade unions had been suspicious of family allowances,
but their hostility had largely disappeared by the 1g6os and the TUC had
been advocating that they be increased for several years. The TUC had
not been following the debate within the Government closely, but
Herbison knew where they would stand. She invited representatives of the
General Council to a meeting, outlined the alternatives, and emphasised
that clawback would not hurt well-paid workers.l 32 The delegation was
 Family Poverty 101
fully apprised of the political battle in cabinet; Crossman encountered one
of the union representatives, Harry Nicholas, later that day and found that
'he knew all about the struggle between Peggy Herbison and Jim
Callaghan and ... he was doing all he could to see that Jim was defeated
on this.' 133 The General Council quickly came back with a unanimous
rejection of the means-tested benefit and an endorsement of claw back-
just in time for the next major cabinet debate on the issue.
The cabinet meeting on 23 February 1967 turned to social security, with
many ministers believing that the Chancellor had garnered enough
support to carry the day. Mter lengthy discussion, the Prime Minister went
round the table for opinions: the tally did reveal a significant shift towards
the Chancellor- but a small majority still opposed the means test. At this
point, however, the Chancellor insisted that the only acceptable alterna-
tive was a general increase in family allowances, since clawback violated
the prerogatives of the budget, and following the meeting there was
confusion about whether the cabinet had simply decided to increase family
allowances or to adopt clawback as well. 134 Another set of papers was
circulated and another cabinet meeting took up the problem in mid-
March, with particular reference to the budgetary and costing com-
plications of clawback. The Prime Minister suggested, as a compromise,
that family allowances be increased in October but that the tax side of the
proposal be left up to the discretion of the Chancellor and the budget. But
this ran aground on the determined opposition of some of the claw backers,
such as Crossman, who themselves opposed a universal increase in family
allowances as wasteful; and the discussion ground on. In the end, it was
wearily agreed that the issue should be deferred until the PESC review in
July when the general expenditure situation would be clearer.1 35
Unfortunately for the Government, no one else knew that the issue had
been postponed. The press, the Opposition and Labour backbenchers all
confidently expected that the Chancellor would announce the decision in
his April budget, and the lack of any word provoked widespread criticism.
CPAG sent an open letter to all cabinet ministers, 136 and appealing
editorials and feature articles abounded, many of them fuelled by CPAG
material: 'The People the Budget Forgot' (Sunday Times); 'Promises, Plans
but No Decisions' (Sunday Mirror); 'How To Displease Everyone' (Obser-
ver); 'Who Cares About One Child in Six?' (Daily Mirror); and 'A Million
Children Living in Poverty' (Sun).I 37 The Conservatives used one of their
supply days to move a motion condemning the lack of action, and Labour
protests increased a notch; more backbenchers joined the chorus and
Callaghan was questioned closely on the issue at a PLP meeting by
Houghton, now the chairman of the party. 138 But the protests were
insufficient to budge the Government from its new timetable.
The issue did not re-emerge in cabinet for several months, and in the
interim the intensity of the dispute eased. The balance of opinion was
settling against the means-tested option: in mid-May the Prime Minister
102 Poverty, Politics and Policy
told the Opposition he did not agree with their call for greater means-
testing,139 and in June a bill introduced to increase national insurance
benefits contained a temporary power to raise family allowances in case the
Government did decide to increase the benefits in the early autumn. The
crucial point was that the bill did not confer the power to means-test the
increase. There was, of course, no obligation to use the power, but the bill
seemed to indicate the direction of the eventual decision. In fact, when the
Chancellor had not objected strenuously to the proposal in cabinet, the
ministerial clawbackers sensed victory; he was, they believed, slowly
conceding the defeat of the means-tested option and shifting his concern to
the size and financing of a general increase in family allowances. 140
Callaghan did make one final attempt to press the means-tested solution a
few weeks later, this time in the form of a special housing allowance for the
poor. But the proposal was raised at the last minute, without adequate
discussion with the relevant ministers, and with a number of adminis-
trative questions unresolved. The cabinet's response was even less
favourable to this version and the proposal was dropped. 141
The family allowance approach had won, but the critical issues of the
amount of the increase and the clawback remained. These issues were
confronted in cabinet committee and full cabinet in mid-July. By now, the
issue had been .before cabinet repeatedly and patience was running out;
'one of the bitterest cabinets I've attended', was Crossman's description. 142
On the amount of the increase, Herbison pushed for 10 shillings, the
Chancellor for 5 shillings, and the compromise was 7 shillings. As an
interim step, 5 shillings was to be paid for fourth and subsequent children
as of October 1967, with the rest beginning in April rg68. But clawback
excited a real row. The Chancellor insisted on the prerogatives of the
budget and, despite the angry opposition of Herbison, Crossman and
others, he won. When announcing their decision to increase family
allowances, Gordon Walker could only note that the Chancellor of the
Exchequer would 'propose, at the right time and in light of all the relevant
circumstances, the method or methods by which the necessary revenue
could be raised' .143
The result was paradoxical. The Labour Government were announcing
a universal increase in family allowances, an alternative no minister
wanted, and their decision was widely criticised as wasteful, a triumph of
ancient ideology over common sense. The paradox was soon accentuated.
On the day after the announcement, Margaret Herbison resigned, citing
her disappointment with the family poverty decision as one of her
reasons. 144 Yet within a year, everything she had fought for-a 10 shilling
increase with clawback-had come to pass.
The decisive break came with the devaluation of the pound in
November 1967, and the replacement of Callaghan as Chancellor by Roy
Jenkins. Like Callaghan, Jenkins had come from humble origins. But there
the similarity ended. Jenkins was a political intellectual. He had gone to
 Fami{y Poverty 103

Oxford on a scholarship, taking a first-class degree; he had written a

number of books, mainly political biographies; and, in general, he
probably preferred to dine with academics rather than trade unionists.
Although on the right ofhis party, Jenkins thought of himself as a liberal
reformer and a policy innovator. With the arrival of the new Chancellor,
the clawbackers saw their chance. Kaldor continued to press on, and
Judith Hart, the new Minister of Social Security, met privately with
Jenkins over Christmas, as did a number of back bench advocates of the
policy. The Chancellor was sympathetic; 'he was attracted intellectually as
it was a neat solution', recalled one of his advisers. In addition, the
Treasury's opposition eased as the change would be announced as part of a
post-devaluation budget statement and, as such, would do less damage to
proper fiscal procedures. The Inland Revenue were increasingly isolated,
and they lost. In the special January statement, the adoption of claw back
was announced. 146 The path of the extra 3 shillings was more tortuous.
During his post-devaluation speech, the Prime Minister had promised that
the poor would be protected from the resulting increase in the cost ofliving.
Devaluation, however, increased rather than reduced the pressure to cut
expenditures, and in late November the cabinet rejected any further rise in
family allowances. 146 Redemption of Wilson's pledge was eventually
achieved, but at the price of an equivalent reduction in spending on
another social programme, sickness insurance. On that basis, Jenkins'
March budget included the announcement of an additional 3 shilling
increase, beginning in October 1968 and also subject to clawback. 147 The
Labour Government's poverty policy was finally complete: a 10 shilling
increase in family allowances with clawback.
Why did the cabinet react in the way that it did? The division at the
crucial meeting of 23 February appears to have been: 148

For clawback For a means-tested allowaru:e

Michael Stewart James Callaghan

Lord Gardiner Roy Jenkins
Richard Crossman Patrick Gordon Walker
William Ross Douglas jay
Anthony Greenwood Anthony Crosland
Earl of Longford Cledwyn Hughes
Ray Gunter Richard Marsh
Fred Peart (Kenneth Robinson)*
Barbara Castle (John Diamond)*
Anthony Wedgwood Benn (Herbert Bowden)t
(Margaret Herbison)* (Denis Healey)tt
(John Silkin)*
(George Brown)t
* Not formall)'. a member of cabinet but attended these meetings.
t Absent from the February meeting but indicated position at later one.
tt See note 148.
104 Poverty, Politics and Policy
No single factor can explain this breakdown. In part it was a division
between the left and right wings of the Government, but only in part. The
left wing of the party was not well represented in Wilson's cabinet and
many clawbackers, including Peggy Herbison, were not left-wing. Cer-
tainly ministers did not think of the split primarily in such terms: 'quite
definitely not', remarked one clawbacker; 'not really', confirmed another.
Individual ministers were caught in the same net of pressures that had
enveloped the issue from its origins. These can be represented as follows:

c M
L Party tradition E
A Administrative procedure A
w Electoral consequences N
B Expenditure restraint s
A Interest group attitude
c Professional opinion T
K E
s
T
The most plausible interpretation is that most members of the cabinet
shared the traditional Labour uneasiness about the means test. As one
clawbacker put it, 'The means test psychology was the main thing. The
Cabinet was generally disposed against it, so that it was an up-hill fight for
the Chancellor.' But the other factors in the chart also shaped ministers'
choices by either reinforcing or modifying party tradition. The position of
the TUC strengthened the opposition of some ministers, particularly those
like Michael Stewart, Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, whose
departmental responsibilities required co-operation with the unions.
Others, however, including several ministers who did not particularly like
means tests, were induced to support the Chancellor. A few shared the
Chancellor's concerns about the reaction of financial speculators and
middle-income voters. For others, the pressure on public expenditures was
most compelling; spending ministers, in particular, realised that a big
increase in family allowances would mean that their departments would
suffer. This was undoubtedly Callaghan's biggest asset. Even ministers like
Crosland and Robinson, who were publicly resisting the Chancellor on the
general issue of public versus private consumption, nevertheless supported
him on the specific question offamily poverty. Without their support, plus
that of several other spending ministers, Callaghan would have been in a
much smaller minority.
Sheer numbers is not the only criterion in settling cabinet disputes.
Much has been written about the predominance of particular members of
the cabinet, notably the Prime Minister, the Chancellor and the Foreign
 Family Poverty 105

Secretary. 149 On the face of it, Peggy Herbison was badly outmatched;
while Callaghan was a major figure in the Government, she was not even in
the cabinet and her nominal superior, Gordon Walker, was opposed to her.
Yet despite all this, she won on the means test, if not claw back. Clearly the
active support of ministers such as Crossman and Stewart was essential to
her success. So too was the neutrality of the Prime Minister. The social
security side sensed that Wilson mildly favoured them, at least on the
means test, and, while he did not intervene decisively on their side, he held
his hand rather than supporting the Chancellor. This was undoubtedly
important in stalling Callaghan's momentum, especially at the crucial
meeting of 23 February.1 50
Finally the compromise policy also reflected the strength of feelings
around the table. The social security side was passionately opposed to the
means test; for Peggy Herbison such a policy was simply intolerable, and
some ofher cabinet supporters were equally committed. For Callaghan, on
the other hand, the means-test proposal was only one element in a general
expenditure strategy, and was much less important than other problems
facing him. In the end, he was prepared to live with a general increase in
family allowances. On clawback, however, the strength of feelings was
reversed. Callaghan insisted absolutely on the prerogatives ofthe budget.
Although at least one minister interpreted his strong statements on the
question as an implicit resignation threat, 151 it was clearly never pushed to
such lengths. While Herbison, Crossman and a couple of others felt
strongly about clawback, the bulk of the cabinet did not. Important
members who opposed Callaghan on the means test agreed with, or
acquiesced in, his insistence on budget flexibility; 'very few of the majority
were willing to fight', Crossman complained. 152 And the Prime Minister
agreed that the Chancellor should reserve his position on the tax side. Only
the agreement of the new Chancellor, Jenkins, could complete this
innovation in British social policy.
The battle was over.lt had been a hidden battle, fought out within the
confines of inter-departmental committees and cabinet meetings. The
process operated almost in a vacuum. Central policy-makers were acutely
conscious of outside forces; indeed their decision turned heavily on their
reading of external reactions. Yet the process of deliberation itself was
closed. There were continuing demands from outside that action be taken,
but there were few direct interventions, no elaborate negotiations with
powerful groups. The few active groups were mobilised and led at critical
stages by the internal contestants. The final decision turned on the
attitudes and perceptions of policy-makers: their party traditions, their
administrative concerns, their electoral fears. Outside social constraints
were real and potent. But they were present as estimates in the minds of
policy-makers rather than demonstrations on the steps of Parliament.
106 Poverty, Politics and Policy

V EPILOGUE
Family poverty reveals the intellectual and institutional processes of policy
innovation forming patterns different from those of the Rent Act. Rents
had been thrust high on the policy agenda by intense political conflict, but
the legislation itself was predominantly shaped by social-science know-
ledge and professional ideas. In the poverty case, the process was virtually
reversed. Poverty was not an established political issue; and social scientists
had their greatest impact on the recognition of the problem and on the way
in which it was measured. Through CPAG, they were able to change the
way in which policy-makers interpreted British society. Their impact on
the salience of the issue and the final policy response, however, was much
less. The relative importance of the issue was settled on strictly political
criteria; sensitivity among political elites ensured some action, but the lack
of broad electoral support foreclosed the chance of major reform. Social
scientists did influence the range of options considered, and the inclusion of
tax allowances was the result of their campaign. In comparison with the
rents case, however, the minister and civil servants were much less
uncertain about how to proceed and outside experts were not invited into
the heart of the department's deliberations. More importantly, in-
stitutional resistance was far more formidable. Bureaucratic objections to
the mechanisms proposed, and the perceived electoral costs of income
redistribution, both between classes (from affluent to poor) and within
income classes (from husband to wife), blunted their drive. Their proposals
were steadily refined, with the clawback compromise being devised by
another politically active intellectual. But the final, agonised choice
turned, not on a conflict between professional doctrines and party ideology
as in the rents case, but on a trilogy of intensely political concerns: party
traditions, bureaucratic procedures and electoral strategies.
The impact of the Government's policies was clearly a disappointment
to everyone. The decisions did help low-income families in the short term.
But they did not eliminate poverty: over half of the children involved were
still below the Supplementary Benefits level the day after the increases
came into effect; and, of course, the Supplementary Benefits level
continued to rise over the ensuing years, raising the poverty line even
further. By 1970 even clawback was proving counter-productive. The tax
threshold dipped below the poverty line and, in effect, some of the family
allowance increase was being clawed back from the poor as well as the
prosperous .153
The political impact was also disappointing to the Government. Labour
politicians soon decided that their decision was unpopular with the public.
By November 1967 Judith Hart was quite defensive about the increase/ 54
and the policy became a problem for Labour in by-elections in early 1968.
'The only subject I was attacked on passionately then was the family
 Family Poverty I07

allowance announcement', one minister recalled; 'it was most unpopular

with our own people.' After three particularly devastating by-election
results at the end of March, a long line of Labour backbenchers,
representing both the left and right wings of the party, rose in the House to
complain about the reactions of their constituents: Iss

Throughout the country in all our constituencies there are many people
who are opposed to the idea of extending family allowances .... The
Government have acted very courageously. (Eric Helfer)
Increases in family allowances are not popular .... Many people-
including many Labour voters or potential Labour voters- do not look
with much favour on family allowance increases. (D. Winnick)
There has been a furore over this proposition in my constituency.
(E. Wainwright)

The Parliamentary Secretary, Charles Loughlin, also conceded that

'family allowances are unpopular' and accused the Conservatives of
exploiting the issue 'on the door-step when canvassing in by-elections' .1s 6
This initial public reaction was magnified by confusion as clawback
came into effect. While the family allowances were increased in three
stages, the associated tax changes only started at the beginning of the tax
year in April. The result was that each April families were hit with tax
increases greater than their immediate family allowance increase. The
path was tortuous:

October I 967 F'llmily Allowance increase of 5 shillings for fourth

and subsequent children; no tax change.
April Ig68 7 shilling Family Allowance increase completed;
taxes increased to claw back not only the 7 shillings
but also the additional3 shilling Family Allowance
increase planned for the following October.
October I g68 Additional 3 shilling Family Allowance increase;
no tax change.
April 1969 Tax increased slightly as the additional 3 shilling
Family Allowance increase, which had been paid
for only half of the previous year, would apply for
the whole year.

With different departments in charge of the benefit and tax sides, no co-
ordinated attempt was made to prepare the public for these complicated
adjustments. The reaction was 'hostile', as a Labour pamphlet conceded;
'the Inland Revenue staff have been overworked in answering complaints
from angry husbands who did not know their wives were receiving an
increased family allowance.' 1s7 The head of Inland Revenue Staff
108 Poverty, Politics and Policy
Federation publicly denounced clawback. 15~ Clearly some of Jim
Callaghan's early worries were being vindicated. The reaction impressed
ministers. Publicly they defended the decision and Harold Wilson urged
the party to 'stop apologising' 159 for it. But even before the full reaction to
clawback was felt, Crossman recorded that many ministers who had
supported the original decision had changed their minds. 'The Cabinet',
he concluded, 'is now against family allowances.' 160 During the remain-
ing two years of the Labour Government, various proposals for helping
low-income families were discussed, including the further use of family
allowances and clawback. But no additional steps were taken before the
election of 1970. 16 1
Yet inaction also hurt the Government. Throughout their campaign,
CPAG had remained sympathetic to the Labour Party and their old
friends in the Cabinet. But as the 1970 election approached and no further
action was taken, the group took off their gloves. They attacked the
Government's social policy record and argued that the poor had actually
become poorer under Labour. The conclusion ofthis phase of British social
policy was a bitter public exchange between CPAG and the Labour
Government during the run-up to the election campaign. 162
The decisions of 1967-68 did, however, represent an innovation in social
policy. The tax and benefit systems were linked for the first time. Although
institutional resistance ensured that this first step was a modest one,
clawback did legitimate a new principle in social and fiscal policy. The
poverty debate continued and bolder examples of the new principles, such
as the Conservative Government's proposed tax credit scheme, were to be
prominent items on the social policy agenda of the 1970s.
4 Poverty and Educational
Priority
The impact of the rediscovery of poverty in the 1g6os soon spread beyond
the narrow range of income transfer programmes initially focused on by
the CPAG. As the decade progressed, specialists in a wider and wider
range of policy areas took up the issue, until proposals for reform to aid the
poor were being made in virtually every domestic policy area-education,
housing, health, personal social services, taxation, incomes policy. The first
major extension of the poverty debate came in 1967 when the Central
Advisory Council on Education (CACE) issued a dramatic call for a
national programme of compensatory education. 1 Education, the Council
argued, should be employed in a concerted effort to break down the social
barriers that trap young children in poverty. The most deprived urban
areas should be designated Educational Priority Areas (EPAs) and receive
exceptional educational resources, the best and most generous educational
facilities in the land.
The EPA proposal was a response to a dilemma. Western societies have
created a complex and expensive system of social services. In Britain the
National Health Service is an object of widespread pride; education has
expanded dramatically since the war; public housing provides a third of
the total housing stock. By the mid-1g6os social services consumed close on
40 per cent of public expenditure. Yet this expansion of the social services
has not had the impact on poverty and inequality that many had hoped
for. The poor consistently fail to get the full benefit. Many live in privately
rented slum housing, not modern council housing; their children continue
to leave school without adequate education; and they are less likely to
receive elementary health benefits such as immunisation and vaccination.
Universal social services alleviate the stigma associated with discrimi-
natory policies. But the problems of the poor seem impervious to them.
As these lessons began to sink in during the 1g6os, western governments
increasingly experimented with their social services. The most dramatic
experiment was the American War on Poverty, which relied heavily on
compensatory education and community action programmes; but the
same sort of approach also spread to Britain. Similar programmes began,
albeit on a smaller scale: Educational Priority Areas, the Urban Pro-
gramme, the Community Action Programme, Housing Action Areas.
EP As were the first in this series and, potentially, represented an important

109
IIO Poverty, Politics and Policy
innovation. The existing educational system was universal, seeking to
provide equal services to all. But as the CACE report put it, 'Equality is
not enough.' 2 The EPA idea of 'positive discrimination' invoked another
conception of educational equality. The aim was not simply to provide
equal services but to achieve more nearly equal outcomes; and the
narrowing of inequalities in educational attainment seem to dictate
unequal services. In effect, the proposal implied a large change in the
purposes of the educational system and the principles on which it was
based. Potentially, EPAs represented what one observer described as the
only really new educational policy since I 944· 3
The politics ofEPAs reveal the intellectual and institutional processes of
policy innovation moving in patterns remarkably similar to those in the
field of family poverty. The proposal was essentially social-science theory
translated into public policy; the original inspiration for EPAs came from
ideas developing in the academic community in the early I96os. But the
Plowden Council's recommendation ran into sharp conflict with the
institutional structure of education, and in the end the proposal was
fundamentally remoulded to fit the existing contours of administrative and
political life. The resulting policy turned out to be but a pale reflection of
the original idea. EPAs provide a fascinating view of the emergence of a
new idea, its diffusion in the political world, and its transformation in the
policy process.

I EPAs: THE EMERGENCE OF. AN IDEA

The Central Advisory Council was a unique institution in the field of social
policy. Under the terms of the I944 Education Act, the Minister of
Education was required to appoint councils of outside experts to advise
him or her on educational theory and practice, and throughout the post-
war years the councils produced major reports on different educational
problems. Since their memberships were drawn from professional edu-
cators and academics, the various CACEs functioned as direct links
between the concerns of professionals and those of administrators. Their
reports absorbed, extended and legitimated ideas and theories emanating
from educational experts. 4 Unlike in other social policy areas, the
interchange between the intellectual and institutional worlds had been
institutionalised.
In June I963 Edward Boyle, the Conservative Minister of Education,
announced the appointment of a Central Advisory Council to examine
primary education. There had been no comprehensive review of primary
education since I 93 I, and it had emerged as an obvious subject for study.
The Council was chaired by Lady Plowden and its membership included
the usual large number of headmasters, inspectors and educational
committee chairmen. But there was also a larger than usual contingent of
 Poverty and Educational Priority Ill

academics, reflecting the concern of Boyle and the Ministry to draw on

new developments in the social and biological sciences. Two of the
academics appointed were David Donnison and Michael Young. These
men had backgrounds in sociology and social administration, and the fact
that they were both on the left of political centre helped balance the
political composition of the council. 5 Young was also included as a
representative of a new breed of educational activist. He was the author of
the brilliant educational satire, The Rise of the Meritocracy, 6 and the founder
of the Advisory Centre for Education, a group which campaigned for
greater parental participation in the schooling of their children. Together
Donnison and Young were critical for the emergence of the EPA idea.
By the time the Plowden Council began its deliberations, it could draw
on two major streams of social criticism. The first was the rediscovery of
poverty; while the Plowden group was at work, Abel-Smith and Townsend
published their full findings and launched the CPAG campaign. The
second was the growing realisation in professional circles that education
was not having much impact on either poverty or inequality. In 1944 the
new Education Act had established for the first time a comprehensive state
education system, including secondary education for all. Since then,
further and university education had expanded rapidly. British society was
devoting more and more of its resources to educating the young;
educational spending was rising dramatically not only in real terms but
also as a percentage of the gross national product (see Figure 4.1). Great
expectations had surrounded this expansion. According to Churchill, the
1944 Act would ensure equal opportunity for all, and for his Labour
partners in the wartime Government the Act represented the results of a
generation's educational ambition and effort. 7
But the social promise of 1944 was not being fulfilled. Although general
educational levels were rising, marked class differentials in attainment
remained, and the children of the poor were making the least progress of
all. The lead in gathering the relevant evidence was taken by academics,
since once again the information in the hands of the central government
was inadequate. Special surveys were required, and, as in the other cases,
influence as exerted by those capable of carrying them out. Sociologists, in
particular, became increasingly interested in education, one of the first
important studies being conducted by Floud, Halsey and Martin, and
others following over the next decade. 8 These private efforts were extended
by government commissions, such as the CACEs and the Robbins
Committee on Higher Education, which commissioned major research
projects and nation-wide surveys. 9 The statistical appendices to their
reports soon numbered hundreds of pages and in themselves became
important contributions to educational sociology.
The cumulative message of these various studies was clear. At each stage
of education, working-class children did less well than middle-class
children; and the poorest children- the sons and daughters of unskilled
I I2 Poverty, Politics and Policy

5.5
----Current
5.0 ------Current and capital

4.5

4.0

3.0

2.5

1.5

1.0

o~--L-~--~--~~~~~~L-~~~~~~-
1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970

Fm. 4.1 Education expenditure as a percentage of UK national income, 192~5

Source: J. Vaizey andj. Sheehan, Resourcesfor Education (London: Allen & Unwin,
lg68), P· 138.

workers-did worst of all. The number of such children in grammar

schools w~s disproportionately low. Indeed poor children tended to leave
school as soon as they legally could; 92 per cent of the sons of unskilled
workers stopped their education at age I5. 1° Children of fathers in
professional and managerial occupations were twenty times more likely to
enter university as those offathers in semi-skilled or unskilledjobs. 11 More
revealingly, these differentials had been remarkably stable over the post-
war period. As one academic survey concluded: 'Middle-class pupils have
 Poverty and Educational Priority II3

retained almost intact their historic advantage over the manual working
class.' 12 The major expansion of education at the higher levels, in which so
much faith had been placed, in fact represented an unintended shift of
educational spending towards the upper income groups.
Members of the Plowden Council were aware of this pattern. As left-
wing intellectuals, Donnison and Young were particularly concerned; and
when the Council broke down into smaller groups to prepare the various
sections of the report, they became the core ofWorking Party No.2, which
examined social influences on educational attainment. They were joined
by two others also interested in the social sciences: Timothy Raison, a
Conservative journalist who later became founder editor of New Society,
and Maurice Kogan, the Council Secretary, a young civil servant who
later became Professor of Government and Social Administration at
Brunei University. The working party commissioned elaborate surveys
and research projects, invited extensive evidence from outside experts, and
travelled to other countries to look at experiments there. Throughout, its
members were looking for educational policies that would have some
impact on poverty and inequality.

DEFINITION OF THE PROBLEM

What could be done? Were class differences in educational attainment

simply given facts about which the schools could do nothing? Or could the
educational system be employed as a mechanism for reducing poverty?
The EPA proposal emerged from attempts to grapple with this problem.
Virtually all educationists accept that educational achievement is the
product of a complex interaction between inherited ability and environ-
ment; but sharp disagreements centre on the weight that should be given to
each.

I • Tht Gtnetic Perspective

Differences in intelligence and educational attainment are predo-
minantly attributable to genetic differences, with environmental factors
contributing only a minor portion of the variance among individuals.
The low educational attainment of the poor is primarily a reflection of
lower inherited ability. As one psychologist argued, 'The ability of
parents who have entered one of the professions tends to be transmitted
to their children. In addition for generation after generation ... there
has been an appreciable amount ofsocial mobility; bright children from
the poorer classes forge their way upwards, and duller children from the
higher classes drift downwards. Class differences thus become inevitable
in any civilized society.' 13
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
2. The Environmental Perspective

Social influences have a major impact on educational performance. A

great pool of potential exists among even the poorest classes of society,
but powerful environmental forces operating throughout a child's life
suppress his or her educational progress. As a sociologist argued, 'It is
evidently not just a matter ofintelligence. The long-standing reservoir of
ability amongst the working-class children is still there; the task of the
century is to bring it more under the influence of education.' 14

These interpretations have conflicting implications. The genetic per-

spective implies that, short of genetic engineering, class differentials are
relatively immutable and are not worth trying to eradicate. The
environmental perspective, on the other hand, implies that social changes,
including possibly a different pattern of educational provision, might
significantly increase the educational success rate of the poor. Clearly a
marked shift between these perspectives could have important
consequences.
EPAs were a product of such a shift. The 196os saw the high-water mark
of the environmental perspective and of faith in the capacity of education
to change society. The shift in professional opinion can be seen in the major
educational reports. During the interwar years, those active in education
paid the greatest attention to genetic inheritance and its measurement.
The 1931 Harlow Report and the 1938 Spens Report, for instance,
accepted the advice of psychologists such as Cyril Burt that the important
factor in educational attainment was inborn cognitive ability. 15 But after
the war this perspective was increasingly challenged. Sociologists entered
the lists. Their academic orientation inclined them to social explanations
of achievement, and they began the laborious task of tracing the
educational progress of different classes. The major CACE reports of the
195os faithfully reflected this evolution in the intellectual debate, and by
the 196os there was a wealth of evidence to support the conclusions of the
Roo bins Committee that working-class children were much less successful
on average than middle-class children ofsimilar ability, as measured by IQ
tests. 16 Even these analyses were thought to understate the differences, as a
child's score on an IQ test was itself environmentally influenced. Indeed
experts increasingly argued that there was no means of measuring pure
inherited ability. One could only guess at the relative influence of genetic
and environmental factors, and throughout the 196os the prevailing
assumption in professional debate was that social influences were very
powerful indeed. One survey of British educational research reported that
some 'writings in education and sociology suggest that the genetic element
in intelligence is either so small as to be educationally insignificant or it is
non-existent.' 17 While not everyone went that far, the pendulum had
clearly swung a long way from the assumptions of the 193os.
 Poverty and Educational Priority I 15
Equally important to the EPA policy was a shift in theories of how
poorer children were handicapped by their environment. In the past, the
problem had been seen in hard material terms; grinding poverty led to
illness and poor attendance, overcrowded homes, and refusals of grammar-
school places. However, with greater working-class affluence in the post-
war period, attention increasingly focused on the values of working-class
culture. Poorer children were considered disativantaged because their
parents did not consider education important and did not encourage their
intellectual development. Early research on linguistic development was
interpreted as suggesting that, from infancy, poor children absorbed
restricted patterns of speech and thought from the home. The deprived
child's educational prospects seemed dimmed even before he arrived at the
schoolhouse door.
When the Plowden Council began its work, the policy implications of
the environmental perspective were still unclear. But in 1g64 America
provided a lead. President johnson declared his War on Poverty, and a
central weapon in this war was compensatory education. Hundreds of
thousands of young slum children were enrolled in Head Start, a massive
pre-school programme designed to help them overcome the limitations of
their background. Heroic expectations surrounded those first years.
Poverty was to be vanquished; education was to be the means. Given the
environmental perspective of British educational experts, the American
experiment was very compelling. Here was a dramatic attempt to go
beyond merely documenting social influences and to use education to
overcome environmental deprivation. The American experiment sparked
a transatlantic flurry, and Michael Young in particular was enthusiastic.
He launched a pilot project in Britain, 18 and several members ofWorking
Party No. 2 visited the US to examine Head Start at first hand. The initial
interest was reinforced by the Council's own research findings and the
testimony of experts who came before it.
The section of the final report written by these men was an articulate
statement of the environmentalist point of view. 19 Excellent schools, it
argued, could compensate for a poor environment, providing the stimu-
lation that more prosperous children received at home. 'Education',
Donnison later insisted, 'is one of the most powerful agents in the field of
human change.' 20 The report called for a national policy of 'positive
discrimination': deprived urban areas should be designated 'educational
priority areas' and should receive the most generous and innovative
educational provision.
EPAs reflected professional faith rather than knowledge. Crucial
assumptions were untested. The Council had not attempted to measure
'innate ability' and could not really demonstrate how important en-
vironmental influences such as parental encouragement actually were. 21
There was little hard evidence that extra educational resources would in
fact produce better results. 22 Nor had the Council examined the geo-
116 Poverty, Politics and Policy
graphic distribution of poverty to see if designating specific urban areas
would actually cover most poor children. In fact, within two years some of
the assumptions underlying compensatory education were being seriously
challenged. A string of negative evaluations of Head Start reopened a
furious debate about the relative importance of genetic and environmental
factors and the extent to which education can compensate for social
deprivation; and other studies questioned whether poverty was sufficiently
concentrated geographically in Britain for an EPA strategy to work. 23 But
the proponents of EPAs were fortunate. There is a time-lag between
professional and political debate, and their recommendations were to
outlast the swell of professional confidence that produced them.
Thus the process of social monitoring and analysis was once again
dominated by professionals and social scientists, in this case operating both
independently and through government research bodies. They docu-
mented the problem, defined its causes, and prescribed innovative policy.
Now the critical question became whether their ideas would find sufficient
support to be translated into public policy.

II EPA POLITICS: AN IDEA

IN SEARCH OF A CONSTITUENCY
As the invention of a small group of intellectuals, EPAs needed strong
political backing to avoid being put on the proverbial dusty shelf. Thl!"ppOr
parents whose children were to benefit could not provide a policl.cal
constituency; they remained unorganised and unassertive throughout.
Support would have to come from somewhere else. The Plowden Council
did its best to create its own constituency. It attached 'absolute priority' to
the EPA proposal over all other recommendations in the report, 24 and
after the report's publication members of the Council campaigned
strenuously for their ideas. Unlike previous CACE chairmen, Lady
Plowden was unwilling to fade away. She exhorted Ministers and senior
officials in private; she spoke publicly to educational interest groups and
teacher conferences; she wrote articles for the press and visited countless
schools; she was co-opted onto the Inner London Education Authority's
schools sub-committee and pressed for action at that level. In addition, she
and her colleagues turned themselves into public auditors, reconvening on
each anniversary of the report's publication to assess progress and resume
the call to action.
A second and more private campaign was waged by Donnison and
Young, together with a few other left-wing intellectuals such as A. H.
'Chelly' Halsey, the Oxford sociologist. These men were old friends of the
Secretary of State for Education in the Labour Government, Anthony
Crosland. They had worked with him on educational questions when he
was in Opposition and now they used their private contacts with him to
 Poverty and Educational Priority 117

press the EPA case. During his period as minister, Crosland regularly
sought the advice ofsuch educationalists sympathetic to Labour. A series of
evening seminars on specific issues was held at his London home and at
least one session was devoted to 'what to do about Plowden' .25 At about the
same time, Halsey entered the Department of Education and Science
(DES) as a part-time adviser to Crosland and pushed for action from
inside. Although the EPA campaign involved the same type of social
scientists and policy experts as did CPAG, it was a very different effort.
There was no organisation: Lady Plowden and the academics conducted
their respective efforts with minimal co-ordination; there was no staff,
headquarters or journal; there was little consistent cultivation of the
media. In fact, the EPA idea depended largely on the un-coordinated
enthusiasm of a few individuals searching for a constituency.
EPAs, Pressure Groups and the Public. The EPA proposal found few other
champions outside the institutions of government. Its biggest impact was
undoubtedly within the educational community; the Plowden Report
became an instant best-seller, the subject of debate in the educational press
and a standard component in teacher training curricula. But while interest
in the EPA idea was widespread, none of the major educational groups
mounted a sustained drive to secure its implementation; indeed their main
concern was often to ensure that EPAs were not implemented in a way that
would jeopardise their own primary goals. Although some Local
Education Authorities (LEAs) were enthusiastic, their national
representative, the Association of Education Committees (AEC), was
cautious. The association was potentially divided by the proposal; many
rural areas also had poor schools and were worried that an EPA policy
would delay their own programmes. 26 As a result, the AEC welcomed the
principle ofEPAs but did not consider it a high priority. 27 The reaction of
the teachers' unions was similar. The National Union ofTeachers (NUT)
formally endorsed the principle and the National Association of Head
Teachers (NAHT) gave Lady Plowden a standing ovation. 28 But the
teachers never regarded EPAs as the most important part of the Plowden
Report, and the proposal was scarcely mentioned during the debate on it
at the NUT conference. 29 More importantly, while the NUT accepted
EPAs in principle, it was opposed to several of the key details of the
proposal as advanced by the Plowden Council, as will be seen.
The educational organisations apart, no other organisations took much
interest. The TUC formally welcomed the Plowden Report but did little
else. 30 The press gave the report generous coverage when it was first
published, and the EPA recommendation received general editorial
approval; 31 but this initial interest never turned into the sustained
attention that family poverty enjoyed. Within six months the proposal had
virtually disappeared as a regular editorial feature and news coverage
shrank to a trickle. Nor did EPAs ever become a major issue for the public.
Attitudes towards the idea were largely undefined, varying markedly in
118 Poverry, Politics and Policy
TABLE 4.1 Public attitudes to EPAs: I

These are some of the recommendations in the Plowden

Report on 'Children and their Primary Schools'. For each
of them would you tell me whether you approve or
disapprove of the recommendation?
(c) Top priority for schools in poor districts (to provide
more teachers, better buildings and supplies):

%
Approve 88
Disapprove 4
Don't know 8

Source: Gallup Poll Index, Report No. 82 (February 1g67).

different contexts. For instance, 'top priority for schools in poor districts'
was widely favoured, as Table 4.1 indicates. But when the proposal was
contrasted explicitly with the principle of equal treatment for all schools,
support plummeted (see Table 4.2). Clearly the presentation of an EPA
policy would be critical. Help for poor areas would be acceptable, but
explicit deviation from the universalist principle of the education system
might generate public opposition, including among working-class voters. 32

TABLE 4.2 Public attitudes to EP As: II

It has recently been argued that schools in deprived areas should get preferential
treatment over allocations of teachers, new buildings, etc. Do you agree with this or
do you think that all primary schools should be treated alike regardless of their
location?

Some schools preferential treatment

Similar treatment
Don't know

Source: David Donnison, 'Education and Opinion', New Sociery, 26 October 1g67.

Politicians would undoubtedly have been very nervous if the Plowden

Council had called for a major programme of positive discrimination.
As the Association of Municipal Corporations put it mildly, 'dis-
crimination ... within an authority's areas is not always easy.' 33
Certainly a dramatic and visible shift of educational resources to schools in
poor neighbourhoods would have been controversial. But the Government
was not being asked for radical redistribution. From the beginning, the
 Poverty and EducatioTUll Priority 119
Plowden Council had explicitly rejected such a strategy as politically self-
defeating, u and Lady Plowden later warned of the 'danger of being unfair
to middle-class children through pushing the priority area policy to
extremes.'35 The Council's milder proposal would only delay educational
improvements in more affluent areas for a few years. The political dangers
were thus less acute; as one official put it, the idea of disquiet among the
affluent 'never bothered us much'. On the other hand, EPAs did have
modest political attractions. These were not seen primarily in terms of
extra votes in poor areas; in the early years, the Government even refused
to publicise which areas were receiving benefits in case local residents
disliked being labelled educationally deprived. 36 But at the national level
programmes such as EPAs do have some publicity value, as hard-pressed
ministers can make attractive announcements about helping the poor,
often at modest cost to the Treasury.
Still, EPAs had not really found their constituency outside government.
Approval in principle was widespread among educational groups and the
press, but, as one minister summed it up, 'Except for a few researchers, the
degree of outside pressure was miniscule.' The fate ofEPAs thus depended
heavily on the response within government.
EPAsand Poliq-Makers. Policy elites reacted ambivalently to EPAs. On
the plus side, there was virtually no opposition in principle to the proposal.
During the 1g6os political debate on education was pervaded by a vague
environmentalism; while the details of academic research had little
impact, the main thrust of the environmentalist outlook did find echoes
among politicians and civil servants. In part because of the succession of
educational reports, policy-makers generally accepted that poor children
were held back by their surroundings. An assertion that such children did
poorly at school simply because they were less able was almost never
expressed in public debate. When hints did emerge, they were roundly
condemned. For example, when the Daily Telegraph attacked the EPA
proposal as meaning that the interests of capable students would be
'subordinated to those who show no wish to receive [education]', it was
rebuked for 'reactionary prejudice' by the Sunday Time!. 37 When a
Conservative MP made similar allusions, another Conservative MP
explicitly rejected the 'disgraceful suggestion' and Shirley Williams, the
Minister of State for Education, reasserted that poor children were 'the
failure of the system, not of themselves'. 38 This broad acceptance of the
assumptions underlying the EPA proposal was somewhat qualified by
scepticism about the capacity of education alone to compensate for social
deprivation; a question commonly asked was whether EPAs would
accomplish much unless reinforced by a whole range of other social
policies.39 Unlike in the US, compensatory education never emerged in
elite thinking in Britain as the mechanism of social change. But no one
denied that it would help to some extent.
The real ambivalence of politicians and civil servants concerned the
120 Poverty, Politics and Policy
salience of the EPA proposal; while sympathy was widespread, few saw it
as especially important. For some time the easiest point of entry into
government for such ideas had been the Department of Education and
Science. Most of the senior officials in the DES in the early 196os had spent
virtually their entire working lives in educational administration; their
main contacts outside Whitehall were with LEAs, teachers' unions and the
educational press; and some of them had assisted in the preparation of
CACE reports. Not all officials were well versed in the academic debates;
but men like Toby Weaver, john Embling, Leonard Fletcher and Derek
Morrell were regarded by their colleagues as sympathetic to such ideas. 40
They were the men responsible for schools policy in 1963 when the
Plowden Council was appointed and academics like Donnison and Young
were added to it.
Departmental interest was declining, however, by the time Plowden
reported. In 1964 a new Permanent Secretary, Sir Herbert Andrew,
arrived from the Board of Trade. He had little experience in educational
administration and was strongly sceptical of sociological research, much of
which he regarded as thinly veiled ideology. He also believed in the
tradition of the detached administrator and was worried that the DES had
become too emotionally committed to educational expansion and reform.
Andrew sought to change the department's general orientation. Existing
personnel were shuffled and new officials brought in from other
departments to fill important positions. By the time the Council's report
was published in 1967, the senior positions in charge of schools policy were
filled with officials considered much more detached. As the shuffle
progressed, both officials and academics sensed a lessening of interest in the
new ideas and research being produced by the educational intelligentsia.
One sign of this was a hardening of the Department's attitude towards
the CACE. By the mid-196os it was clear that 'the Department didn't like
it', as Crosland put it. 41 The Council generated extra work for officials who
had to prepare papers for it and develop responses to its recommendations.
In addition, those recommendations often conflicted with the priorities of
the Minister, the department or outside groups. As one senior official
complained:

They kept coming up with monumental reports recommending spend-

ing millions of pounds we didn't have. So all it did was put the Minister
in awkward positions. Ministers never got any credit out of it and they
never got any advice they couldn't have had by inviting three or four
people to lunch. It was rather a bugbear.

The new Permanent Secretary publicly opposed the statutory requirement

that there be such major research-advisory bodies 42 and, after Plowden, no
further CACEs were appointed. Even before the Plowden report was
finished, the Council began to detect a certain departmental coolness.
 Poverty and Educational Priority 121
Individual recommendations such as EPAs received greater sympathy.
'Everyone in the department thought it was quite a good idea', recalled
one official. 'No one was hostile', echoed another. There were crucial
differences, however. A few officials like Fletcher and Morrell were
particularly enthusiastic, but they were no longer in the Schools Branch;
by 1967 Fletcher was in the Planning Branch and Morrell had moved to
the Home Office. Although they were able to support further EPA
research, 43 they were not centrally involved in shaping EPA policy. The
attitude of other officials was more qualified. The dominant view was that
EPAs were a good idea but not a desperately important one. The
Department was willing to advance the policy in places, and its support
was important. But only those parts of the proposal that did not conflict
with existing priorities or relationships were actively pursued.
Political judgements were equally qualified. The response of the major
parties depended primarily on the extent to which the EPA idea
corresponded with existing party policies. The authors of the proposal
were most disappointed by the Labour Government's reaction. Histori-
cally Labour had not regarded education as a major instrument of social
reform, but interest had grown after the war. The right wing of the party,
in particular, argued that educational and social policy were more
important to achieving equality than economic changes like national-
isation.44 Not everyone accepted that education could be such an
important mechanism of social change; Bevan, for instance, argued that
class education was inevitable in a class society. 45 But during the 1g6os
educational reform rose in prominence in party discussions, and the
professional arguments were absorbed into party rhetoric.
There was a lag, however, between the professionals and the politicians.
During the I gsos academic work had focused on secondary education, and
the Labour party had absorbed that emphasis. Their policies on
comprehensive reorganisation and the school-leaving age were repeated in
countless speeches and codified in successive manifestos. By comparison,
the structure of primary education was not seen as a pressing area of re-
form. 'The reason there is a searchlight on secondary education is that it
is basically wrong', argued one Labour MP; 'there is no disagreement
basically on the system of primary education.' 46 Such conceptions of
relative importance are not immutable; but neither are they lightly
changed simply because some Tory-appointed committee has finally
reported. The Plowden Report was the first to reflect the newer theories
that the pre-school and primary years were just as important, if not more
so, to educational success. But it was not until the 197os that such ideas
were diffused more widely through the political world.
The EPA advocates were fortunate that Crosland was Secretary of State
for Education when the report was published. Crosland was an in-
tellectual. He had been an Oxford don before entering political life and,
more importantly, he was attuned to educational sociology. He had long
122 Poverty, Politics and Policy
argued that educational reform was crucial to equality and his views on the
subject, as expounded in his major book, The Future of Socialism, owed
much to conversations with Michael Young and the r~arch of people
such as Halsey. 47 Primary schools were not one of his priorities as minister,
and he was cool to the Plowden Report as a whole. But he pronounced the
EPA idea 'utterly convincing'. 48 Crosland was a critical sympathiser,
however. From the social scientists' point of view, their old friend failed to
grasp positive discrimination as a basic approach to education; he was
sceptical of the mechanics of their proposal; and he did not attach nearly
the same importance to it. But Crosland did at least initiate action on parts
of the proposal in his last months at the DES.
After Crosland left the Department in August 1967, no other minister of
education took such a personal interest in EPAs. The first comments on the
proposal by his immediate successor, Patrick Gordon Walker, convinced
most observers that no further action should be expected; 49 and the next
minister, Edward Short, said very little one way or the other. Nor was the
response very different elsewhere in the Labour party. The main
Commons debate on the Plowden Report was poorly attended, and EPAs
never attracted sustained support among Labour MPs. 50 The 1g67 party
conference called for the Plowden Report to be given first priority; but
EPAs were a minor theme in the debate and thereafter conference
enthusiasm shifted to nursery education. 01
The Conservatives' reaction to Plowden was considerably warmer
because in general it reinforced their educational views. Conservatives
were divided over the comprehensive school issue; but at the very least they
all could agree that comprehensive reorganisation should not take
precedence over other educational needs. In particular, the party
demanded higher priority for primary education, and the shifting of the
CACE spotlight on to the inadequacies at the primary level provided them
with extra ammunition. The EPA part of the report also received
Conservative support. Only a few of the party's educational spokesmen,
such as Edward Boyle, were particularly knowledgeable about the newer
social-science theories of educational success, 52 but 'positive discrimi-
nation' fitted well with the developing emphasis on selectivity in the
party's policies. Even before the report was published, the 1g66
Conservative manifesto had promised 'special help to areas where there is
most need', and the EPA proposal gave an added boost to this approach. 53
Yet, again, support was qualified; except for Boyle and a few others, EPAs
excited little real enthusiasm in Conservative ranks. 54
In short, Educational Priority Areas had not found a major political
constituency. Sympathy was widespread, but no real champion emerged.
Obituaries soon appeared: the various educational journals announced
that Plowden was being 'pushed aside', dying 'of neglect', and heading 'for
peaceful oblivion', with the remains to be left 'on a shelf to gather dust' .55
In the case of the EPA recommendation, the obituaries were not so much
 Poverty and Educational Priority 123

premature as overstated. There was sufficient sympathy among policy

elites to ensure that some action would be taken. But without more
powerful backing the proposal was highly vulnerable to being 'improved'
to death by administrators and interest groups. The transformation of the
idea was about to begin.

III EPA POLICY: AN IDEA TRANSFORMED

It is one thing to argue that 'positive discrimination' can create a
'compensating environment' for the poor; it is another to specify exactly
what the government should now do. No one on the Plowden Council had
really known for sure how to increase the educational attainment of poor
children, and consequently the council's proposal was really a package of
ideas, coupled with a call for ongoing research to determine which
programmes had the greatest impact. 5 6 Unlike with the American Head
Start, the Council did not envisage separate programmes that totally by-
passed the existing educational structure; rather, they sought to re-
distribute resources within the school system. Their idea was deceptively
simple. The central government should carefully select the most deprived
urban areas for special treatment; schools in those areas should receive
more teachers, expanded nursery education, improved buildings and the
most modern equipment. In addition, the schools should make determined
efforts to increase parents' interest in their children's education. Research
seemed to indicate that parental interest and encouragement were critical
to a child's educational success, and the Council hoped that by involving
parents in the schools more fully their interest might be enhanced. The
hope was that changing parental attitudes might accomplish as much as
working on the child directly. 67
The task of responding to this package fell to the DES. But doing so was
administratively complicated. In the first place, the Department itself was
not well designed to handle such a proposal. EPAs represent an area
approach to policy; but the DES is structured along functional lines, and
no single section of the department was ever responsible for all aspects of
EPA policy (see Figure 4.2). The building and nursery education parts of
the Plowden proposal fell to the Schools Branch; ideas about staffing poor
schools fell to Teachers Branches I and II, and the special machinery
established for negotiations with the teachers' unions; actual classroom
practice and parent participation involved the Inspectorate (HMI);
research fell to the Planning Branch; and the expenditure implications
naturally involved the Finance Branch. The department's response was
thus developed by officials in the various branches. Senior people in the
Schools Branch collated advice in the early months, but the lack of
centralised responsibility for the proposal within the DES undoubtedly
complicated the policy response in the longer term.
 I24 Poverry, Politics and Policy
PERMANENT UNDER-SECERTARY

Deputy Under-Secretary Deputy Under-Secretary

I I
I
Schools Special
I
External
I
Architects
I
Teacher Teacher Further Universities
Services Relations and Supply Training Education
Building

Finance Planning

FIG- 4-2 Department of Education and Science: partial organisation chart,

1967

The DES also faced a major constraint in the larger structure of

educational administration. While a cash benefit programme such as
family allowances can be implemented unilaterally by the central
government, changes in a social service such as education require the
manipulation of a complex structure over which the central government
has only partial control. Education is provided by the Local Educational
Authorities. The DES influences what LEAs do, through a number of
specific legal powers and financial provisions as well as through more
informal means of persuasion. But within the framework of national
controls significant areas of local discretion remain, and in such areas the
Minister cannot issue commands and expect automatic compliance. 58
Educational changes also involve the teaching profession. Teachers'
unions influence not only salaries and working conditions but also larger
aspects of educational policy. 59 The more a policy directly affects the
teacher and his or her behaviour in the classroom, the more it requires the
compliance and even the co-operation of teachers. Where the EPA
proposal conflicted with the goals of the teaching profession, the chances of
its being implemented were sharply reduced.
The department was also under powerful resource constraints. Edu-
cational spending was growing dramatically, both in real terms and as a
proportion of total public expenditure. But the main determinant of this
increase was sheer growth in pupil numbers. The impact of the increased
birthrate in the I950S was working its way through the educational system;
between I962 and I973 the primary schools absorbed a 25 per cent
increase in pupil numbers, and by the later I96os this cohort was moving
into the secondary sector. Demand for longer schooling added to the
pressure: more pupils were staying on after the legal school-leaving age,
and the numbers in further and university education more than doubled in
the I 96os. 80 Although expenditure was growing, there was, as the DES put
it, 'little respite from the sheer job of simply coping with numbers'. 61
 Pover9 and Educational Priori9 125

With little flexibility in the education budget, new programmes such as

EPAs had to compete with the spending proposals of other departments.
But the competition was severe, as witness the family poverty case. The
Plowden Report was published in the middle of Callaghan's drive to
restrain public expenditure, and after the November 1967 devaluation
there were actual cuts in educational programmes and commitments. The
financial prospects were bleak. And the manpower situation was not much
more encouraging. Qualified teachers were in short supply, and expansion
in EPA areas could only come -by diverting stafifrom other sectors. Growth
at the secondary level was already threatening the staff position at the
primary level, and improvements in the primary and pre-school sectors
were going to be difficult to bring about.
The Plowden Council had estimated that the cost of all of its 197
recommendations would reach£1oo million by the mid-197os, and add 14
per cent to projected current expenditures on primary education by the
end of the decade. The cost of the EPA proposal alone was much less.
Table 4·3 gives the Council's own estimates ofits cost during the phasing-in
period; a full EPA programme would add roughly 3-4 per cent to the
projected cost of the primary sector over the period. 62 But even such a
modest increase, the Government argued, would require sacrifices else-
where in the education budget. 83 The EPAs' champions denied that the
EPA costs represented a large amount; they criticised both the
Government's general spending priorities and the priorities within the
education budget, especially the expensive decision to raise the school-
leaving age. 64 But with little strong support from any other sector ofBritish
life, their complaints made little impact.

TABLE 4·3 Estimated cost of EPA recommendation

£millions
A B
Total of
Capital building costs Cu"ent costs A+B

1g67 6.1 1.4 7·5

1968 8.5 4·2 12-7
1969 8.8 6.4 15-2
1970 9·3 8.6 17·9
1971 9·0 I I. I 20.1
1972 2.8 I I. I 13·9

Source: Calculated from Plowden Report, Tables 39 and 40.

Thus, in formulating its response to the EPA proposal, the DES had to
contend with limited resources and a dispersed structure of control over
education. Together, these forces modified the Plowden recommendation
 Poverry, Politics and Policy
in fundamental ways. The resulting transformation can be best seen by
looking at the fate of each of the major elements of the original package.
A .National Programme. The Plowden Council had called for a national
programme of compensatory education, involving co-ordinated changes
in virtually all aspects of education in carefully selected urban areas. Such
a co-ordinated programme, the Council argued, had to be directed by the
central government. They recommended strong central direction through
two mechanisms: the official designation of EPA schools by the DES, and a
special formula to channel funds to those schools. LEAs would be required
to rank their schools according to specific criteria of social need. The DES
would then merge these lists into a single national ranking and designate
the 10 per cent most deprived as 'priority schools'. These would qualify for
favourable treatment, financed through additional Exchequer grants.
Regular reports would be sent back to the DES so that progress could be
monitored. 65
The national programme died an instant death. The proposal would
have required a shift in the power relationships in education, with a
considerable expansion of the role of the DES. Important parts of the EPA
package involved areas of local discretion; under existing legislation the
DES had no legal right to change an LEA's current expenditure decisions
or to alter the distribution of teachers, aides, equipment and so on between
schools within its jurisdiction. The DES could draw up any national lists it
wanted to, but it could not force LEAs to favour schools so designated. 'We
simply had no power to intervene', insisted a senior official. This discretion
was preserved by convention and by the power of established educational
groups. The central government could have taken additional powers to
intervene, but members of the Department regarded such intervention as
inappropriate, at least in the EPA case:

You can either run schools through local authorities or through the
Government, but not both. You can't have the Department telling the
local authority which of its schools deserve more funds.
Central designation was just contrary to the whole way thinking
about government relationships has developed at least since the
introduction of the general grant in 1958.
People kept suggesting that you could change a relationship in one
special area and not in general. But if you are going to tell the local
authorities which schools are the worst, you will soon be drawn into
everything, including the choice of blotting paper.

These conventions were strongly reinforced by the major educational

groups whose power would be affected by central designation. In a rare
show of unanimity, the idea was denounced by all of the AEC, the ILEA
and the NUT. 66
 Poverry and Educational Prioriry 127
Even without such opposition, designation of EPA schools would have
been politically difficult. Officials could envisage conflicts with the local
authorities over the weight to be attached to diverse criteria of social need,
and formal designation might also generate greater protests from rural
areas. 'The burden ofdepartmental advice', recalled one official, 'was that
setting up a national list of EPA schools would be a difficult, slow and
contentious process.' In addition, formal designation would also give an
official imprimatur to the social needs of a large number of schools. Since
adequate funds to assist all of them might not be forthcoming, central
designation would only provide a public yardstick ofgovernmental failure.
Politically, it was safer to recognise only as much need as it was intended to
deal with.
There was nothing immutable about all this. The central government
could have expanded its role, improved the resources of the DES for
making such judgements, and simply shouldered the complexities in-
volved. Legislation conferring additional powers or establishing a specific
grant could have been sought, as was done for the Urban Programme. Or
the Government could have adopted a stronger promotional attitude by
designating schools and exhorting compliance through less formal meth-
ods, as was being done in the case of secondary reorganisation. But only a
government firmly committed to a national programme of compensatory
education could be expected to change the established system against the
opposition of the major interest groups affected. That commitment was
lacking. In 1967 the formal designation of EPA schools was dismissed
'more or less out of hand', explained one official. 'Fortunately- speaking as
an administrator- that question was disposed of quickly', echoed another.
Crosland 'took no persuading to reject it', recalled a third. In the
Commons, no one spoke in favour of central designation. Crosland simply
rehearsed the objections and concluded that 'every local authority knows
which are its own EPA schools and we can therefore achieve the results
within the present administrative framework.' 67 This position was main-
tained subsequently, the department even rejecting a demand that they
give 'strong and detailed guidance' to local authorities about positive
discrimination in their expenditures. 68
With the rejection of a national programme of co-ordinated action,
responsibility for the various aspects of the original proposal was fractured
among different jurisdictions, with no common criteria as to which schools
should benefit. Each jurisdiction had to decide whether to respond at all
and to set its own terms. As a result, the concept of'EPA' itself began to
undergo an important change. Originally it had meant a national
programme of compensatory education. But when no national programme
was launched, it came to represent a general attitude towards education, a
vague idea that ongoing programmes should be biased a little in favour of
poor areas, wherever possible. This conception was far more compatible
with the existing administrative structure and on this basis some progress
128 Poverty, Politics and Policy
was made. The idea began to have a modest effect on existing programmes,
and an EPA element was built into several new programmes which were
being propelled forward by stronger political forces than EPAs could ever
muster on their own. In the end, some aspects of the original package were
implemented, but on others little happened. The sum of the individual bits
was different from the original, but progress of a sort was made none the
less.
Buildings. While the administrative framework militated against some
elements in the EPA package, it had the effect of expanding the
significance of others. The clearest case was the building element. The
Plowden Council had ample evidence of the survival in slum areas of grim
nineteenth-century school buildings, with their 'narrow passages; dark
rooms; unheated and cramped cloakrooms; unroofed outside
lavatories; ... and the ingrained grime of generations'. 69 Yet the Council
did not stress buildings in their proposal. Rather than advocating
wholesale replacement of slum buildings, they recommended a 'minor
works' allocation for small improvements in each EPA school; indoor
sanitation, classroom renovation or simple redecoration, they argued,
would make schools pleasanter places. But the proposal was deliberately
modest; the average grant suggested was only £sooo, one-quarter of the
normal limit for such projects. 7°Change in actual school buildings was
definitely not the essence of compensatory education.
Administrative convenience, however, transformed buildings into the
central government's main response to the proposal. School building is one
activity over which the DES does have significant direct control: although
the LEA makes the initial judgement about needs and actually constructs
the building, the Department must approve each individual project. The
DES already had developed the administrative capacity to regulate
building programmes, and a special building programme, unlike a
national list, would not disrupt relations with the LEAs and the teachers.
Indeed, after the publication of the report in 1967, the AEC urged such a
response on the Department. 71 If the DES was to respond to the EPA
proposal at all, a building approach would involve the least disruption to
the existing administrative framework.
Education policy-makers were used to thinking about the problems of
slum areas in terms of poor buildings. A survey conducted by the DES in
1962 had revealed that over 50 per cent of primary schools dated from the
nineteenth century and that 75 per cent were seriously deficient by modern
standards; the NUT had published a similar survey in the same year; and
in 1963 a CACE report re-emphasised the sorry state of secondary schools
in slum areas. 72 Policy-makers were embarrassed. The Conservative
Government found the results of their 1962 survey so alarming that they
refused to publish them, and the Labour Opposition continually cited the
problem as evidence of Conservative neglect of the social services. But the
problem was proving intractable. On top of the impact of the higher birth
 Poverty and Educational Priority 129
rate, the population was moving southeastwards and into new towns, new
housing estates and new suburbs. The building programme throughout
the 196os was inexorably pre-empted by 'basic needs', the provision of
schools in areas where children would otherwise have no school to attend at
all. There was little scope for the replacement of old buildings, even those
acknowledged as deficient. 73 Children from better-off families living in
new housing areas went to new schools, while those left behind in the slums
carried on in Victorian buildings that matched, rather than compensated
for, their environment.
A special EPA building programme was therefore doubly attractive to
the DES. It would be administratively simple and would remedy an
embarrassment in existing policies. The Department did not pretend that
a building programme really constituted a strategy of compensatory
education. Indeed the departmental brief recommending an EPA build-
ing programme to Crosland conceded that it could not be expected 'to
counter the complex effects ofsocial deprivation'; only after a meeting with
ministers was a concluding flourish about education 'compensating for the
effects of social deprivation and ... overcoming family poverty' tacked
onto the circular that announced the programme. 74 But the more
important elements of the Plowden proposal involved greater adminis-
trative complications. When the DES was looking for a simple response to
Plowden, buildings proved irresistible. 'In the educational world, the
timing was right', recalled an official; 'no one challenged it.' Crosland
concurred. In a generally cautious Commons speech on Plowden, he was
most encouraging about the building possibilities. 75
A special building programme still had to circumvent the restraints on
public expenditure. The prospects for significant new money were
virtually non-existent and Crosland agreed to cut another programme,
school meals. Demands for an increase in school meal charges and a
reduction in the subsidy involved had been growing in Parliament, 76 and
the Chancellor of the Exchequer had tried to get cabinet approval for such
an increase in November 1966. But the social security ministers had
managed to delay the issue, insisting that it be considered in connection
with family allowances and other social reforms. 77 They were hoping to
sacrifice school meals in favour of extra social spending elsewhere. In early
1967 the press contained a good deal of speculation that the price to be
paid for EPAs was an increase in school meal charges, and in February
Crosland publicly promised to consider the increase. 78 At the same time
Crosland was having to contend with social security ministers who argued
that any savings on school meals should be applied to the proposed family
allowance increase that was being discussed at the same time. 79 In the final
public announcement in july, the annual saving of £25 million from the
school meal decision was presented as an offset of the cost of the more
controversial family allowance increase. But Crosland's acceptance of the
increased charges was crucial. As one of the officials involved put it,
 Poverry, Politics and Policy
The Chancellor wanted to keep the whole thing as balanced as possible.
Crosland said that he was willing to accept a significant incre~e in the
charges for school meals provided that he got money for school
buildings. Without that he would not have got the money.

The strategy worked: £I6 million were authorised over two years for a
special building programme in EPAs. 80
Administrative and political convenience had thus made improved
buildings a central part of EPA policy. This was not the original intention.
After the announcement of the building programme, Young wrote to
Crosland pleading that some of the£ I 6 million be used for other aspects of
the proposal. 'Buildings, though obviously important, are less so than other
things', he argued. 81 But, given the structure of educational politics, these
'other things' were more difficult to achieve. A building programme was
easiest, so a building programme was adopted.
Although this was the first major acceptance of the EPA principle, it
received little public attention. The allocation was announced in the same
Commons statement as the increase in family allowances, and in the
controversy over the family allowance decision the EPA policy sank from
view. None the less, the EPA idea continued to affect the building
programme. Crosland's special programme was simply a first step. Despite
the hurried introduction of the programme, the proposals submitted by the
LEAs to the DES totalled £43 million. But only£ I6 million was available,
and the special programme was not extended beyond the initial two years.
In the I970s, however, the pressure of pupil numbers began to ease at the
primary level, leaving greater flexibility in educational spending. Simul-
taneously the Conservatives came to power determined to give primary
education a higher priority, particularly by mounting a drive on old school
buildings. In I97I-72 an additional £I8 million was made available for
replacements in socially deprived areas; in I972-73 a major four-year
programme was launched to replace pre- I 903 buildings and in the
first year a substantial part of the programme was devoted to deprived
areas. 82
Staffing. In the original Plowden proposal, the single most important
element was improved staffing in EPA schools. Schools in deprived urban
areas suffered from a depressing cycle of rapid teacher turnover, unfilled
vacancies and temporary substitutes. The report urged that the quota for
teachers allocated to varipus areas should be raised for authorities with
EPA schools. But since deprived schools often could not fill even their
existing allotment of positions, some 'additional incentive' was required.
To attract and hold more experienced and successful teachers, the Council
recommended a salary supplement of £I20 per year for teachers in EPA
schools. They also recommended more generous provision of teacher aides
than in the rest of the country, with one aide for every two classrooms. 83
The DES was sympathetic, but once again its powers were limited. It
 Poverty and Educational Priority
did make marginal adjustments in the quota, 84 but the more important
salary proposal had to be thrown into the machinery established for the
negotiation of teachers' salaries. Bargaining was conducted through the
Burnham Committee, composed of a Teachers' Panel representing the
various unions and a Management Panel representing the local authorities
and the DES. From the outset the salary supplement was controversial;
even before negotiations began, the representatives of both the teachers
and the local authorities indicated coolness towards it. The AEC disliked a
flat-rate supplement for all teachers in EPAs but left open the possibility of
a higher number of 'responsibility posts', which carry a higher salary, in
such schools. 85 The NUT, however, was the major stumbling-block.
During the 196os the union's primary goal was a much higher basic salary
scale and it was not happy about the endless variety of special supplements
that were regularly proposed. They felt that such differentials created
troublesome distinctions between teachers and drained away resources
from a higher basic scale. In the same week that the Plowden Report was
published, the NUT executive rejected a remarkably similar supplement
for teachers in immigrant areas. 86
The minister and the DES decided to recommend some form of
supplement, although, in the words of one official, 'We told Crosland that
we weren't likely to get much.' They were right. The bargaining situation
was tense in 1967. The Management Panel's salary offer was restricted by
the Government's incomes policy and was far below union demands; the
teachers, on the other hand, were showing greater militancy and were
committed to selective sanctions if negotiations failed. With the novel
prospect of a partial strike on the horizon, the Government was not in a
position to insist on something like EPA supplements in the face of
continued union opposition. They could only hope to win over the
Teachers' Panel to some limited supplement.
The Government was partially successful, and an exploratory compro-
mise was announced. But it was limited and difficult to administer fairly.
The Committee set an arbitrary limit of £400,000 for such supplements,
and the unions insisted on a flat-rate payment to all teachers in each EPA
school. 87 In combination, these two decisions greatly restricted the number
of schools in which supplements could be paid. Even though Plowden's
figure of £120 was reduced to £75 per teacher, only z! per cent of all
schools-rather than Plowden's 10 per cent-could be covered before the
money ran out. When LEAs submitted their lists of schools that they felt
should qualify, the DES decided that it could not choose from among the
large number involved without creating serious anomalies. The Depart-
ment tried to get the Burnham Committee to reconsider its approach, but
the Committee refused; so in November 1968 the Department went ahead,
anomalies and all. 88 Since then, the EPA supplement has become a stable
part of the salary structure. It was increased in 1971 and 1972, although at
£105 it was still short of the original Plowden target of £120; and in 1973
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
the formula was altered somewhat to provide some of the greater flexibility
that the Management Panel had been seeking. 89
The second of the Plowden staffing recommendations- a more extensive
use of teachers' aides, especially in EPAs-ran into even more determined
opposition. The use of such assistants was already a controversial issue. The
DES and the LEAs had been recommending greater use of'auxiliaries' as a
solution to teacher shortages; but the teachers' unions strongly opposed the
use of unqualified personnel in teaching duties, and feared that semi-
qualified auxiliaries would fatally blur the distinction between qualified
and unqualified teachers. After lengthy negotiations an uneasy compro-
mise had been reached. 90 The Plowden Report's more emphatic advocacy
of aides arrived just after this fragile accord had been accepted, and its
approach to the issue pleased no one. The NUT was outraged: 'These are
monstrous proposals', declared its President. 91 The DES and LEAs did not
want to jeopardise the earlier accord by pushing harder. It was therefore
left to local decisions, made in keeping with the accord, to determine the
use of teachers' aides, 'including of course the special needs of educational
priority areas'. 92
Thus the demands of established educational groups ensured that the
staffing elements of the original EPA proposals emerged only in a
truncated and, as will be seen, largely ineffective form.
Parental Participation. The fate of the other elements of the original
proposal that the Plowden Council considered essential, such as increased
parental participation, also depended on the willingness to co-operate of
those actually running the schools. The Report laid great stress on parental
involvement, community schools and home-school liaison, especially in
EPAs, where parental encouragement of the children's education was
thought to be particularly lacking. But once again institutional obstacles
blocked rapid change. Such matters fell to the LEAs and individual
headmasters; more importantly, any progress required overcoming the
teachers' traditional desire for professional autonomy and their intense
suspicion of Parent-Teacher Associations on the American model. While
the NUT was willing to consider the general principle, it insisted that the
idea should not be imposed on teachers.n At no time was central direction
even suggested. 'You can't force a teacher to be nice to a mother by
government decree', argued one Plowden member; 'it must be a voluntary
movement', echoed Shirley Williams. 94 The Government easily fell into a
passive role and limited itself to publishing a pamphlet on good home and
school relations. There was never any co-ordinated effort to stimulate
parental involvement in EPA areas.
Nursery Education. Nursery education was another central element in the
original Plowden conception. Newer research was emphasising how early
environmental influences took their toll, and there was a strong belief that
compensatory education should start as early as possible. The Plowden
Report had advocated nursery education for all, but children in EPAs
 Poverty and Educational Priority 1 33

were to receive priority treatment. Nursery schools should start im-

mediately in these areas and only spread out to more affluent areas as
resources became available. Even then, EPAs were to have a permanently
higher level of provision, with 50 per cent of poor children attending full-
time rather than part-time as envisaged for the rest of the country. 95
In 1967, however, the Plowden appeal was blocked by other edu-
cational programmes that had more political backing. An expansion of
nursery education would have required transferring money and teachers
away from other sectors of education. But for decades both Conservative
and Labour Governments had committed themselves to lowering the size
of primary and secondary classes first, and they were reluctant to drain
away teachers, particularly from the hard-pressed early years of primary
schooling that were the most likely source of nursery teachers. The
Plowden Council had sought to circumvent these obstacles. Priority to
deprived areas was, in effect, a socially defensible means of phasing in
nursery education slowly; a full nation-wide service was not expected until
the 1g8os. To overcome the manpower problems, they recommended that
'nursery assistants' carry out the main work, with qualified teachers only in
a supervisory capacity. Those qualified teachers were to be diverted from
the infant schools by a slight raising of the age of entry to school for some
children. But the manpower proposals were controversial in the edu-
cational world and Crosland deferred them for 'a great deal of study'. The
nursery element of the EPA proposal went with it; Crosland was only
willing to promise 'to give priority to EPA areas when we are in a position
to make some further relaxation on the establishment of new nursery
classes.'96 On its own, the EPA proposal did not possess sufficient political
force to break the log-jam.
Yet these obstacles were easily blown away by a much greater political
force: race. The popular response to Enoch Powell's speeches on race in
April 1968 created a major controversy, and the Government responded
immediately with a new Urban Programme designed to assist poor urban
areas with heavy levels of immigration. Given the haste with which the
programme was rushed into operation, it could do little but gather up and
extend existing policies and ideas, and the nursery element of the EPA
proposal was swept up into it. Nursery classes did well because, as one
official put it, they were 'administratively ready-made'; the school
building machinery already existed and classes could be put in place
rapidly. The entire DES share of the Urban Programme was spent on
nursery education in socially deprived areas. By 1972, some 18,ooo new
nursery places had been provided, representing a real beginning on the
report's call for 50,000 new places in EPAs for four-year-olds plus
additional provision at a later date for three-year-olds. 97
A general expansion of nursery education did not occur until well into
the 1970s, when the pressure of'basic needs' began to ease. By that time, a
major public campaign for nursery education had developed. The drive
1 34 Poverty, Politics and Policy
was well organised by a group called the Campaign for Nursery
Education; it enjoyed strong public support, especially among middle-
class families; it received consistent backing from the press, the NUT and
most LEAs; and it found aggressive parliamentary champions in all
parties. 'Politically it was a pushover', recalled one DES official. In 1972
the Conservative Government accepted the principle of universal nursery
education and launched a ten-year programme to phase it in. The
legislative authority for such an expansion had long existed; all that was
required was a DES circular, and during that summer the drafting of the
circular began in earnest. But whether the Conservative Government
would deny its middle-class supporters and bias the new provision towards
poor areas was unclear.
The EPA advocates remained few in number. Lady Plowden was still
active, but among the academics the lead increasingly fell to Chelly
Halsey. In 1967, when the prospects for major action seemed bleak, Halsey
and Michael Young had launched another research effort designed to keep
the EPA idea alive. Using their contacts with Crosland and Young's
position as chairman of the Social Science Research Council, they
obtained joint DES-SSRC funding for four small EPA demonstration-
research projects. The programme was directed by Halsey, and by the
summer of 1972 he and the project staff were writing up and publicising
their findings. The demonstration projects gave the EPA campaign new
research ammunition and an organisational base for the first time. The
small staff of men and women involved believed in EPAs and championed
the idea publicly; indeed, after the research was completed, the Liverpool
project turned itself into a continuing organisation called Priority and
published a variety of pamphlets and books on the subject. 98
The influence of these EPA advocates on the nursery education circular,
however, was highly dependent on the sympathy of the relevant officials in
the Schools and Planning Branches of the DES. These officials drew Halsey
into the Department's deliberations. They arranged meetings with the
Secretary of State; they offered him advice on the most effective way to
formulate his recommendations; they arranged for the research findings to
be published by HMSO before the final policy decisions were announced;
they sent drafts of the circular to him for comment. In part the Department
was co-opting a potential source of public criticism. But in addition many
officials were sympathetic to the EPA idea. Its underlying assumptions
were increasingly absorbed into departmental thinking; during the same
period, for instance, officials were arguing before a Commons committee
that 'underprivileged children have an exceptional need for the additional
stimulus which can most effectively be provided before the age offive.' 99
Indeed one official argued that Halsey simply 'gave emphasis to the view
already current in the Department. The Department was able to pray
Halsey in aid of a policy it had decided to pursue anyway.'
Halsey argued strongly that nursery education could be a powerful
 Pover~ and Educational Priori~ 135
instrument of compensatory education, but only if it were organised
properly. He pressed in two directions. 10°First, he reiterated the original
Plowden appeal for strong DES direction. There was a fear that local
authorities might not favour their deprived sections because the most
forceful demands for nursery education came from middle-class parents.
Halsey therefore argued for a new branch of the DES to take responsibility
for EPA policy, stricter reliance on objective criteria to identify needy
areas, and a financial formula modelled on the Urban Programme to
channel money directly to such areas within each local authority.
Secondly, he sought a new structure of nursery education to involve
parents more. He advocated 'nursery centres', a hybrid structure combin-
ing elements of professional nursery schools and amateur parent-run play
groups.
Much of the spirit and language of Halsey's arguments were in-
corporated into the final circular. But at the level of hard administrative
directives, his influence was muted. There was to be a modest EPA element
in the nursery-school programme: in the initial stages allocations were to
be weighted in favour of authorities with the greatest social need. But once
again central direction was rejected. The DES could only hope that local
authorities with such deprived areas would actually give priority to
them. 101 More importantly, although nursery education was initiated in
deprived areas first, there was no requirement to fulfil the central EPA idea
of permanently higher level of provision there.
Halsey's arguments for a new structure of nursery education had even
less impact. The Conservative Secretary of State for Education, Margaret
Thatcher, was sympathetic to the idea of greater parental participation,
but once again the structure of educational government posed difficulties.
Educational administrators were sceptical about whether 'Halsey's Hy-
brids' would be successful, especially in deprived areas. They believed it
administratively easier and cheaper to use the existing machinery and
provide nursery education through existing primary schools with standard
staffing arrangements. 102 Halsey's ideas also excited the NUT's de-
termined opposition. The idea of parental involvement was still suspect
and the union disliked the parent-run playgroup movement, on which
Halsey's proposal was partly based. The NUT insisted that nursery
education be provided in the professionally run educational system, and
they attacked Lady Plowden for arguing that social-science evidence
demonstrated that pre-school education would have little lasting effect if
parents were not centrally involved. 103 Confronted by administrative
convenience and interest-group opposition, the proposals of a solitary
social scientist like Halsey withered. The circular made clear that nursery
education would be provided through existing primary schools. An early
draft of the circular had urged LEAs to 'take all possible steps to encourage
parents to play a more active role' and included a paragraph of detailed
suggestions from Halsey's report. But after objections from the teachers'
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
unions, these recommendations were progressively watered down until the
final circular simply asked LEAs to 'extend opportunities for col-
laboration' and dropped the detailed suggestions completely.l 04
The Evolving Pattern. The original EPA proposal was clearly a failure. No
national programme of compensatory education was ever implemented.
But the EPA idea was a modest success, and an EPA ripple effect continues
to influence education. How much of the original proposal has been
implemented in this way is difficult to judge. DES statistics are no help.
Without central designation, 'EPA schools' as such never existed; as one
official put it, 'The Department does not recognise "EPAs" as an
administrative concept.' Consequently the normal departmental infor-
mation processes do not record information about them. MPs asking about
progress in EPA schools are simply told that, since there is no formal
designation of such areas, 'the collection of statistics and the making of
comparisons ... [does not] arise.' 105 The Written Answers section of
Hansard for the late 196os is littered with unanswerable questions about
progress in EPAs. The impact ofPlowden is also difficult to assess because
some of the educational improvements that have flowed to deprived areas
in the last decade would have done so anyway; some of the initiatives
presented as 'EPA policy' were simply a change in the language used by
governments to describe those parts of their normal programmes that
affected poor areas. 106 Measuring the extent to which the Plowden
proposal has been implemented would require a national survey that
identified the 10 per cent most deprived school areas-something neither
the Plowden Council nor the Government ever did- and then compared
the provision in those schools with that throughout the country, before and
after 1g67. Only then would it be clear whether the poorest schools
really benefited most and whether schools received some benefits but not
others.
Nevertheless, a tentative assessment is possible. Important improve-
ments in educational provision came to poor areas earlier than they
otherwise would have. The general drive to replace old primary school
buildings in the 197os would have reached poor areas eventually; but
Crosland's£16 million, the£18 million allocated for 1971-72 and the first
year of the general drive all gave priority to poor areas, bringing new
schools earlier. Similarly, the decision to introduce universal nursery
education would have benefited poor areas eventually even if the phrase
'EPA' had never been coined; but the EPA idea ensured that many such
areas benefited first rather than last. Echoes of other parts of the original
proposal have been quieter. For instance, the limited salary supplement
had almost no impact on the problem of high teacher turnover; 107 EPA
schools would simply have to wait until the teacher shortages of the 1g6os
disappeared. The stimulus given to greater parental participation in EPA
schools is even more difficult to measure. The past decade has seen greater
innovation and experimentation in many schools, stimulated in part by the
 Poverty and Educational Priority 137
Plowden and Halsey reports. But there is little evidence to suggest that this
has come particularly in deprived areas.
The greatest casualty was the idea of an integrated programme. Some
local authorities were more enthusiastic than others, and a variety oflocal
responses developed. Where DES approval was required, the department
could often only hope that LEAs would adopt a common approach in
preparing their submissions.I 08 Diverse criteria even characterised those
aspects of EPA policy that did flow from the central government. The
criteria set by the DES for the special building programme were different
from those for the salary supplement settled on by the Burnham
machinery, which in turn were different from those set under the Urban
Programme for the early nursery school elements.I 09 In addition, with no
formal designation of EPA schools there was no commitment to assist all
similarly deprived schools. In the DES programmes an arbitrarily
determined amount of money was allotted and LEAs were asked to bid for
it. Consequently some schools received one type of assistance but not
others. While 570 schools qualified for salary supplements, only 158
benefited from Crosland's special building programme. Anomalies were
inevitable.
Schooling for many poor children now starts a year earlier. It is better
housed and better equipped than in the early 1g6os. The EPA idea speeded
the arrival of these benefits. But in the context of the entire educational
system, progress so far has been modest. Between 1g68-6g and 197o-71,
the extra resources channelled into EPAs by the DES represented between
0.2 and 0.4 per cent of the schools budget.uo Positive discrimination has
not yet become a basic principle of British education. The system is still
predominantly universal, reflecting a different conception of educational
equality. Slum schools may be closer to the national average, but the
original Plowden vision of transforming them into the best schools in the
land is still distant.

IV EPILOGUE
EPA policy reveals the intellectual and institutional processes of policy
innovation in conflict again. As with family poverty, the problem of
educational deprivation was not put on the political agenda by the
dynamics of political conflict. Rather, it flowed from a change in the way in
which policy-makers interpreted their environment. Social-science infor-
mation made them aware of the problem; social-science theory defined its
nature for them; and social scientists charted the new course of action
presented to them. These intellectual initiatives succeeded in shifting the
terms of educational debate in Britain, and their impact is still felt.
Concepts, once diffused throughout the policy world, persist long after the
initial campaigns have subsided.
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
As in the family poverty case, however, the salience of the issue and the
final policy response were determined by more immediate institutional
forces. EPAs never found a major constituency in the world of educational
politics. The idea was sustained by the enthusiasm of a small number of
intellectuals and professionals, coupled with the sympathy of an equally
small number of administrators and politicians. But the educational system
is a complex organisation, governed by a firmly established framework of
administrative-group relations, and sustained political pressure is required
to change it. EPAs lacked that kind ofsupport and, as the proposal entered
the final phases of the policy process, it was remoulded to fit the contours of
the educational world. As one of the intellectuals involved reflected, 'All an
academic can do is change the definition of the debate. Any direct
influence on legislation is fortuitous.'
Originally EP As were to be an instrument of social reform, a mechanism
for reducing poverty and inequality. Whether the marginal changes
introduced have, in fact, improved the relative educational performance of
poor children is not clear. Evidence from Head Start and British nursery-
school experience has rekindled the controversy over the capacity of
education to reduce social inequality and has blunted earlier expectations.
In Britain, there is also a growing realisation that poverty is not as neatly
concentrated in specific urban cores as was assumed; most children in EPA
schools are not specifically deprived, and most deprived children are not in
EPA schools. The final verdict on the EPA programme is not yet in. But the
debate over its feasibility has reopened in the same academic community
that produced the idea a decade ago. 111
5 The Social
Policy Process
The rg6os saw the British social policy debate transformed. The assump-
tions of the 1950s were swept aside, and poverty and inequality were
reinstated as critical social issues. While the rediscovery of poverty did not
come as a sudden blinding revelation, one dimension of hardship after
another was thrust firmly into political consciousness, and the cumulative
impact on the social policy agenda was very great. This change did not
flow from any sudden shift in the structure of British life; perceptions of
income trends changed dramatically while the actual distribution of
income remained broadly stable. Nor was the change imposed on
politicians by pressures from below; the poor remained unassertive
themselves, and were undefended by well-organised allies. Rather, the
rediscovery of poverty and the policy response to it were the products of the
internal dynamics of the social policy process.
The new policies flowed through twin processes of intellectual and
institutional adaptation. Policy-making is a conceptual activity. In-
dividual policy-makers must perceive and define problems and devise
responses to them. But policy-making also takes place within institutions.
The structure of those institutions, and their relationship with the wider
society, shape the choices of those in authority. The preceding chapters
have revealed a persistent tension between the intellectual and in-
stitutional processes of policy change. This chapter draws together the
patterns that have emerged into a more comprehensive picture of the social
policy process.

INTELLECTUAL INNOVATION

When attention is focused on the individual policy-maker, the intellectual

process stands out. From this perspective, policy change flows from shifts in
the perceptions and attitudes of central decision-makers, and the policy
process resembles a complex communications network within which
information and ideas are exchanged. Policy innovations, in particular,
highlight the intellectual process. The individual who analyses problems in
a new way, or who recombines existing elements so as to introduce a novel
pattern, takes the first indispensable step towards innovation .I Those who

1 39
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
contribute to such conceptual shifts are major agents of policy innovation,
however insignificant they may otherwise appear in politics.
The number of people who contribute to this intellectual process is
small. The ideas underlying the social policy innovations of the 1g6os can
be traced, in the first instance, to a few social scientists and professionals
operating on the margins of politics. Crossman's key outside advisers
numbered three or four; the group that documented poverty and drafted
the CPAG's policy proposals was only slightly larger; and the EPA ide~
was invented and sustained by another handful. Such individuals are,
however, essentially middlemen between the intellectual and political
worlds. They are most effective when they are drawing upon a broader
stream of research, theory and opinion developing in their academic or
professional communities. The innovative approach of the Rent Act
reflected a growing professional disenchantment with the polarised nature
of housing debates; the CPAG's proposals flowed from a decade of research
and thinking by a new generation of academics based at the LSE; and
EPAs emerged from the general environmentalist consensus in educational
research.
The influence of these social scientists and professionals is particularly
marked in three phases of the policy process: awareness, definition, and
the specification of policy alternatives. The most obvious impact is on the
awareness of problems. The 1g6os offer compelling evidence of the role of
empirical research in shaping the social policy agenda. More than any
other group, the left-wing intellectual movement led by Titmuss and his
students revealed the persistence of poverty and inequality and documen-
ted the failures of the welfare state. Their surveys of housing, poverty and
educational attainment filled major gaps in the information available to
government, and slowly changed policy-makers' conception of British
society. In effect, the social-science community acted as a social seismo-
graph, identifying and measuring problems hitherto ignored in political
life.
But their influence does not stop there. Social scientists also shape the
definition of the problems that they reveal. Social-science theory and
professional doctrine regularly penetrate the wider political world, an~
advisory committees in particular serve as mechanisms for absorbing such
models of reality and legitimating them for political purposes. As a result,
political argument often takes place within a wider consensus on the nature
of the problem, which reduces the range of conflict substantially. Normally
this process of diffusion takes time. The environmentalist consensus in
education took over twenty years to develop and permeate political
discourse; and the relative conception of poverty, first articulated by
intellectuals in the early 1950s, was not widely accepted in politics until the
mid-196os. But occasionally the diffusion process is greatly speeded up.
The evolution of professional opinion on housing was comparatively rapid,
spanning as it did only eight short years between 1957 and 1965; and
 The Social Policy Process
Donnison and the other advisers exercised their greatest influence over the
rent legislation in a matter of weeks, by shaping the new minister's
conception of the private rented market and the stresses within it.
The policy options actively considered also owe much to intellectuals
and professionals. The original inspiration for the innovative features of all
of the policies examined here sprang originally from the minds of such
people. The most novel elements in the Rent Act were first suggested by
Goodman, Donnison and Pilcher. The insistence that the tax and benefit
systems were both instruments of redistribution, as well as the specific
proposal that family allowances and child tax allowances be integrated,
were injected into the poverty debate by politically active intellectuals;
and the final clawback variation was invented by yet another academic
'irregular'. Similarly EPAs were social-science theory translated into
concrete recommendations by social scientists.
In some of its phases, then, the social policy process is essentially a
process of diffusion of information and ideas. The thin stratum of society
composed of social scientists and professionals acts as an instrument of
social analysis, a link between British society and its political institutions
that is critical in the making of social policy. It alerts politicians to changes
in their environment, interprets and reinterprets social problems for them,
and generates a continuous flow of proposals around which political
debate revolves. The images of reality that emerge are not necessarily
correct, but they are politically potent.
This process of diffusion is the product, in part, of a wider international
network, with social-science research and professional conferences and
publications forming the primary links between Britain and other
countries. The absorption of foreign ideas is, of course, a highly selective
process, and professional opinion in the host country must be sympathetic
before an importation can be successful. But the modern exchange of
policy intelligence between countries that do share common intellectual
traditions can be rapid indeed. The EPAs were a classic case. The
environmental consensus in Britain facilitated the exchange, but the
American example was an essential catalyst. Indeed EPAs never escaped
their trans-Atlantic origins; subsequent American pessimism about such
programmes was imported equally quickly, and Halsey and his friends
were soon having to fight the pervasive assumption that negative
evaluations of Head Start automatically applied to EPAs as well. Although
in less obvious ways, the international exchange of ideas pervaded other
fields as well. The Milner Holland Committee's examination of rent
legislation in other countries was important in the Rent Act, and the idea
of a negative income tax positively sped across national borders.
The impact of social-science knowledge and professional ideas depends
on several factors, the most important of which is uncertainty within
government. The complexity of modern policy problems has increased the
uncertainties of policy-makers generally and steadily expanded the role of
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
professionals. But differences between issues remain. The professionals'
influence is greatest when problems have been ignored, when they seem
new and undefined, when existing approaches no longer seem adequate.
Uncertainty was particularly marked in the rent case and, as a result,
outside experts were invited into the heart of the process and exercised a
decisive influence on the legislation. This is hardly the norm, however. The
pattern discovered in the poverty and EPA cases is probably more
common. Social scientists raised new issues and proposed innovative
policies; but officials and ministers were more confident of their capacity to
handle these problems, and the social scientists participated much less in
internal deliberations.
While the degree of uncertainty is critical to the role of such experts, it is
not the only factor involved. Confused policy-makers could still choose to
muddle through on their own. Their willingness to listen to social scientists
and professionals also depends on their attitude towards their particular
expertise. Social-science knowledge is intrinsically less verifiable than that
in the natural sciences and accordingly exacts less deference. Although the
status of the social sciences was certainly rising during the 1g6os, the
reaction of individual policy-makers varied enormously. Social scientists
had far greater influence with the intellectual politicians in the Labour
cabinet, such as Crossman, Crosland and jenkins, than with others such as
Callaghan; similarly their educational research carried much more weight
with Boyle than with many of his Conservative colleagues. Officials'
receptiveness also varied. Few officials, especially those older ones
at senior levels, have had much social-science training. Most studied
classics or history at university, and some of them remain determinedly
sceptical about the claims of social science: 'a lot of third-class words' was
one assessment ofsociology, 'just ideology' another. But other officials were
sympathetic, and personnel changes could significantly shift departmental
receptiveness, as the DES illustrates. In the early 1g6os, official sympathy
facilitated the appointment of Donnison and Young to the Plowden
Council; in the late 1g6os, the scepticism of a new set of senior officials
dampened enthusiasm for their recommendations; by the early 197os, yet
another group were inviting Halsey into their deliberations on nursery
education.
The extent of uncertainty and the status of the expertise in turn influence
a third factor that is critical to its impact: the particular mix of
communication channels through which ideas must pass. The diffusion of
policy intelligence proceeds through a variety of channels. In addition to
purely scholarly and professional publications, ideas flow back and forth in
the public media. Britain is a relatively centralised society, and the
institutions capable of disseminating policy intelligence are highly con-
centrated in London. The quality press, the weekly journals such as New
Society and The Economist, the pamphlet series and publishing houses
together constitute a national forum for policy discussion. Debates
 The Social Policy Process 143
conducted in this forum rarely reach the bulk of the British public but they
do engage informed opinion and policy-makers. 2 Outside experts can use
this network to shift perceptions in Whitehall and Westminster, sometimes
without even leaving their studies in Hampstead and elsewhere. These
indirect exchanges are supplemented, however, by a series of more direct
channels of communication between the professional and political worlds.
Informal consultations are a regular feature of the process, as Crossman's
group, the seminars in Lynes' flat, the sessions in Crosland's home and
Halsey's contacts with the DES all testify. Increasingly, contact is also
formalised. Social scientists and professionals are regularly appointed to
advisory bodies such as the Milner Holland and Plowden committees; and
some become formal advisers to ministers, as did Kaldor and later Abel-
Smith. In effect, social scientists and professionals have been partially
integrated into Britain's policy elites. 3
But the directness of communication in any particular instance depends
on the degree of uncertainty and deference to expertise among policy-
makers. When both are marked, as in the rent case, direct consultations are
likely. Such contact is clearly the most efficient type, involving as it does less
personal effort on the part of the outside adviser and less distortion of his
message: Goodman, Donnison and Pilcher were able to get their ideas
across clearly because of their direct participation in the drafting process.
But when uncertainty and respect are reduced, social-science and
professional ideas have to pass through less direct channels, such as
advisory committees and the public media. These channels remain
important; they prepare wider political and informed opinion about new
directions in professional thinking, preparing the way for government
action, should it come. But reliance on indirect channels alone is a
daunting task; greater effort is required, as the CPAG campaign indicates,
and the messages are more vulnerable to reinterpretation, as the fate of the
EPA proposal demonstrates. Thus the influence of social-science and
professional thinking on policy-makers varies considerably. The rent bill
provided a unique combination of favourable factors: high levels of
uncertainty, an intellectual minister and direct channels of communi-
cation. These factors were diminished in the other cases, and the
professionals' impact was correspondingly less.
Despite such differences, however, our most striking finding is the
pervasive influence of intellectuals and professionals. The conceptual
changes that are the preconditions of policy innovation regularly start with
them. In this sense, the social policy process has not changed dramatically
since the nineteenth century. Empirical research has long been a powerful
weapon against political orthodoxy. The way in which the assumptions
about the Welfare State were dissolved was simply a modern instance of
the undermining of the intellectual foundations of the Poor Law a century
before. Leading activists may be more professional now, and the expansion
of the universities, research institutes and professions may have provided a
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
firmer institutional base for them. But the essential dialectic between
knowledge and policy has not changed.
The interpretations of policy-making as a process of social learning
advanced by Deutsch, Vickers, Heclo and others thus do illuminate a
critical dimension of the social policy process. Such theories explain how
problems are raised and defined, and how innovative policy ideas emerge.
During the rg6os the problems of poverty and educational deprivation
were not imposed on government by party conflict or group power. Thes~
issues flowed from new policy intelligence which shifted policy-makers'
interpretation of their environment. Even in the case of the highly
politicised rent issue, policy formulation was essentially a process of
collective learning, in which party doctrine and electoral calculus gave
way to expertise and social-science data. Overturning established images
of society and reshaping contentious areas of public policy are major
accomplishments. The impact of knowledge cannot be denied.
Yet focusing on the intellectual process of policy innovation captures
only part of the whole. Such a view overemphasises the independence and
potency of knowledge, as well as the openness of political systems to
change. A problem defined is not a problem solved. Social scientists could
champion the interests of the poor, but they could not force the
government to act. Indeed they had remarkably little impact on the
salience attached to the issues that they raised; the CPAG campaign was
their most elaborate effort and its success depended heavily on the
sensitivity of policy elites. Similarly a policy proposed is not a policy
adopted. A common pattern of the rg6os was for proposals from socia,l
scientists to find an echo in legislation, but in such a modified form that the
original aspirations went unfulfilled. Expertise generates influence, and
intellectual creativity can alter political thinking. But knowledge is not
power. Ideas must be harnessed to more powerful forces to change the
direction of social development. Analogies with learning fail to reveal the
limits of knowledge because they underestimate the extent to which policy-
making is an institutional as well as an intellectual phenomenon.

THE INSTITUTIONAL PROCESS

Politics in the field of social policy is largely a reactive process. The

problems and proposals around which political discourse revolves usually
originate elsewhere. But political parties, bureaucracies and interest
groups constitute an institutional screen that filters the ideas seeking to
penetrate the political world, and limits the extent to which the ideas that
do slip through the screen are translated into public policy.
Party Politics. The beliefs and strategies of politicians are central to the
screening process. Theories that highlight the potency of expertise often
depict politicians as poor, uncertain creatures, constantly struggling to
understand their environment and constantly unsure of what to do. But
 The Social Policy Process 1 45

this is a very partial image. Complexity does not always breed indecision.
Cognitive theorists emphasise that the human mind is essentially a
mechanism for imposing order on ambiguous situations; individuals evolve
structures of belief within which decisions can proceed smoothly even in
complex circumstances. 4 So it is in politics. Politicians develop their own
commonsense notions about social processes, derived largely from their
personal experiences, and their perceptual maps incorporate certainties as
well as uncertainties. Some choices that appear complex to experts seem
simple to politicians. Their images of reality may be incorrect, but they are
held no less firmly for that.
Party doctrine and electoral survival are the most powerful sources of
political certainty. Party doctrine is never comprehensive and seldom
unambiguous; there are many gaps in which the role of expertise can
expand, as the drafting of the Rent Bill illustrates. But when party
perceptions do harden, the impact of expertise fades. In addition,
politicians are continually anticipating the electoral consequences of their
actions. Their judgements are largely intuitive and much political
argument centres precisely on the shape of public enthusiasms and the
'elasticity of public tolerances. But the intuitive nature of such perceptions
does not alter the certainty with which they are often held. Ministers
regularly assert dogmatically that certain courses of action are simply not
on. 5
Yet the impact of political judgements varies enormously between
different phases of the policy process. Politicians do not usually raise the
issues to which they respond, or define the terms in which they are debated.
Only in the highly politicised issue of rents did parties take a lead in
monitoring social change. In that case Labour strove mightily to focus
attention on the developing pressures in the private rented sector and to
shape the public conception of the problem. When parties do commit their
energies in this way, their impact on the policy agenda is formidable: other
dimensions of poverty remained hidden for years, but the problems of poor
tenants were quickly recognised in political circles. Parties play such a role
intermittently, however. Of all the problems crowding the social policy
agenda of the 1g6os, only a few emerged originally because of such intense
partisan scrutiny. 6
If social issues are only occasionally defined by politicians, their salience
is always decided by them. Party ideology and electoral calculations were
the twin forces at work in the policies considered here. If both party
attitudes and electoral opinion pointed in the same direction, the result
was decisive. Rent legislation was placed high on the agenda because
Labour was emotionally committed to it and the issue provided electoral
ammunition; EPAs were low on the agenda because they had little support
from either the party or the electorate. On the other hand, when party
ideology and electoral calculations pulled in opposite directions, as in the
Conservatives' rent policy and Labour's poverty policy, politicians were
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
torn. Deliberations were agonised and halting; the issues were repeatedly
deferred; the final outcomes were inelegant compromises.
The impact of politics on the specifics of policy is much more in-
termittent. Specific party traditions, such as Labour's dislike of means-
testing, may be critical. But parties do not always have such concrete
preferences. The Minister of Housing turned to others for ideas, and there
was no specific Labour approach to primary education. Similarly,
electoral considerations had an uneven impact. Possible public opposition
to income redistribution was crucial in limiting the response to family
poverty, and clawback was evolved to neutralise the immediate danger
posed by the standard rate taxpayer. Yet in the case of the more politicised
Rent Bill, professional advice outweighed electoral caution; and the
electorate's impact on the details of EPA policy was all but non-existent.
One way of illustrating the intermittent impact of party politics is to ask
how government policy would have differed if the Conservatives had been
in power in the late 196os. The question cannot be answered conclusively,
of course, and the premise may be incorrect; Labour's victory in 1964
unleashed great expectations of social reform and contributed to the
willingness of professionals to raise issues in the first place. But some sense of
the probable differences can be gleaned from Conservatives' statements at
the time and from their actions when they were in office after 1970.
The Conservatives might have given lower priority to social spending
during the economic traumas of the second half of the decade. The
evidence is ambiguous, however. Labour had come to power stating
explicitly that social policy reforms depended on an improved economic
performance, and certainly the party did not envisage a massive departure
from the past. Indeed, when Brian Abel-Smith compared the Labour
Government's intentions, as set out in its National Plan for 1964-70, with
the last six years of Conservative rule, he concluded that, even though the
Government assumed a similar rate of economic growth, it planned for a
slower rate of growth in social expenditures than had already been
achieved under the Conservatives. 7 When economic performance proved
poorer than assumed, the painful scaling down of expectations began.
Whether the Conservatives would have gone much further is difficult to
decide. Certainly the process would have been less agonising for Con-
servatives; some cuts might have come earlier; and the selectivist approach
to spending would have received an added boost. But whether the total
level of social spending would have been markedly lower in 1970 is
unclear.
Probable differences in specific policies are only slightly clearer. The
Conservatives would undoubtedly have opted for the means-test approach
to family poverty. They demanded it at the time and enacted it in 1970.
But the other cases are more doubtful. A Conservative Government would
probably have responded more warmly to the Plowden Report as a whole,
but the form of EPA policy adopted would have been similar. The
 The Social Policy Process 147
Conservatives agreed with the rejection of a centralised programme in
1g67 and maintained the decentralised approach after 1970. The rent case
is the most intriguing. The Conservatives were pledged to provide
protection for tenants ifMilner Holland called for it, and certainly the civil
service expected a Conservative Government to reintroduce some controls.
The scope of the controls might well have been less extensive, limited
perhaps to the major conurbations. But the Conservatives' initial reaction
to Crossman's machinery, and their adoption of it in their own legislation
on private rented housing in 1972, suggest that they were not fundamen-
tally opposed; their major departure was to implement Crossman's policy
more quickly than his Labour successors as Minister of Housing had done.
The final irony is that in 1g65 a Conservative Government might have
been uneasy about introducing such a flexible system, designed as it was to
raise rents, for fear of a massive attack from the Labour Opposition.
Certainly Crossman was privately convinced that this was the case.
Governments often see their most cherished programmes destroyed by
outside pressures, and to some extent the story of the 1g6os is one of party
aspirations overwhelmed by economic crisis. But the intermittent nature of
party influence also reflects the weakness of parties as planning instru-
ments. Even in opposition, parties cannot always translate their pre-
ferences into concrete proposals. They may fail to agree internally on
controversial issues such as rents and take refuge in ambiguity, leaving the
tough decisions to a future minister. In addition, the research resources
available to an opposition party are limited. Mistakes can be made,
leaving the basic ideas vulnerable to political ridicule and administrative
objections, and necessitating painful retreats later. 8 The party also faces an
uncertain future, and may fail to anticipate correctly which issues will
dominate over the next decade: Labour had no agreed position on family
poverty or compensatory education when it entered office because neither
was yet perceived as an issue.
The problems of developing distinct party policies are increased in
office. The burden falls squarely on the relevant ministers, who are often
isolated from each other and the wider party. Herbison and Crosland did
reflect broad party beliefs and priorities in their responses to family poverty
and EPAs, but Crossman felt completely free to turn to non-party sources
of inspiration. Party checks on ministerial choices are hardly consistent.
The Prime Minister was not deeply interested in the issues examined here,
and extensive cabinet deliberations occurred only in cases of inter-
departmental conflict, such as family poverty. In comparison, the initial
response to the EPA proposal was settled without reference to the cabinet;
and the only other ministers deeply involved in drafting the Rent Bill, the
Law Officers, served more as guardians of the norms of the legal
community than of the traditions of the Labour party. The impact of the
PLP and the annual conference was even weaker. Clearly on a major issue
the Prime Minister, cabinet, parliamentary party and conference can
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
challenge a minister, and the fact that there was no such challenge to the
policies examined here suggests that the party was not in fundamental
disagreement. But it is equally clear that ministers are left with broad scope
for manoeuvre. Governments with clear policies can be blown off course by
powerful outside forces. But the unevenness of party planning also allows
many ministers to drift off by themselves.
The Administrative System. The British civil service is seen as pre-
eminently responsive to political authority. This image of neutrality,
however, masks the reality of its influence. The historical record repeatedly
testifies to the importance of the civil service in the evolution of British
social policy, and the policy patterns of the rg6os do likewise. But, like
other policy determinants, the impact of the civil service varies sharply
from one phase of the process to another.
The norm of administrative neutrality takes its greatest toll on the
shaping of the social policy agenda; officials have little impact on which
issues are raised and how salient they are thought to be. Public
bureaucracies can, if they wish, mobilise impressive resources to monitor
and interpret society. In post-war Britain, however, officialdom did not do
so in the social policy field. Departments produced endless statistical
reports on ongoing programmes, but the data reflected prevailing
conceptions of need and did not identify new social trends or problems;
they did not measure the growing stresses in the private rented sector, the
extent of family poverty or class differentials in educational attainment. At
best the information generated by ongoing programmes drew attention to
the possible existence of such problems. In the early rg6os the monthly
figures on homelessness and the wage stop acted as crude barometers of
social stress; but because the. figures did not measure the problem
comprehensively, their meaning was open to dispute, and they posed little
threat to the free play of political imagination.
The civil service did little to supplement such information with more
elaborate monitoring mechanisms. Only the DES had equipped itself with
a powerful intelligence system. The CACEs brought professionals and
academics closer to the department, and drew officials, who helped to
prepare the reports, into the continuing process of social interpretation.
Other departments lacked such facilities. They were less able to anticipate
lines of public attack and were left with fewer defences when they came.
Administrators had no data with which to assess charges about Rach-
manism or family poverty and had to mount special research efforts in the
form of the Milner Holland Committee and the survey of family incomes.
Such ad hoc efforts can legitimate pressing concerns with official data, but
they provide only snapshot views of social processes and their reliability
quickly fades. In general, civil-service research in the rg6os reacted to
events rather than shaping them.
The weakness of civil-service research reflected its importance. Research
can greatly complicate a government's life by multiplying the number of
 The Social Policy Process 1 49
options and factors to be juggled. As Keynes observed, 'There is nothing a
government hates more than to be well-informed; for it makes the process
of arriving at decisions much more complicated and difficult'. 9 Research
can also be embarrassing.lt can reveal the inadequacies of policies to which
politicians are committed, as in the 1957 Rent Act survey. It can extend
public consciousness of problems, like poverty, that governments cannot
readily solve. And it can challenge the government's own priorities, in the
way that the Plowden Report did. In such circumstances, governments of
all parties seek to suppress research findings, as in the Rent Act survey, or to
dispose of over-powerful research systems, as with the demise of the CACEs.
For the politician who wffihes to maximise his own control over the policy
agenda, judicious limits on the monitoring of policy are very tempting.
But such a strategy merely shifts initiative in social interpretation from
public to private expertise. Much of the influence of the social scientists
during the 196os was a reflection of the lacunae in the information
available to the civil service. The initiative relinquished extended beyond
the simple awareness of problems. Outsiders incorporated their own
perspectives and standards in their research and thereby shaped to a
greater extent the prevailing definition of problems as well. For instance,
one of the most significant shifts in post-war social debate was the spread of
the relative conception of poverty: 'need' was redefined for public purposes
by private actors. Administrators found their Supplementary Benefits line
turned into a general poverty line and poverty turned into a recurring
problem. Officials grumbled about this development, but having sur-
rendered the initiative in social interpretation they were left with only
technical arguments about how high the line actually should be.
During the 1970s, the balance between independent and civil-service
research appears to be shifting as departments improve their information
systems. If the information balance shifts significantly, so will the policy
process. The change may make officials more sensitive to outside efforts;
but more probably the capacity to influence the policy agenda through
independent research will decline as the civil service builds stronger data
defences. Research initiatives will increasingly reflect governmental and
administrative priorities, and the crucial definition of categories and
standards through which social problems are interpreted will settle more
firmly into official hands. Either outside experts will be drawn into internal
processes or they will be increasingly reduced to being critics of official
statistics. HI
During the 196os officials also had little influence on the salience of
issues. EPA policy received qualified departmental support which, in the
absence of external pressures or sustained ministerial interest, was
important simply in keeping the idea alive. But, by themselves, officials
could not create the drive for major action; they did not mount campaigns
either for or against rent controls or for or against action on family poverty.
Indeed, civil servants generally believed that issues had to be perceived as
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
such in the political arena before they could move. 11 Comparison with his
nineteenth-century counterpart suggests that the modern official has a
smaller role in setting the social policy agenda, and at least one older
official sensed such a change over the last four decades. 'Before the war civil
servants would have written a stiff memorandum, indicating that action
was essential. But today there is a greater tendency to sit back; there has
been a real falling off in forcing unpopular issues on ministers.'
Administrators come into their own, however, as soon as the actual
drafting of policy begins. Officials' most sensitive function is the specifi-
cation of the alternatives to be presented to ministers. Only in the drafting
of the Rent Bill was this function shared. That sharing was due to the
stubborn insistence of an aggressive minister; and the initial resistance he
encountered revealed the strength of officials' assumptions that formulat-
ing advice was ultimately their job. Innovative policy ideas tend to
develop outside. But officials are critical in adapting ideas to political
realities, and much depends on their sympathy. Acceptance of the
proposals of Crossman's outsiders was greatly facilitated because the
department generally agreed with the attitudes towards the private
market that underlay them; the CPAG was fortunate that some of the
senior officials in the Ministry of Social Security also disliked the means-
tested option; and the EPA advocates were unfortunate that few officials
were prepared to battle for the specifics of their proposal.
Officials do not limit themselves to advising ministers. They also try-
albeit with infinite discretion- to mobilise outside support for their
policies. Major orchestrations of political support are usually carried out
by the minister; Crossman managed the public campaign prior to the
introduction of the Rent Bill and Herbison activated the TUC and
backbenchers during the cabinet. split over poverty. But administrators
were also involved. It was an official of the Ministry of Social Security who
contacted the CPAG and convinced them to support the Ministry's
compromise. Similarly the DES cajoled the NUT into accepting the salary
supplement, and guided Halsey in his contacts with their minister, in hopes
of pushing nursery education at least some distance along the discrimi-
natory path that they too wished to tread.
The administrative structures within which officials labour also have
profound policy consequences and can, on occasion, transform social
policy ideas out of all recognition. Governmental structures, in effect,
create a set of channels within which central policy-makers can operate
with relative ease. Trying to change the channels, or operate outside them,
however, is far more complicated, requiring changes in standard pro-
cedures and conventions in Whitehall, changes in relations with outside
groups, and sometimes changes in the law. Avoiding such costs should not
be confused with simple bureaucratic inertia. For the most part, existing
structures serve the government well, and even the most active bureaucrat
or politician will pause before overturning a vast array of existing
 The Socilll Policy Process
institutions and understandings simply in order to achieve specific, limited
ends. He may finally choose to confront existing structures, but doing so
can only generate additional opposition inside and perhaps outside
Whitehall. There is a strong incentive to achieve the ends, if possible,
through existing channels.
The patterning of the administrative structure is clearly evident with
regard to the social policies of the rg6os. In the first place, divisions of
administrative responsibility compartmentalised social policy. A func-
tional division of responsibility takes the situation of a single social group
such as the poor and divides it up between a number of departments and
agencies. Social security, wages and employment, education and housing
are all dealt with by separate departments, and the assumption of re-
sponsibility for a problem by one department effectively determines the
range of policy responses considered. The fact that the Ministry of Social
Security took up the family poverty issue ensured an income-transfer
approach: regulation of the wage structure through a minimum wage or a
social service approach such as community action fell outside the
department's jurisdiction and were not even considered.
No co-ordinated discussion of the best approach to poverty ever
occurred, simply because the relevant administrative structures did not
facilitate it. 12 Different departments responded to the poor in their own
way. The battle over linking tax allowances and family allowances reveals
the obstacles facing even a limited integration of programmes managed by
different departments. Such administrative pluralism is often counter-
productive. For example, the accumulation of tax policies and means-
tested benefits provided by various departments has created an unintended
'poverty trap'; families receiving such benefits can find that an increase in
their earnings actually reduces their standard of living. In the 1970s
Whitehall launched efforts to co-ordinate social policies more effectively,
but the evidence of the rg6os suggests that the obstacles are daunting. 13
Standard operating procedures within each department also have
policy consequences. Officials prefer to use established capabilities
wherever possible, and in the three cases examined here their strongest
stands came in defence of what they saw as procedural propriety. In the
family poverty case, the family allowance approach was an adminis-
tratively attractive option simply because the programme already existed;
and the Inland Revenue's opposition to the use of the tax system for social
purposes, together with the Treasury's insistence on the prerogatives of the
budget, generated great heat in the struggle. The EPA proposal was even
more profoundly transformed to fit the administrative framework. DES
sensitivity to the LEAs' discretion doomed the national programme; the
building recommendation achieved a prominence never intended by its
original authors while administratively more difficult parts of the package
faded into the background; and at a later stage Halsey's hybrid nursery
centres lost out to the existing schools structure.
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
Creating new administrative machinery provides greater flexibility, but
it is a major task not lightly undertaken by officialdom. The Ministry of
Housing did set up new machinery to regulate rents, but only when
convinced that no alternative existed; and even then official nervousness
about a possible administrative breakdown led to the system's almost
surreptitious introduction. In addition, while new machinery does
increase the room for manoeuvre, the escape from administrative norms is
hardly complete. After a terrible row with his department, Crossman
compromised on how rent officers would be appointed; and it was the
views of Lord Chancellor's Department on the judicial nature of
regulation that were written into the legislation.
Clearly the 'neutral' civil service is a myth in two senses. Officials do
have policy preferences which they seek to advance. And even if officials
avoid such commitments the structure of the administrative system within
which they operate still leaves its imprint on the policies of the nation.
Interest Groups. By comparison with parties and the civil service, interest
groups played a secondary role in the politics of social policy in the 1g6os.
The poor were not organised at all: they did not force their plight on to the
political agenda, and policy did not change in response to their demands.
Throughout the decade, the 'poor' remained a statistical category rather
than a social group, with their numbers varying between two and seven
million depending on the personal inclinations of the statistician. Sim-
ilarly, the category of'educationally deprived' took its meaning from the
definitions of social scientists rather than the consciousness of the
beneficiaries. As Robert Pinker has argued, it is possible that most of the
people diagnosed as deprived are 'far less aware oftheir condition and far
less ideologically motivated by it than those who undertake the diag-
noses' .14 Certainly by comparison with the more affluent and politically
aggressive sections of the community, the poor could be ignored with
impunity. Those who stood to suffer from social policy were more vocal but
not always more effective. Landlords did have organisational repre-
sentatives but their impact on the 1965 Rent Act was minimal. The
financial costs of other policies such as income transfers and social services
fell primarily on the taxpayer. The constraint from middle-income
taxpayers was real, but they were imposed via politicians' electoral
calculations rather than by means of organised groups.
Nor was social policy the product of a clash between the great peak
organisations, the TUC and the CBI. British trade unions have long
concentrated on economic issues and, while they are consulted on changes
in income transfer programmes, the initiatives generally come from
elsewhere. The only important TUC intervention in the cases examined
here- the opposition to the means test- was orchestrated by the Minister
of Social Security. Business and labour were, of course, deeply involved in
the central issues of economic management, which had a powerful indirect
impact on social policy. But a pattern of direct bargaining between the
 The Social Policy Process 153
Government and peak organisations over the specifics of social policy did
not emerge in this period. In comparison with economic policy, govern-
ments are far less constrained by group action, and the enthusiasms and
intolerances of party and public have freer rein.
The influence of professionals sometimes does flow through group
action. The CPAG was essentially a social-science group in its origins,
leadership and information sources, and its success has stimulated similar
groups dedicated to social policy reform. These groups, however, have few
sanctions to impose on governments. Like individual social scientists, they
can raise and define problems and options; but their final impact on policy
depends on the receptiveness of others more powerfully placed. The
professionals with the greatest independent power over social policy are
those who staff the social services, such as doctors, teachers and, to a lesser
extent, social workers. Their co-operation or at least compliance is
important to government, and this fact gives them power. Certainly
opposition from the NUT was sufficient to reshape important parts of the
EPA proposal.
But, overall, social policy was not the product of clashes between
organised groups. In fact, as the family poverty case demonstrates, groups
were as often adjuncts to the real contenders inside government as they
were independent sources of policy direction. Obstacles to social policy
reform did exist, and aspirations for social change were often blunted. But
most often the opposition took the form of estimates in the minds of policy-
makers rather than organised groups treading the corridors of power.
Policy Types: The Institutional Patterns Compared. The particular con-
stellation of institutional factors depends on the type of policy at stake. In
all three cases, innovative ideas came from social scientists and pro-
fessionals, and their salience was settled according to the same political
criteria. But the institutional constraints shaping the final policy depended
on the mechanism that reformers sought to bend to their task: regulation,
income transfer, or social service.
Reform of social services such as education is undoubtedly the most
complex. Such services are provided by large organisations that are usually
run by a variety of authorities. They are also manpower-intensive,
employing professionals who are usually well-organised and ready to
defend both their own interests and their beliefs about how the service
should operate. And social services require large capital investments in
buildings and equipment, which constrain the future uses to which any
service can readily be put. This complex pattern of administrative and
group relationships, together with the dispersed structure offormal control
over it, complicates the reformer's task enormously. During the 196os the
dominant thrust of educational debate in both Europe and America was to
use education as an instrument of wider social change.1 5 But even mild
versions of this strategy, such as EPAs, face strong institutional resistance.
Social services can be reshaped in the name of equality, as the British
I 54 Poverty, Politics and Policy
reorganisation of secondary education demonstrates. But the process is
contentious and strong political commitment, sustained over a long
period, is essential. And whether such changes, once achieved, have the
desired impact on inequality is still debated.
The politics of income transfers are organisationally simpler. Such
transfers constitute a direct exchange between the state and the citizen,
and reform of them is less dependent on the co-operation of independent
groups or the manipulation of complex structures. Administrative pro~
cedures and conventions can complicate such decisions, but a determined
government can overcome these, as the eventual adoption of clawback
indicates. The network of tax and benefit programmes is more seriously
trapped, however, in a web of public desires, expectations and in-
tolerances. While helping dependent groups such as the aged is politically
straightforward, significant opposition to vertical redistribution within the
working population comes not only from the wealthy but also from middle-
income earners, both manual and non-manual. Income redistribution is
potentially a powerful mechanism of change. Its impact on the life
situation of citizens is more immediate and visible than that of other types
of policies. For that very reason, the electoral constraints are more severe.
Regulation emerges as the most politically flexible tool. Central policy-
makers enjoyed wide latitude in drafting the I965 Rent Act. In part, this
was because they were creating new machinery; and certainly their
flexibility declined once it was in place, since local rent officials were given
significant discretion in setting rents. Nevertheless, the regulatory process
is not as complex as the provision of education, and the Government could,
and did, intervene with relative ease in subsequent years to limit the
impact on rents. Yet, although regulation is more politically flexible than
the other two mechanisms, it does not lend itself readily to accomplishing
precise social purposes such as helping the poor. Its impact depends on the
use made of regulatory provisions, and the poor consistently exercise their
rights less assiduously than others. More importantly, regulation ofa sector
of the market like private rented housing is essentially a holding operation.
The Rent Act sought to alter the terms on which the poor inhabited slum
housing- a not unimportant goal. But it could not generate the improved
housing the poor really needed. Thus, while some mechanisms are
politically more flexible than others, there is no easy route to social reform.

INTELLECTUAL AND INSTITUTIONAL CYCLES: THE Ig6os

Social policy can thus be thought of as the product of the continuous

interaction of intellectual and institutional change. These two processes
move in different cycles, paced by different forces. Sometimes they move in
parallel. In such pleasant times, ideas germinating in intellectual and
professional communities find a ready response in policy decisions. But in
other times, the two processes diverge, receptiveness declines and the gap
 The Social Policy Process 1 55

between aspiration and achievement grows. The 196os saw both cycles at
work: intellectual initiatives and political forces at first moved together,
then diverged.
The production of knowledge has a long lead-time and policy
innovations tend to flow from the intellectual creativity of the previous
decade. 16 By the 196os the critical assessment of the welfare state was well
advanced and professional debate about social policy was alive with
proposals for reform. In the early part of the decade, institutional processes
seemed responsive, and the Labour party, in particular, absorbed many of
the new ideas. The seeds of tension were present from the beginning,
however, and, with the advent of the low-growth economy, the political
scope for reform shrank. New ideas continued to influence policy, but
in a much more muted way.
The potential for radical social change has long been contested
vigorously within both the political and the intellectual left. Moderates
argue that the working class and the poor largely accept the existing social
structure and that advocates of change are therefore condemned to a
strategy of incrementalism. Enthusiasts reply that there are sufficient
tensions latent in the British social structure for a creative political
leadership to create a constituency for radical change. 17 Whatever the real
potential for change, the position of the Labour Government was
unequivocal. Their social policy decisions proclaimed that the tolerance of
income redistribution was low, even among many of their manual
supporters, and that in periods of slow economic growth the political scope
for significant reductions in poverty and inequality was extremely limited.
Social scientists could attack. They could make Labour feel uncomfortable
about their record. But they could not break the pattern.
By the 197os the left-wing intellectuals who had set off bravely in the
early 196os were disappointed. Problems had been raised and policies
changed, often_in innovative ways. But social policy had not significantly
reduced the extent of poverty and inequality in modern Britain. The
housing of poor tenants remained poor; the benefits of the family allowance
increases were soon eroded by inflation; and the concept of positive
discrimination remained a pale reflection of its potential. Other social
policies seemed to have a similarly limited impact. When analysts
examined the distribution of income after 1970, they found that it had
changed little from a decade previously (see Table 5.1).
The reaction of students of social policy was a protracted post-mortem,
in which the prospects for social reform in democratic political systems were
debated with renewed intensity. Pessimists argued that the still tenuous
affluence of the bulk of the population had brought the process of vertical
redistribution to an end. 18 The cautiously optimistic still hoped that
change would be possible through alliances with more powerful allies.
Some sought closer links with the trade unions; some hoped for an
ideological shift toward the left in the Labour party; 19 others insisted that
 Poverry, Politics and Policy
TABLE 5.1 Effect of taxes and benefits on distribution of income, 1961-63 and
1971-73

United Kingdom

Decile group Original income Final income

1g61-63 197 1-73 1g61-63 1971-73

% % % % %
Top 10 27·4 26.9 23·5 23-4
11-20 15·7 16.8 15-2 15·5
21-30 13.0 13·9 12.8 12.9
31-40 I 1.5 I 1.8 I I. I I I. I
41-50 9·3 10.0 9·8 9·6
51-6o 8.o 8-4 8.5 8.3
61-70 7-0 6.6 7-2 6.9
71-80 5-4 4-2 5·9 5·5
81-90 2-4 1.3 4-2 4·2
91-100 0.2 0.1 1.8 2.6

Gini coefficient % 40·3 42-3 32.8 32-4

Source: Royal Commission on the Distribution of Income and Wealth, Initial Report on the
Standing Reference (London: HMSO, Cmnd 6171, 1975), Table 24.

social policy was a relatively weak instrument of reform but that economic
policy changes could reduce inequality; and still others argued that only
the rise of industrial militancy and a truly radical socialist party could
produce major help for the poor. 20 While the diagnoses differed, the
concern was the same. Social professionals had been innovators in the
social policy process. But knowledge had not conferred power. They had
not been able to remove the institutional barriers to change.
In the future, social policy will continue to evolve through intellectual
and institutional processes. There may be periods of tranquillity when the
ideas for reform do not test to the full the existing political scope for change,
or when the scope for reform expands rapidly and catches up with existing
proposals for innovation. But such periods of compatibility are likely to
prove fleeting, especially in a low-growth economy. The prospects are for
continuing tension between the world of social imagination and the world
of power politics.
Notes
I EXPLAINING SOCIAL POLICY

1. For useful reviews of the policy-making literature generally, see Austin

Ranney (ed.), Political Science and Public Policy (Chicago: Markham, 1g68); Richard
Rose, 'Comparing Public Policy: an Overview', European Journal of Political
&search, 1 ( 1973), 67-g4; Hugh Heclo, 'Review Article: Policy Analysis', British
Journal of Political Science, 2 ( 1972), 83- 108; Richard Simeon, 'Studying Public
Policy', Canadian Journal of Political Science, 9 (1976), 548--Bo.
2. Harold Wilensky, The Welfare State and Equaliry (Berkeley: University of
CalifOI'nia Press, 1975), p. 47· See also Harold Wilensky and C. N. Lebeaux,
Industrial Sociery and Social Welfare (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1958), p.
230; W. W. Rostow, Stages of Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1965), pp. 11-12, 73-4. For a critical survey of similar arguments in
historical interpretations of the rise of the welfare state by Beales, Carr and
Polyani, see John Goldthorpe, 'The Development of Social Policy in England,
18oo-1914', Transactions of the Fifth World Congress of Sociology, 14 (1962), 41-56.
3· Philips Cutright, 'Political Structure, Economic Development and National
Social Security Programs', American Journal of Sociology, 70 ( 1965), 537-50; Felix
Paukert, 'Social Security and Income Redistribution: A Comparative Study',
International Labour Review, g8 ( 1g68), 425-50; Wilensky, The Welfare State and
Equaliry, ch. 2.
4· See, for example, Thomas Dye, Politics, &onomics and the Public (Chicago: Rand
McNally, 1966). For critical reviews of this vast literature, see Herbert Jacob and
Michael Lipsky, 'Outputs, Structure and Power', Journal of Politics, 30 (1968),
51o-38; Stuart Rakoff and Guenther Schaefer, 'Politics, Policy and Political
Science: Theoretical Alternatives', Politics and Sociery, 1 (1970), 51-77; John
Dearlove, The Politics of Policy in Local Government (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1973), ch. 4; Joyce Munns, 'The Environment, Politics and
Policy Literature: A Critique and Reformulation', Western Political Quarter!J, 28
( 1975), 64~7. For an argument that the importance of political factors increases
when concern shifts from levels of expenditure to their redistributive nature, see
Brian Fry and Richard Winters, 'The Politics of Redistribution', American Political
Science Review, 64 (1970), 5o8-22.
5· For example, variation in social security expenditures among developed
nations is explained less by economic level than by such factors as how long social
security policies have been in effect. See Henry Aaron, 'Social Security:
International Comparisons', in Otto Eckstein (ed.), Studies in the Economics ofIncome
Maintenance (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1967); Koji Taira and Peter
Kilby, 'Differences in Social Security Development in Selected Countries',
International Social Securiry Review, 22 (1g6g), 139-53; and Frederic Pryor, Public
Expenditure in Communist and Capitalist Nations (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968), pp.
146-51 and 172-76.

157
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
6. For useful critiques of the functionalist underpinnings of many such in-
terpretations, see Gold thorpe, 'Development ofSocial Policy in England'; Dorothy
Wedderburn, 'Facts and Theories of the Welfare State', in Ralph Miliband and
John Saville (eds), The Socialist Register 1g65 (London: Merlin Press, 1965); and
John Carrier and Ian Kendall, 'Social Policy and Social Change- explanations of
the development of social policy', Journal of Social Policy, 2 (1973), 2og--24.
7. This argument can be found in the critique of bourgeois and critical-utopian
socialism in Marx's The Communist Manifesto and Engels' Socialism: Utopian and
Scientific. For modem variations on the theme, see Ralph Miliband, The State in
Capitalist Socie!)l (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1g6g); Frances Piven and
Richard Cloward, Regulating the Poor: The Functions of Public Welfare (New York:
Randon House, 1971); Victor George, Social Securiry and Sociery (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1973); andJ ames O'Connor, The Fiscal Crisis ofthe State (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1973).
8. John Saville, 'The Welfare State: an Historical Approach', as quoted in
Wedderburn, 'Facts and Theories of the Welfare State', p. 137.
9· O'Connor, Fiscal Crisis of the State, p. 138.
10. Gaston Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and lndustrializatwn i" Europe, America and
Russia (New York: John Wiley, 1971}, ch. 4; Lidtke, however, suggests that the
strategy was not particularly effective and that any check on the growth of the
Social Democrats was only transitory. Vernon Lidtke, The Outlawed Par!)~: Social
Democracy in Germany, 18;8-18go (Princeton, N J .: Princeton University Press,
1g66), especially pp. 158--64.
11. Piven and Cloward, Regulating the Poor, Part 111. The authors do not, however,
provide much direct evidence of politicians' intentions to support theiY:"
interpretation.
12. For interpretations in which the fear of unrest is not present, or at best is one of
a variety of factors, see Maurice Bruce, The Coming of the Welfare State, 4th edn.
(London: Batsford, 1g68); Bentley Gilbert, The Evolution of .National Insurance in
Great Britain (London: Michael Joseph, 1g66); and British Social Policy, 1914-1939
(London: Batsford, 1970); Kenneth Bryden, Old Age Penswns and Policy-Making in
Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1974); and Hugh Heclo,
Modern Social Politics in Britain and Sweden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1974).
13. This approach builds on Vickers' distinction between policy-making as a
mental skill and policy-making as an institutional process. See Sir Geoffrey Vickers,
The Art of Judgment (London: Chapman & Hall, 1g65).
14. James March and Herbert Simon, Organizations (New York: John Wiley,
1958); Charles Lindblom, The Intelligence of Democracy (New York: Free Press,
1g65); Karl Deutsch, The .Nerves of Government (New York: Free Press, 1g63);
Vickers, Art ofJudgment; John Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory of Decision-Making
(Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1974).
15. 'The widespread image of the political process as the pushing, pulling and
clashing of interest groups', argues Deutsch, tends 'to leave unexplained the
curious fact that there are not more bitter conflicts among all the different groups
than we actually find in practice' (.Nerves of Government, p. 2o8).
16. A. V. Dicey, Law and Public Opinion in England, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan
1914), p. 33·
17. 0. McGregor, 'Social Research and Social Policy in the Nineteenth Century',
 Notes 1 59

British Journal of Sociology, 8 ( 1957), 146--57; and Robert Pinker, Social Theory and
Social Policy (London: Heinemann, 1971).
18. Heclo, Motkm Social Politics, ch. 6.
19. Donald Price, Government and Science (New York, N.Y.: New York University
Press, 1954), v. See also Guy Benveniste, The Politics of Expertise (Berkeley, Cali.:
The Gendessary Press, 1972) for a comparative discussion.
20. Nathan Glazer, 'A New Look in Social Welfare', New Sociery, 7 Nov 1g63, 6--8.
A similar picture emerges in more detailed studies of these developments; see
Gilbert Steiner, Sociallnsecuriry: The Politics of Welfare (Chicago: Rand McNally,
1g66); and Robert Connery, The Politics of Mental Health (New York: Columbia
University Press, Ig68).
21. Daniel Moynihan, 'The Professionalization of Reform', Public Interest, 1 ( 1965),
6--16.
22. James Sundquist and C. Schelling (eds), On Fighting Poverry (New York: Basic
Books, 196g); Daniel Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding (New York:
Free Press, Ig6g); Peter Marris and M. Rein, Dilemmas of Social Reform, 2nd edn.
(Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1973).
23. See especially D. V. Donnison, Social Policy and Administration Revisited
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1975). On the role ofsocial workers at the national level,
see Phoebe Hall, Reforming the Welfare (London: Heinemann, 1976).
24. On the development of the discipline ofsocial administration, see Pinker, Social
Theory and Social Policy.
25. See, for instance, Titmuss' introduction toR. H. Tawney's Equaliry, new edn.
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1964); also his Essays on 'The Welfare State', 2nd edn.
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1g63), Commitment to Welfare (London: Allen & Unwin,
1968), The Gift Relationship (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1973) and Social
Policy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1974). For a first attempt to assess Titmuss' work,
see D. A. Reisman, Richard Titmuss: Welfare and Sociery (London: Heinemann,
1977). For early philosophical statements by Brian Abel-Smith and Peter
Townsend, see their contributions to Norman Mackensie (ed.), Conviction (London:
MacGibbon & Kee, 1959).
26. Samuel Beer, Modem British Politics: A Stut!J of Parties and Pressure Groups
(London: Faber, 1965).
27. Richard Crossman, Inside View (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972).
28. Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row,
1957)·
29. David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd edn. (London:
Macmillan, 1974), ch. 8; Philip Converse, 'The Nature ofBeliefSysteins in Mass
Publics', in David Apter (ed.), Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press of
Glencoe, 1964).
30. On politicians' perceptions of their electorates, see David Butler and Anthony
King, The British General Election of 1¢4 (London: Macmillan, 1965), ch. $ and
Warren Miller and Donald Stokes, 'Constituency Influence in Congress', in Angus
Campbell, et al., Elections and the Political Order (New York: John Wiley, 1967).
31. Oliver MacDonagh, 'The Nineteenth-Century Revolution in Government',
Historical Journal, 1 (1958), 52-67, and A Pattern of Government Growth: 18oo-I86o
(London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1g61); David Roberts, Victorian Origins of the British
Welfare State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 196o).
32. For an interesting elaboration of this perspective, see Graham Allison, Essence
100 Poverty, Politics and Policy
of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971), cbs 3
and 4·
33· Richard Rose, The Problem of Parry Government (London: Macmillan, 1974),
ch. 15.
34· Maurice Kogan, The Politics of Education (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin,
1971), P· 36.
35· The broadest formulations depict all political interests as groups, either active
or potential, and in this form group theory simply becomes another language for
discussing politics.
36. For examples, see John Stewart, British Pressure Groups (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1958); S. E. Finer, Anonymous Empire (London: Pall Mall, 1958);
Harry Eckstein, Pressure Group Politics: The Case of the British Medical Association
(London: Allen & Unwin, 196o); Allen Potter, Organised Groups in British National
Politics (London: Faber, 1961); Peter Self and Herbert Storing, The State and the
Farmer, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1g62).
37· See the discussion of British politics in the report of the SSRC Committee on
Comparative Politics, reprinted in Harry Eckstein and David Apter, Comparative
Politics (New York: Free Press, 1g63); also Robert McKenzie, 'Parties, Pressure
Groups and the British Political Process', Political Qr.tarterry, 29 (1958), 5-16.
38. Useful discussions of decision-making are Vickers, The Art ofJudgment; March
and Simon, Organi<;ations, ch. 6; Charles Lindblom, The Policy-Making Process
(Englewood Cliffs, N J .: Prentice-Hall, xg68), chs 2-4; and Kenneth Boulding, The
Image (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press·, 1956).
39· This power may also be used to exclude issues from the political agenda. For an
argument that the poor, in particular, suffer from such 'non-decision-making', see
Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, Power and Poverry (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1970). For a general discussion of the factors that influence the
priority ofissues, seeP. Hall, H. Land, R. Parker and A. Webb, Change, Choice and
Corifiict in Social Policy (London: Heinemann, 1975), ch. 15.
40. March and Simon, Organizations, p. 139·
41. In discussing the influence of 'obvious' solutions in bargaining situations,
Thomas Schelling argues that 'the "obvious" outcome depends greatly on how
the problem is formulated, on what analogies or precedents the definition of
the issue brings to mind .... Much of the skill has already been applied
when the formal negouauons begin.' The Strategy of Conflict
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 196o), p. 6g. For examples of how
different ways of defining problems raise different solutions, see Vickers, The Art of
Judgment, ch. s; Lindblom, The Policy-Making Process, p. I$ and Raymond Bauer
and Kenneth Gergen, The Study of Policy Formation (New York: Free Press, 1968),
PP· I6-I8.
42. On this phase, see the discussion of 'satisficing' in March and Simon,
Organi<;ations, and the discussion ofincrementalism in Lindblom, The Policy-Making
Process.
43· Rimlinger, Welfare Policy and Industrialisation; Anthony King, 'Ideas, In-
stitutions and the Policies of Government', British Journal of Political Scimce, 3
(1973), 291-313 and 409-2$ Peter Kaim-Caudle, Comparative Social Policy and
Social Securiry (London: Martin Robertson, 1973); Heclo, Modern Social Politics;
Wilensky, Welfare State and Equaliry; Arnold Heidenheimer, Hugh Heclo and
Carolyn Adams, Comparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in Europe and
 .Notes
America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975); David Woodsworth, Social Securiry
and .National Policy: Sweden, Yugoslavia, Japan (Montreal: McGill-Queens University
Press, 1977).
44· On different typologies, see Rose, 'Comparing Public Policy'; and Lewis
Froman, 'The Categorisation of Policy Contents', in Ranney, Political Science and
Public Policy.
45· Theodore Lowi, 'American Business, Public Policy, Case Studies and Political
Theory', World Politics, 6 (1964), 677-715.
46. On the nature of innovation see Homer Barnett, Innovation: The Basis ofCultural
Change (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1953), ch. 7· In Hallet al., Change, Choice, and
Corifiict in Social Policy, the term innovation is limited to the initial introduction of a
programme; according to the typology employed in that study, the policies
examined here are primarily 'reforms'.

2 RENTS, RACHMAN AND REGULATION

1. This section is drawn primarily from David Donnison, The Government of

Housing (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1967) and the Report of the Committee
on Housing in Greater London (London: HMSO, Cmnd 26o5, 1967), hereafter cited as
the Milner Holland Report.
2. Donnison, The Government of Housing, ch. 6.
3· Milner Holland Report, ch. 4, and Donnison, The Government of Housing,
chs. 5-7.
4· On the history of British housing policy in the interwar period, see Marian
Bowley, Housing and the State (London: Allen & Unwin, 1945).
5· Donnison, Government of Housing, pp. 163-81.
6. On the 195 7 controversy, see Malcolm J. Barnett, The Politics of Legislation:
The Rent Act 1957 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969). For an analysis of the
assumptions of the two parties about the impact of the Act, see David Donnison, C.
Cockburn and ·T. Corlett, Housing Since the Rent Act (London: Occasional Papers
on Social Administration, No. 3, 1961 ), p. 83.
7· Parliamentary Debates, House of Commons, Vol. 560, col. 1787. (Hereafter
House of Commons debates are cited as HCD.)
8. For these repeated charges, see generally HCD 56o, cols 76o-2o62.
9· As late as 1969 Harold Wilson was still appealing to the party conference by
denouncing the Conservatives as 'the party of the Rent Act', despite the fact that
the most recent rent act had been passed by his own Government. See Harold
Wilson, The Labour Government: 1¢4-1970 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson and
Michael joseph, 1971), p. 707.
10. Report of the Fifry-Fijth Annual Conference of the Labour Parry ( 1956), p. 108.
11. Robert Jenkins, HCD 583, col. 891.
12. Housing (London: HMSO, Cmnd 2050, 1963), para. 74·
13. HCD 520, col. 235.
14. Labour Party, Housing of the Future ( 1956), p. 13; also Bevan, HCD 521, col.
826, and Callaghan, HCD 560, col. 2048.
15. Report of the Fifry-Sixth Annual Conference of the Labour Parry (1957), p. 18.
16. Hugh Gaitskell, letter to J. Murray, 9 Oct 1957 (Gaitskell Papers, Nuffield
College, Oxford).
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
I7· See The Times, 9 Aug and IO Dec I957; Manchester Guardian, 8 Nov I957
(hereafter always cited as Guardian).
I8. David Butler and Richard Rose, The British General Election of 1959 (London:
Macmillan, I96o), p. 54· For a discussion of the electoral consequences of the
legislation, see Barnett, Politics of Legislation, ch. I2.
I9· Donnison, Government ofHousing, ch. 5 and 6; also the Milner Holland Report.
20. This broadening can be seen by comparing the housing sections of Labour's
I959 election manifesto, Britain Belongs To You, with that of the Ig64 manifesto, The
.New Britain; see also the I96I policy statement, Signposts for the Sixties, in which rent
control has a decidedly secondary place in the section on land and housing. For
Stewart's general approach, see HCD 637, cols I34-45; 664, cols 3I3-2 I; and 666,
cols 334-48.
21. Barnett, The Politics of Legislation, pp. I43-5·
22. For examples of news stories based primarily on information gathered by
tenant groups, see Evening Standard, 4 Aug I96o; Guardian, 8 Aug I96o; Daily
Telegraph, 29 Aug I960.
23. For the Labour party's campaign, see Daily Telegraph, 23 Aug, I4 and 2 I Sep
Ig6o; Guardian, 23 and 30 Aug I96o; The Times, 28 Sep I96o. Also HCD 627, cols
I564-I6o5.
24. Guardian, I9 Dec I96o.
25. For an example of such a protest that did get brief coverage, see Daily
Telegraph, I9 Aug I96o.
26. Evelyn Sharp, The Ministry of Housing and Local Government (London: Allen &
Unwin, I969), p. 101.
27. See J. B. Cullingworth, Housing and Local Government in England and Wales
(London: Allen & Unwin, Ig66), chs. 8-Io.
28. John Greve, London's Homeless (London: Occasional Social Papers on Social
Administration, No. IO, I965), chs. 2-3; also Guardian, 23 Nov I963.
29. Report of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 1958 (London: HMSO,
Cmnd 737, I959), p. 56; Brooke, HCD 633, col. 21.
30. See, for instance, HCD 698, col. I570.
31. Labour efforts can be traced in the Guardian, 3 I Oct, I, 2, I I, I8 and 2 I Nov
I961.
32. Guardian, I8 Dec I96I.
33· For later protests by the bishops, see Guardian, 2 July and 29 Dec I962; The
Times, 3oJuly I962 and 2I Aug I963.
34· Donnison, et al., Housing Since the Rent Act; also Donnison, 'Housing Since the
Rent Act', The Times, I7 July I961.
35· Twelve of their newspaper articles were republished in Donnison et al., Essays
on Housing (London: Occasional Papers on Social Administration, No.9, I964); for
an example of exchanges between the academics and Dame Evelyn Sharp at a
professional housing conference, see Housing, xxm, No.3, pp. 65-I21.
36. Rent Act 1957: Report of Inquiry (London: HMSO, Cmnd I246, I96o); Gray
and Russell, The Housing Situation in 1g6o (London: HMSO, I96o); and London:
Employment: Housing: Land (London: HMSO, Cmnd I952, I963).
37· For example HCD 669, col. 553;_ 670, cols 732-3; and 675, col. 228.
38. London (Cmnd I952) para. 48; and Housing (Cmnd 2050), para. 7·
39· Barnett, Politics of Legislation, p. 54· For the Minister's refusal of demands for
more research, see HCD 633, col. 769.
 .Notes
40. See, for instance, Stewart's criticism of the Minister's use of some of the
figures, HCD 68I, col. II70.
4I. HCD 664, cols 204-326.
42. HCD 68I, col. I 103.
43· HCD 702, col. 563. For earlier Labour objections to the committee, see
Guardian, 22 Aug Ig63; and HCD 6gB, cols IOIS-I8.
44· The Times, 29 Aug Ig63.
45· HCD 637, col. 979·
46. The Times, 23 Nov I962.
47· HCD 668, especially cols 532-4 and 584.
48. London (Cmnd I952) para. 48. On the problems of measuring the extent of
such behaviour, see the Milner Holland Report, pp. I62-7.
49· On the importance oflibellaws in this case, see The Economist, 27 July Ig63.
50. For a useful summary ofRachman's life and empire, see the Milner Holland
Report, Appendix 11.
51. HCD 679, cols I3I-2.
52. Sunday Times, 7 July I963; Parkin, HCD 68o, cols 922-34.
53· HCD 68I, cols 704-7.
54· Guardian, g-3I July I963; The Times, Ig--25July I963; Daily Telegraph, g--26
July I963; Evening Standard, IS-23 July Ig63; Sunday Times, Observer and Sunday
Telegraph, I4, 2 I and 28 July I963. For good examples of the more sensational
reporting, see News of the World and The People, I4 July I963.
55· HCD 68I, col. 106o.
56. Ibid., col. 1088.
57· Milner Holland Report, ch. 7 and Appendix v, section 7·
s8. D. Denman, Times, 2I Aug I963; also later Estates Gazette, 27 Mar Ig65.
59· See Sir Keith Joseph, HCD 68I, col. 1082; 685, col. 523; 6g8, col. I567-
8.
6o. Guardian, 29 Nov Ig63. Their first pamphlet was entitled Rent Controls or
Houses?
6I. Guardian, 2 Nov Ig63.
62. HCD 68I, col. I I I g.
63. HCD 68I, cols I I08.
64. The Times, 30 Oct I965.
65. Richard Crossman's diary, I 7 Oct I964. Throughout this book, all references
to the diary are to the original transcripts, which cover the period from I952 until
I970. Parts of the diary for the years I964-70 have been published as The Diaries of
a Cabinet Minister, Vols I-3 (London: Hamish Hamilton and Jonathan Cape,
I975, I976 and I977)· Many of the references included here, however, are from the
years prior to I964 or from parts of the I964-70 diary not included in the published
version. Therefore, to simplify the process of citation, the original transcripts are
cited throughout. The reader should note that because the diary was redictated
and edited for publication, many of the quotations from the original transcripts
included here differ marginally from their published counterparts.
66. David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd edn.
(London: Macmillan, I974), pp. 287-g5.
67. Ibid., pp. 297-8.
68. Ibid., pp. 2g8-g.
6g. Transcript of BBC programme, 'Crosstalk', a conversation between Cross-
 Poverry, Politics and Policy

man and Dame Evelyn Sharp. Excerpts were reprinted in The Listener, I5 Mar
I973·
70. The Listener, I5 Mar I973, p. 336.
71. On Dame Evelyn's opposition to the Land Commission, see ibid., p. 335,
Crossman diary, 28 Oct I964, and Harold Wilson's reference in The Listener, I5 Feb
I973, p. 206.
72. Crossman diary, 29 Oct I964. The battle by Crossman and the Ministry for
priority for rent control is recorded in his diary (28-29 Oct and 2 Nov I964).
73· For the inter-war period, see Bowley, Housing and the State, pp. I5, 36-4I, I35-
46. The parallels between the policies in I933-9 and I953-7 are very strong.
74· See, for instance, HCD 622, col. I599; 644, cols 322-23; and 709, cols I6o-2.
75· The I964 Conservative election manifesto, Prosperity with a Purpose, promised
'additional safeguards for tenants' if, as was almost certain, they were 'shown to be
necessary by the inquiry into rented housing in London'.
76. Guardian, 2 Nov I962 and The Times, 23 May I964. See also the statement by
Sir Eric Errington, past-president of the NFPO; HCD 685, col. 537·
77· See Powell's 'Housing in a straiuacket', Sunday Times, I4 Mar 1965.
78. HCD 709, cols I6o-I.
79· Labour Party, Homes of the Future ( I956), p. 49, and 100 Qjtestions Asked and
Answered on Housing (I958), p. I7. For similar arguments by individual Labour
members, see HCD 629, cols 9I3-I4; Report of the Fifty-Ninth Annual Conference
of the Labour Party ( Ig6o), pp. I25--6; and James Mcinnes, Rents and Rates (Glasgow
City Labour Party, I 958).
8o. HCD 56o, col. 2051.
8I. MacColl, HCD 668, col. 498. For a similar assertion that the market was a
jungle', see Stewart, ibid., col. 581.
82. Report of the Fifty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Labour Party ( I956) p. g8. The
municipalisation policy was set out in greatest detail in Homes of the Future.
83. HCD 664, col. 207.
84. HCD 68I, col. I058; and The Times, IO Feb I964.
85. Crossman diary, 22 June I956. For the compromise on the pace of
municipalisation, see Homes rif the Future, p. I6.
86. The demise ofmunicipalisation came in the policy document, Signposts of the
Sixties, the final draft of which was prepared by the officers of the NEC, with
Gaitskell himself writing the section on Land and Housing (Crossman diary, I7
May Ig6I). Crossman, another participant in the drafting, commented: 'I was
always against municipalisation and in this draft I backed Hugh in knocking the
doctrinaire guts out of it' (ibid., 28June I96I).
87. Report of the Fifty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Labour Party ( 1956), p. g8; Report
of the Sixtieth Annual Conference of the Labour Party (Ig6I), p. 117.
88. NEC Minutes I I Ig6o/6I, 27 June Ig6I; Report of the Sixtieth Annual Conference
of the Labour Party (I g6 I), pp. I oo- I 7; Report of the Sixty-First Annual Conference of the
Labour Party (Ig62), pp. I Ig-26; Report of the Sixty-Second Annual Conference of the
Labour Party (I963), pp. 108-22.
8g. HCD 583, cols 846-7.
go. Ibid., 668, cols 582-3; 68I, col. n73; and 6gg, col. I257·
gi. The NEC dispute is described in the Crossman diary, I 7 and 26 Sep I957; for
the conference debate on the issue, see the &port ofthe Fifty-Sixth Annual Conference of
the Labour Party ( I957), pp. 95-103.
 Notes
92. HCD 709, col. 72.
93· Dame Evelyn Sharp, 'Housing: The Past Ten Years', Chartered Surveyor,
( I956), pp. 29I-6. She later repeated her arguments in The Ministry rif Housing and
Local Government (London: Allen & Unwin, I969), p. 71.
94· Ibid., p. 292. On the Ministry's assumptions about the I957 Rent Act, see the
Report rif the Ministry rif Housing and Local Government, 1957 (London: HMSO, Cmnd
4I9, I958), p. 4, and Barnett, Politics rif Legislation, pp. 76-8.
95· Sharp, 'Opening Address', Conference of the Institute of Housing, reprinted
in Housing, XXIII (Dec I96 I) .
96. Sharp, The Ministry ofHousing and Local Government, p. 7 I. During an interview
another official used virtually the same words to express the attitude.
97· Sharp, 'Opening Address'. For the Conservative Government's more
cautious statements, see the White Paper Housing in England and Wales (London:
HMSO, Cmnd I290, I96I, para. 43; and HCD 637, cols 969-7I and 1078.
g8. Milner Holland Report, p. 2 I 7.
99· Donnison, 'Unknown Men', Estates Ga<,ette, I Aug I959• and his letter to The
Times, 29July I963.
I oo. John Greve, Private Landlords in Britain (London: Occasional Papers on Social
Administration No. I6, 1965), p. 10. See also J. B. Cullingworth, Housing in
Transition (London: Heinemann, 1963), ch. 5·
101. See Housing, XXIII (Dec 1961 ), pp. I2o-l and The Times, 27 May 1g68.
102. See his Presidential Address, Estates Ga<,ette, 16 Nov I963, pp. 599-6o3; also
'Property People', Estates Ga<,ette, 4 Oct 196g.
103. Crossman diary, 22 Oct and I Nov 1964. (See also 4 Nov I964.)
104. Ibid., 17 Sep 1957, I 7 Feb I959, and 28 June 1961.
105. Ibid., 22 Oct I964.
106. 'Crosstalk', printed in The Listener, 15 Mar 1973, 335-8. For Crossman's
interpretation of civil service power, see his introduction to Bagehot, The English
Constitution (London: Watts, 1964).
107. Crossman diary, 5 Nov I964.
108. Ibid., 4 Nov 1964. References to dinners and luncheons with Donnison occur
frequently in the diary at this point (22 Oct, 4, 13 and 26 Nov I964).
I09. Ibid., 2 Dec I964.
110. Ibid., 2 Nov I964.
111. Ibid., 14 Jan I965.
112. Ibid., 7 Dec 1964.
113. Transcript of the BBC programme, 'Crosstalk'.
114. See The First Report rifthe Council on Tribunals (London: HMSO, I959), para.
14; alsoJ. F. Garner, 'The Council on Tribunals', Public Law, 1965, 32I-47·
115. Crossman diary, 9 Dec 1964; the Property Council memorandum is outlined
in the Guardian, 20 Jan 1965.
rr6. On the relationship between the chartered land societies and the Ministry,
see Barnett, Politics rif Legislation, ch. 8.
117. Crossman diary, 24 Mar 1965.
1r8. Quotations in this and the succeeding paragraph are from the following:
HCD 709, cols 6g-88; 710, col. 33-55; 720, col. 502.
119. HCD, Standing Committee F, Session 1964-65, Vol. 111, col. 547·
I2o. See, for instance, HCD 637, col. ss; and 668, col. 587. The Conservative
Government had also adopted rateable value as a base for measuring reasonable
r66 Pover~, Politics and Policy
rents when recasting public housing subsidies. See Housing in England and Wales
(London: HMSO, Cmnd 12go, 1g61), para. 27.
121. HCD 681, col. 1075.
122. Crossman diary 7 Dec 1964. Lloyd later repeated their position in a letter to
The Times: 'It is quite impossible to find any single equation which could be
scientifically applied to every type of dwelling' (2 July 1g65).
123. Milner Holland Report, pp. 41, 227-8 and 346-50; Pilcher, 'Fixing the
Amount of Rent', Memorandum to the Minister of Housing (Dec 1g64); also
Pilcher, 'The Rent Act in Practice', Chartered Auctioneer and Estate Agent, 47
(1g67)·
124. On the controversial nature of the 1g63 valuation, see Sharp, The Ministry of
Housing and Local Government, pp. 193-5. On the possibility of even more appeals if
rateable value were adopted, see Crossman, HCD, Standing Committee F, Vol.m,
col. 705.
125. HCD 710, col. 42.
126. Technically the bill did freeze all rents and require any rent increases to be
registered with the regulatory machinery and accepted as fair. However, there was
no obligation to register the initial rent. Nor was it actually an offence carrying
penalties to increase the rent without registering it, or even to charge more than the
rent set or registered by the regulatory machinery. The most that could happen is
that the tenant, if he objected, was entitled to deduct previous overpayments from
his current rent. As a result the controls would only be effectively invoked where
one of the two parties took sustained action to do so. See the Report ofthe Committee on
the Rent Acts (London: HMSO, Cmnd 46og, 1971), pp. 7 and 111-18 (hereafter
cited as the Francis Report).
127. See the evidence of the RICS, the CAEAI and the NFPO to the Committee
on Administrative Tribunals and Enquiries. Minutes of Evidence, Vol. 5 (London:
HMSO, 1957).
128. Pilcher, 'Fixing The Amount of Rent'.
129. Crossman diary, 3 Feb 1g65.
130. Ibid., 3 Feb 1965.
131. Pilcher, 'Fixing The Amount of Rent'.
132. See Crossman, HCD Standing Committee F, Vol. 111, cols 694-713.
133· Pilcher, 'Fixing The Amount of Rent'; also his 'The Rent Act in Practice'.
For Crossman's attribution of the idea to Pilcher, see HCD Standing Committee F,
cols 7o8 and 713.
134· HCD Standing Committee F, Vol. 111, cols 67o-3.
135· Crossman diary, 24 Mar 1g65.
136. Ibid., 4 May 1g65.
137. See, for instance, the Milner Holland Report, p. 227.
138. Crossman diary, 27 June 1g65.
139· Crossman HCD Standing Committee F, Vol. 111, col, 405.
140. HCD 521, cols 823-4.
141. Manuel, HCD 710, cols 11o-1 r. For the Labourpreferencefortribunalsover
courts, see also Report ofthe Fifty-Sixth Annual Coriference ofthe Labour Party ( 195 7), pp.
95- 1 03·
142. Milner Holland Report, p. 221.
143· See his comments in Report of the Fifty-Sixth Annual Conference ofthe Labour Party
(1957), p. 102.
 Notes
144. Committee on Administrative Tribunals and Enquiries, Minutes of Evidence,
Vol. 5, P· 54·
145. Interdepartmental Committee on Rent Control, Report (London: HMSO,
Cmd 6621, 1944), para. 64 and 67. See also the Committee on Rent and
Mortgage Interest (War Restrictions) Act, Report (London: HMSO, Cd 9235,
1918), para. 37·
146. HCD 415, col. 1940.
14 7. On the discussions between the departments on this, see the evidence of the
Permanent Secretaries of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and of
the Lord Chancellor's Department to the Franks Committee (Minutes of Evidence,
Vols 5 and 6-7).
148. Crossman, Socialism and Planning (London: Fabian Society, Tract 375, 1967),
p. 9· Also his comments in HCD Standing Committee F, Vol. m, col. 56g.
149· Crossman diary, 7 and 12 Dec 1g65. For the opposition of the local
authorities, see the Annual Report of tlu A.M. C., reprinted in Tlu Municipal Review,
Oct 1965.
150. For a more detailed discussion of this relationship, see the Francis Report,
Appendix IV.
151. The local authorities' desire not to become embroiled in rent determination
led several London ones, controlled by different parties, to refuse to allow rent
tribunals to hold their hearings in the Town Hall (Guardian, 4 and 12jan 1g66).
152. Sharp, The Ministry ofHousing and Local Government, pp. 33-8. By the 1g6os the
criticisms of the tribunals had largely disappeared; see, for instance, the Annual
Report oftlu Council on Tribunals (London: HMSO, 1962), paras 4o-5o.
153. Crossman diary, 7 Dec 1964.
154. On the continuing battle over the formality of procedures, see the Annual
Report oftlu Council on Tribunals, 1g66 (paras 62-5) and 1967 (para. 72).
155. Crossman diary, 10 Dec 1964.
156. Ibid., 29 Oct and 18 Dec 1g64.
157. Ibid., 10 Dec 1g64.
158. Ibid., 18 Dec 1964.
159· Ibid., 3 Feb 1g65.
16o. Ibid., 16 Feb 1g65.
161. Ibid.,8Dec 1g64and 19Feb 1g65. For coverage given the 'Open Letter',see,
for example, Guardian, 20 Feb 1g65.
162. For examples of the different reporting see Tlu Times, Guardian and Dai!J
Telegraph, 12 Mar 1965, on the one hand, and the Evening Standard, 11 Mar 1g65,
and Sun, 12 Mar 1965 on the other. The Evening Standard devoted virtually the
entire paper to the report and the Sun later published the entire White Paper on the
Rent Bill (24 Mar 1g65).
163. Crossman diary, 22 Mar 1g65. For reports ofthe speeches earlier in the week
by Crossman and Wilson, see Tlu Times, 13 and 17 Mar 1965; for the Commons
debate, see HCD 709, cols 52-18o.
164. HCD 710, cols 57-8.
165. HCD 715, col. 428.
166. See his 'Housing in a straitjacket', Sundo.y Times, 14 Mar 1g65.
167. Crossman diary, 20 June 1965.
168. HCD 710, cols 55-68.
16g. Tlu Times, 24 Mar and 5 Apr 1965.
168 Poverty, Politics and Policy
170. Estates Gazette, 25 Dec 1965, pp. 1141-2; Rating and Valuation Reporter, 20 May
1 96 5 .
171. Crossman diary, 4 Apr and 2oJune 1965.
172. 'Rent Bill- Determination of Fair Rent', Minutes of a meeting attended by
Goodman, Donnison, Pilcher and Rogerson (29 Apr 1965).
173. Crossman diary, 21 May 1965. For Crossman's use of the advice in
confronting the Conservatives, see HCD, Standing Committee F, Vol. III,
cols 634-43.
174. HCD 702, col. 534·
175. HCD 710, cols 79-86; Standing Committee F, Vol. III, cols 418-21; HCD
715, cols 429-30.
176. HCD Standing Committee F, Vol. III, cols 631-716.
177. Crossman diary, 24 Mar 1965.
178. HCD Standing Committee F, Vol. III, cols 399-445.
179. Crossman diary, 18 May 1965.
180. See the explicit statements of support by Doig and Parkin, HCD Standing
Committee F, Vol. III, cols 641 and 691-2.
181. See the statements of concern by Doig and Parkin, ibid., cols 406--34·
182. Crossman diary, 18 May 1g65.
183. HCD Standing Committee F, Vol. III, cols 425-7, 440, 444-5.
184. HCD 715, cols 401 and 449·
185. Crossman diary, 27 and 28 June 1965.
186. Ibid., 20 June 1965.
187. Francis Report, p. 11.
188. Ibid., calculated from Table 2.1.
189. Ibid., Appendix 1, Supplementary Table 11 (6).
Igo. Ibid., Tables 9 and 10.
191. See the Report of the Joint Working Party of the Chartered Land Societies,
'The Determination of Fair Rents and the Consequences', (18 Nov 1966). In
addition, Crossman recorded, 'the Tories were delighted to see the landlords better
off than they expected' (Diary, 24 Aug 1966).
192. Sunday Telegraph, 12 June 1966.
193· Report of the Sixty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Labour Party ( 1966), pp. 195-7.
194. See, for instance, Is The Rent Act Working?, transcript of a conference
organised by Shelter, June 1969.
195· Report of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, 1g67 and 1g68 (London:
HMSO, Cmnd 4009, 1g69), p. 18.
196. Crossman diary, 25 Nov and 6 Dec 1965; 11 Jan, 15 May, 15June, 27 July
and 24 Aug 1966.
197· See the Francis Report, pp. 6-7, for details.
1g8. See the comments of members of the London Rent Assessment Panel in Sunday
Times, 30 Apr 1967; also Zander, 'The Unused Rent Acts', New Society, 12 Sep
1968, 366-8.
199· Shelter, Notice to Quit (1968).

3 FAMILY POVERTY

1. Seebohm Rowntree and R. G. Lavers, Poverty and the Welfare State (London:
Longmans, Green, 1951). For a survey of these assumptions in the literature, see
 Notes 169
Richard Titmuss, Income Distribution and Social Change (London: Allen & Unwin,
1962), ch. 1.
2. See also Barbara Wootton, The Social Foundations qf Wage Policy (London:
Allen & Unwin, I955l·
3· David Butler, The British General Election qf 1951 (London: Macmillan, I952),
pp. 46--8, 108. Also C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London: Jonathan
Cape, I956), pp. 42-6.
4· HCD 635, col. I027.
5· HCD 666, cols 446 and 456-7.
6. See the Labour party policy statements, Signposts for the Sixties (1961),
especially pp. 24-5, and New Frontiers for Social Security (1963), pp. 6-7.
7· See, for instance, Peter Townsend, 'A Society for People', in Norman
Mackenzie, (ed.), Conviction (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1959).
8. Annual wage stop figures for I953-70 are to be found in HCD 822, col. 327
(written answers).
g. TUC, Report of the ffith Annual Trade Union Congress (1964), pp. 164-6.
IO. See, for instance, the scattered comments in HCD 672, cols 3<>-96.
I I. For a discussion of the nature and influence of this poverty line, see Tony
Lynes, National Assistance and National Prosperity (London: Occasional Papers on
Social Administration, No. 3, I963).
12. Rowntree and Lavers, Poverty and the Welfare State.
13. Income Distribution and Social Change, p. I87.
I4. The evolution of their approach to poverty can be traced in Townsend's
work: 'Poverty: Ten Years after Beveridge', Planning, XIX (I952); 'Measuring
Poverty', British Journal of Sociology, 5 ( I954), I 3o-7; 'The Meaning of Poverty',
British Journal of Sociology, I3 (Ig62), 2I0-27; The Concept qf Poverty (London:
Heinemann, I970).
I 5· Brian Abel-Smith and Peter Townsend, The Poor and the Poorest (London:
Occasional Papers on Social Administration, No. 17, I965), p. 65.
16. 'The Alleviation of Family Poverty' (3o]une 1965).
17· The manifesto did include a one-sentence reference to a 'reorganisation' of
family allowances. The proposal, however, came in the education section and was
presented as a way of easing the effects of the raising of the school-leaving age
(Labour Party, The New Britain, I964).
18. HCD 704, col. 341.
I9. For the early background of the group, see Frank Field, 'A Pressure Group for
the Poor', in David Bull (ed.), Family Poverty (London: Gerald Duckworth, I971);
also Patrick Seyd, 'The Child Poverty Action Group', Political Quarterly, 4 7 ( I976),
189-202.
20. 'Family Poverty', a memorandum submitted to the Prime Minister (23 Dec
1965).
21. The Times, 24 Dec I965.
22. All 24 Dec I965.
23. The Economist, I Jan I966; Tribune, 31 Dec I965.
24. See, for instance, Abel-Smith, 'Below the Affluent Society', Guardian, 2 Feb
Ig66, and 'National Insurance and the National Plan', New Society, 3 Feb Ig66, I 7-
18; also Audrey Harvey in the Daily Worker, 5 Feb Ig66. For a report of their
meetings with the parties, see Guardian, I I Mar I966.
25. See Poverty, No. I.
170 Poverty, Politics and Policy
26. Brian Abel-Smith, Labour's Social Plans (London: Fabian Society, Tract 369,
1g66); Richard Titmuss, Choice and 'The Welfare State' (London: Fabian Society,
Tract 370, 1g67); Peter Townsend, Pover!)l, Socialism and Labour in Power, (London:
Fabian Society, Tract 371, 1967); Richard Crossman, Socialism and Planning
(London: Fabian Society, Tract 375, 1967).
27. This section is based on the Reports of the Secretary to the CPAG Committee
during 1966 and 1g67.
28. R. Lambert, Nutrition in Britain, 195o-Ig6o (London: Occasional Papers on
Social Administration, No.6, 1g64).
29. Crossman diary, 18 Jan 1966.
30. Labour Party, Time for Decision (1g66).
31. Herbison, HCD 729, col. 1919; Wilson quoted in The Observer, 20 Nov 1g66.
32. Heath, The Times, 7 Feb 1g66; Conservative Party, Action Not Wordr (1g66).
33· HCD 724, cols 57--63; 725, cols 1731-4; 729, cols. 1148-72. See also the
editorials in Guardian, 14 June 1g66, and The Times, 18 June 1g66.
34· HCD 747, col. 1344; for the press criticisms, see Dairy Telegraph, The Times,
and Guardian, all 22 June 1g67.
35· Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (London: Heinemann, 1952); Anthony
Crosland, The Conservative Enemy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962), p. 11; Harold
Wilson, Purpose in Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1964), pp. 237-41;
Richard Crossman, Payingfor the Social Services (London: Fabian Society, Tract 399,
lg6g), p. 15-
36. For example, HCD 745, col. 842.
37· Crossman diary, 27 Jan 1970.
g8. Ibid., 8 Feb 1967.
39· For short discussions see Report of the Six!)I-Fijth Annual Conference of the Labour
Par!)~ ( 1966), pp. 174-s; and Report of the Six!)I-Sixth Annual Conference of the Labour
Par!J (1967), pp. 286--97.
40. Samuel Beer, Modern British Politics: A Study of Parties and Pressure Groups
(London: Faber, 1965), chs. g-11.
41. lain Macleod and Enoch Powell, The Social Services, Needr and Means (CPC,
1952); The Future of the Welfare State (CPC, 1958); Principles in Practice (CPC, 1961 );
Enoch Powell, The Welfare State (CPC, 1961).
42. Heath, HCD 725, cols 435-49; Barber, HCD 745, cols 919-29. See also Sir
Keith Joseph, Social Securi!)l: The New Priorities (CPC, 1966).
43· Ministry of Social Security, Circumstances ofFamilies (London: HMSO, 1967).
44· For the rejection of a formal poverty line, see ibid., p. iii. Use of the word
'poverty' was studiously avoided in subsequent annual reports of the department.
45· Quoted in a leading article in The Times, 22 June 1967.
46. Circumstances of Families, Table 11.4, p. 11.
47· See, for instance, &onomist, 12 Mar, 30July, 19 Nov and 3 Dec 1966; 18 Feb,
8Apr, 24Aprand 24June 1967; Tribune, 31 Dec 1965; 15Apr, 3June, 24Juneand
12 Aug 1966; 6Jan, 10 Feb, 16June and 23June 1967. See also The Times, 24 Dec
1965; 18June and 8 Aug 1966; 12 Apr, 20 Apr and wJuly 1967; Guardian, 28Jan,
23 Mar and 18 Nov 1966; 1 Feb, 7 Apr, 12 Apr and 6July 1967.
48. Phoebe Hall, Reforming the Welfare: The Politics of Change in the Personal Social
Services (London: Heinemann, 1976).
49· For discussions of the unions' attitude towards the initiation of family
allowances and National Superannuation, see P. Hall, eta/., Change, Choice and
 Notes
Conflict in Social Policy (London: Heinemann, 1975), ch. g, and Hugh Heclo, Modem
Social Politics on Britain and Sweden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1974), ch. 5·
50. On the basis of his work on National Superannuation, Crossman recorded in
1955: 'There is a strange new alignment growing up in the party. On one side are
the Socialist intellectuals, who want to prepare blueprints ... and on the other
side are the trade unionists, who are suspicious of this kind of Socialist planning'
(Diary, 2 Dec 1955). The problem of getting TUC approval for the Titmuss
group's ideas is dealt with extensively in Crossman's diary in Jan-Mar 1957.
51. Harold Wilson, The Labour Government Ig64-1970 (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson and Michael Joseph, 1971), pp. 32-3.
52. Ibid., p. 33·
53· Financial Times, 25 July 1g67 and 4 Jan 1968.
54· In Gallup and NOP surveys of the most important issues, the range of answers
was specified in the question and family poverty as such was not included. But the
issue also made no impact on more open-ended questions; see, for instance, David
Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd edn. (London:
Macmillan, 1974), p. 297·
55· HCD 762, col. 185.
s6. Sir John Walley, in Poverty, No. 10, p. II.
57· Crossman diary, 5 Jan 1g68.
s8. Report of the Sixty-Eighth Annual Conference of the Labour Party ( lg6g), P· 232·
59· Social Insurance and Allied Services (London: HMSO, Cmd 6404, 1942).
Paragraphs 9 and 455 make the liberal underpinnings of the report clearest.
6o. Heath, HCD 725, cols 437--9 and 727, cols 1078--ao; Barber, HCD 745, cols
919-26; Pike, HCD 729, col. 355·
61. Quoted in a leading article in The Times, 22 June 1967.
62. Quoted in Robert Putnam, The Beliefs ofPoliticians (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1973), p. 36.
63. Ibid., p. 113.
64. Sir John Walley, Social Security (London: Charles Knight, 1972); also his
articles in Poverty, No. 10, and in Bull (ed.), Family Poverty. For this tradition in
France, see Barbara Rogers, 'Family Policy in France', Journal of Social Policy, 4
(1975), 113-28. For an earlier British statement, see E. Rathbone, Family
Allowances (London: Allen & Unwin, 1949). See also Margaret Wynn, Family Policy
(Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1972).
65. 'A Society for People' in Mackenzie (ed.), Conviction, p. 113. See also
Townsend, The Concept of Poverty, especially pp. 44-5.
66. 'Poverty versus Inequality: Diagnosis', The Nation, 8 Feb 1g65. More
generally, see his Essays on' The Welfare State', 2nd edn. (London: Allen & Unwin,
1963), Commitment to Welfare (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968), and Social Policy
(London: Allen & Unwin, 1974).
67. HCD 753, cols 1036 and 1044.
68. For Houghton's comments, see HCD 701, col. 868 and 747, cols 1517-18.
6g. Crossman also comments on the department's respect for Herbison in his
diary (1 Aug 1g67).
70. HCD 729, col. 1918. On the problems of helping the poor by regulating the
wage structure, see Department of Employment and Productivity, A National
Minimum Wage (London: HMSO, 1g6g), and National Board for Prices and
I72 Pover!J, Politics and Policy
Incomes, General Problems of Low Pay (London: HMSO, Cmnd 4648, I97I).
71. HCD 725, cols 9-10.
72. 'The Alleviation of Poverty', 3ojune I965; 'Family Poverty', 23 Dec I965.
73· See his 'The Social Division of Welfare', in Essays on 'Til£ Welfare State'.
74· Houghton, HCD 720, col. I 78; and 743, col. 9I. Also his Paying for til£ Social
Services (London: Institute for Economic Affairs, I968).
75· The report, which was never published, emphasised administrative com-
plications. 'Report on the Negative Income Tax', memorandum on the Report
prepared for the Secretary of State for Social Services by his Special Adviser, Brian
Abel-Smith, 17 Apr 1969.
76. HCD 745, cols 85o-1.
77· HCD 8o6, col. 253·
78. Official estimate given in HCD 745, col. 935· When FIS was introduced,
take-up was well below 100 per cent, and the annual cost was about£5 million. See
the Annual Report of til£ Department of Health and Social Securiry, 1971 (London:
HMSO, Cmnd 5019, 1972), pp. 113 and 328.
79· See his letter to Til£ Times, 11 Dec 1967.
So. 'Mr. Abbot's Alternative', memorandum to the Secretary of State for Social
Services from his Special Adviser, Brian Abel-Smith, (9 May 1969). Mr Abbot's
alternative was remarkably like FIS.
81. HCD 747, col. 1522.
82. David Butler and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1!}64 (London:
Macmillan, 1965), p. 140; and Til£ British General Election of 1!}66 (London:
Macmillan, 1966), p. 115.
83. HCD 686, col. 271.
84. Jeger, HCD 729, cols 1153-4, and HCD 749, col. 2233; Owen, HCD 753, col.
1104·
85. Crossman diary, 3 May 1967.
86. Ibid., 23 Feb 1967.
87. HCD 743, col. 1 (written answers).
88. Official estimates given by Houghton and quoted in Poverry, No. 1.
89. Walley, Social Securiry, p. 180.
go. Crossman diary, 24 June 1967; Wilson, Report of til£ Sixry-Seventh Annual
Conference of til£ Labour Parry ( 1968), p. 169.
91. The survey report is in New Sociery, 12 Oct 1967,512-16. See also PEP, Family
Needs and Social Services (London: Allen & Unwin, 1961), p. 297·
92. For a major dispute within the Conservative cabinet over proposed cuts in
family allowances in I957, see Harold Macmillan, Riding Out til£ Storm (London:
Macmillan, 1971), pp. 364-71.
93· Department of Employment and Productivity, New Earnings Survey, 1968,
Table 4·
94· For the opposition, see C. N. Aydon, 'A New Plan for Child Poverty', in New
Sociery, 19jan 1967, 93-4; Guardian, 23 Mar 1966 and 1 Feb 1967; Observer, 16 Oct
and 4 Dec 1966; 22jan 1967; Economist, 3o]u!y, I9 Nov and 3 Dec 1966. For the
Conservatives' position, see lain Macleod's comments, H CD 744, col. 1218. For Sir
John Walley's objections, see his Social Securiry, ch. 12.
95· HCD 738, col. 1450.
96. Attribution of the idea to Kaldor is found in the Crossman diary ( 7Nov 1966)
and was confirmed in interviews.
 Notes 1 73
97· Official estimate provided at HCD 745, col. 934·
g8. HCD 747, col. I522.
99· Peter Jenkins, Th£ Battle of Downing Street (London: Charles Knight, I970),
ch. 5·
IOO. Tony Lynes, 'Family Allowances in Great Britain', in E. Burns (ed.),
Children's Allowances and the Economic Welfare of Children (New York: Citizens'
Committee for the Children of New York, I968), p. 109.
10 I. Social Insurance and Allied Services, para. 422; Family Allowances: Memorandum by
Th£ Chancellor of th£ Exch£quer (London: HMSO, Cmd 6354, I942); Royal
Commission on Taxation and Profits, Second Report (London: HMSO, Cmd 9105,
I954), para. 45, 52(2) and I79·
102. R. S. Sayers, Financial Policy I9:J!r45 (London: HMSO, I956), pp. 97--8; Royal
Commission on Taxation and Profits, Second Report, para. 35a. On the Inland
Revenue's insistence on keeping the tax system's goals as simple as possible, see Sir
A. Johnson, Th£ Inland Revenue (London: Allen & Unwin, I965).
103. In I969 Abel-Smith encountered the same objections and concluded that the
Board 'still disliked the whole clawback principle'. 'Family Allowances and
Clawback', Commentary for the Secretary ofState on the IRB position, 3 Apr I96g.
I04. HCD 748, col. 295· See also HCD 753, col. I 109.
105. Crossman diary, 20 Dec I966.
106. John Mackintosh, The British Cabinet, 3rd edn. (London: Stevens, I977), pp.
464-7 I.
107. Crossman diary, I7 Nov I965. Patrick Gordon Walker records an 'imag-
inary' cabinet dispute that revolves precisely on this issue in his The Cabinet
(London: Jonathan Cape, I970), pp. I52--8.
108. HCD 745, col. 933·
109. Crossman diary, I4 Mar I967.
I 10. HCD 745, col. 933·
I II. David Butler and Richard Rose, The British General Election of 1959 (London:
Macmillan, Ig6o), pp. 59--63. See also David Butler, The British General Election of
1955 (London: Macmillan, I955), pp. 83-4.
II2. Crossman diary, 28June I96I; Labour Party The New Britain (I964).
I I3· For discussions of the problems of financing the social services in this period,
see Th£ Times, 8 Feb, I I Apr and 3I May I967; Observer, 11 Dec I966; I9 Feb and
25 June I967.
I I4· HCD 744, cols 989--gi.
II5· HCD 75I, col. 97·
I I6. Guardian, 27 July I967; see also his comments in Report ofth£ Sixry-Sixth Annual
Conference of th£ Labour Parry ( I967), p. I98.
I I 7. Crossman diary, 26 June I 967.
I I8. Crossman, Socialism and Planning, pp. 2I-2.
II9. Quoted in Guardian, 25 May I967.
I20. Guardian, I7 July I967.
I2I. A Social Democratic Britain (London: Fabian Society, Tract 404, I97I), p. 2.
See also David Owen's contribution to David Owen et al., Social Services for All, Part
Four (London: Fabian Society, Tract 385, I968).
I22. HCD 75I, col. 98--g.
I23· Crossman diary, 23 Feb I967.
I 24. Ibid., 20 Dec I966.
174 Pover~, Politics and Policy
125. Lee, HCD 740, col. 1814. For reactions to this statement, see Guardian, 10 Feb
1967 and Crossman diary, 10 Feb 1967.
126. Crossman diary, 23 Feb 1g67.
127. The Times, 3 Feb 1g67. For similar reports, see Sun, 6Jan 1967; Observer, 15
Jan 1967; Guardian, 16Jan 1g67; Dai?J Telegraph, 16 and 25Jan 1g67; Sundqy Times,
22Jan 1967.
128. HCD 739, cols 955-8; 740, cols 28-g, 1081-8, 1096-7, 1112-3, 1813-15,
1821-2.
129. Early Day Motion No. 142: 400 (13 Feb 1g67); Crossman diary, 8 Feb 1g67.
130. The memorandum is reprinted in Pover~, No. 2, 1967.
131. For reports of their press conference, see Guardian and New Socie!Y of 16 Feb
1g67.
132. TUC, Report of the 99th AMual Trades Union Congress (1967), pp. 173-4. The
official version was that the TUC sought the meeting.
133· Crossman diary, 20 Feb 1g67.
134· Ibid., 23 Feb 1g67.
135· Ibid., 13 Mar 1g67.
136. Reprinted in Guardian, 13 Apr 1g67.
137· Sundqy Times, Sundlly Mirror, Observer, 16 Apr 1g67; Dai?J Mirror and Sun, 5
May 1967. For critical leading articles, see The Times, Guardian and Sun, 12 Apr
1967.
138. For debate on the Conservative motion, see HCD 745, cols 823-g36; for the
PLP meeting, see The Times, 13 Apr 1967.
139· HCD 746, Col. 16g5.
140. Crossman diary, 6 June 1g67.
141. Ibid., 13 July 1g67. The case for such an allowance had been forcefully
argued in Adelia Nevitt, Housing, Taxation and Subsidies (London: Nelson, 1g66).
142. Crossman diary, 19July 1g67.
143. HCD 751, col. 57·
144. Herbison's letter to the Prime Minister is reprinted in The Times, 26 July
1g67.
145. Wilson, HCD 756, col. 1586.
146. Crossman diary, 22 and 23 Nov 1g67; Crossman attributed the rejection in
large part to post-devaluation pressure from the International Monetary Fund.
147. HCD 761, col. 266.
148. Based on the Crossman diary as confirmed by interviews and news reports at
the time (for instance, Guardian, 2June 1g67). Healey's position appears to have
been somewhat more ambiguous than that of others; compare, for instance,
Crossman's diary for 23 Feb and 13 July 1g67.
149· See Richard Crossman's Introduction to Bagehot, The English Constitution
(London: Watts, 1964); Mackintosh, The British Cabinet; Gordon Walker, The
Cabinet.
150. Crossman diary, 23 Feb 1g67.
151. Ibid., 23 Feb 1967.
152. Ibid., 19 July 1967.
153· See Tony Lynes, 'Clawback' in Bull (ed.), Fami?J Pover~.
154. HCD 755, cols 483-4.
155· These and other similar complaints are found in HCD 762, cols 182-2gB.
156. HCD 762, col. 294·
 Notes 175
157· Labour Party, Talking Points, No. g, July 1968.
158. The attack is recorded in the Sun, 29 May 1968.
I 59· Report of The Sixty-Seventh Annual Conference of the Labour Party ( 1968), p. 16g.
160. Crossman diary, 23 Nov 1967; also 20 Dec 1967.
161. Even during the election campaign, two years after the decisions, George
Brown discovered that in the new housing estates 'the most unpopular thing the
Labour Government ever did was to arrange to "claw back" family allowances
from the better-off.' In My Wqy (London: Victor Gollancz, 1971 ), p. 270.
162. CPAG, 'An Incomes Policy For Families'; reply by the Minister of State,
Tribune, 13 Feb 1970. The exchanges continued in Tribune for several weeks.

4 POVERTY AND EDUCATIONAL PRIORITY

1. Central Advisory Council for Education (England), Children and their Primary
Schools (London: HMSO, 1967). Hereafter cited as Plowden Report.
2. Ibid., para. 149.
3· Anne Corbett, Much To Do About Education, 3rd edn. (London: Council for
Educational Advance, 1973), p. 6.
4· See Maurice Kogan, 'The Plowden Committee on Primary Education', in
R. A. Chapman (ed.), The Role of Commissions in Policy-Making (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1973); also Maurice Kogan and Tim Packwood, Advisory Councils and
Committees in Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
5· Young hap se!"Ved as Secretary of the Labour Party Research Department
throughout Attlee's premiership. On the appointment of the academics to the
Plowden Council, see Maurice Kogan, The Politics of Education (Harmondsworth,
Middx.: Penguin, 1971), pp. 133-4.
6. The Rise of the Meritocracy, IB7o--2033 (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin,
1970).
7. Maurice Bruce, The Coming of the Welfare State, 4th edn. (London: Batsford,
1968), p. 319; Michael Parkinson, The Labour Party and the Organisation of Secondary
Education (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 8o.
8. Jean Floud, A. H. Halsey and F. M. Martin, Social Class and Educational
Opportunity (London: Heinemann, 1956); Elizabeth Fraser, Home Environment and
School (London: University of London Press, 1959) ;J. W. B. Douglas, The Home and
the School (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1964); J. W. B. Douglas,
J. M. Ross and H. R. Simpson, All Our Future (London: Peter Davies, 1968).
g. Central Advisory Council for Education, Earf:y Leaving (London: HMSO,
1954); Fifteen to Eighteen (London: HMSO, 1959); Half Our Future (London:
HMSO, 1963). Also Committee on Higher Education, Report (London: HMSO,
Cmnd 2154, 1963), hereafter cited as Robbins Report.
10. Fifteen to Eighteen, Vol. 1, p. 8; also Earf:y Leaving, pp. 17-23 and appendices.
11. Robbins Report, Appendix One, Part m, pp. 38 and 53; also the main report,
PP· 49-52.
12. Douglas, et al., All Our Future, p. xii.
13. Cyril Burt, 'The Mental Differences Between Children', in C. B. Cox and A.
E. Dyson (eds), The Black Papers on Education (London: Davis-Paynter, 1971).
53· See also H.J. Eysenck, Race, Intelligence and Education (London: Temple Smith,
1971).
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
14. Michael Young, Innovation and Research in Education (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 6o.
15. Report of the Consultative Committee on the Primary School (London: HMSO,
rgsr), including the advisory memorandum by Cyril Burt. Also Report of the
Consultative Committee on Secondary Education with Special Reference to Grammar Schools
and Technical High Schools (London: HMSO, rgs8).
16. Robbins Report, pp. 4g-54; also Appendix One, pp. s8-46.
17. H.J. Butcher (ed.), Educational Research in Britain, 1.¢8 (London: University of
London Press, rg68), p. 26s.
18. Reported in Michael Young and P. McGeeney, Learning Begins At Home
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, rg68).
rg. Plowden Report, ch. S·
20. Quoted in Education, 27 Jan 1967.
21. The Report argued that children did better because parents encouraged
them; but perhaps such parents took an interest because their children were bright
and did well.
22. Indeed the Council's own survey suggested smaller class sizes did not
necessarily produce better results (Plowden Report, paras 78o-86). For a critical
evaluation of the important assumptions about parental attitudes, see Jean Floud,
'Perspectives on Plowden: Part u', The Teacher, 10 Feb 1967.
2S· A. R.Jensen, 'How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?',
Harvard Educational Review, S9 ( 1969), I-I2S; Christopher Jencks et al., Inequality: A
Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (New York: Basic Books,
1972). On the geographical distribution of poverty in Britain, see H. Ackland,
'What is a Bad School?', .New Society, 9 Sep 1971, 45o-s.
24. Plowden Report, para. 1185.
25 Kogan, The Politics of Education, p. 185.
26. 'Plowden Priority Areas Seen as a Threat', Daily Telegraph, 16 May 1g67.
27. AEC Executive Committee Minutes, Appendix One, 'Memorandum on the
Plowden Report', so Mar 1967; also Sir William Armstrong in Education, 20Jan
1967. For the similar position of the general local authority organisations, see
Association of Municipal Corporations, 'Observations on the Report of the
CACE', Municipal Review, Sep 1967; and County Councils Association, 'Obser-
vations on the Plowden Report'.
28. NUT, 'Plowden: The Union's Comments on Some of the Major Issues', 1g67;
for the NAHT response, see Guardian, sr May 1967.
29. NUT, Annual Report: 1g67, pp. 44-57; also NAHT, 'Commentary on the
Plowden Report', 1967.
so. Guardian, 9 Sep 1967.
SI. See leading articles in The Times, Guardian, Financial Times, Daily Mail and
Sun, all 1o Jan 1967; Observer and Sunday Times, 15 Jan 1967. The Daily Telegraph,
which disliked the proposal, was in a distinct minority (rojan 1967).
S2· In the survey reported in Table 4·S· 50 per cent of middle-class respondents
approved of positive discrimination, implying an even higher disapproval rate
among working-class respondents (David Donnison, 'Education and Opinion',
.New Society, 26 Oct 1967, s8s-7).
SS· AMC, 'Observations ... .'On the pressure for equal treatment at the local
level, see also Maurice Kogan and W. van der Eyken, County Hall: The Role of the
Chief Education Ojjicer (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, I97S), p. 165.
 Notes 177
34· Plowden Report, para. 173.
35· Guardian, 23 Aug 1967.
36. HCD 776, cols 182-3 (written answers).
37· Dairy Telegraph, wjan 1967; Sunday Times, 15jan 1967.
38. R. Bell, quoted in The Times, 11 Jan 1967; for the responses, see HCD 743,
cols 835 and 844.
39· See the comments of the General Secretary ofNUT in Education, 7 Apr 1g67;
also leading articles in The Times, 30 May 1g67; Observer, 15jan 1967; and Times
Educational Supplement (TES), 13jan 1g67. The Sundo;y Times was one of the few
believing that education was the 'best way of breaking the inherited poverty cycle'
(15 jan 1967).
40. Weaver (Deputy Secretary) and Embling (Accountant General) had been
teachers and LEA officials before entering the Ministry in 1946, where they
remained until retirement. (Embling was also a Research Fellow at the LSE during
1972-73.) Fletcher (Under-Secretary of the Schools Branch) had been Secretary of
an earlier CACE and Morrell (his Assistant Secretary) was considered the driving
force behind the Schools Council.
41. Quoted in Kogan, The Politics ofEducation, pp. 173-4· On early departmental
uneasiness about the Councils, see Kogan and Packwood, Advisory Councils and
Committees in Education, ch. 2.
42. Testimony to the Select Committee on Education and Science, Session 1969-
70, Teacher Training, Minutes of Evidence, pp. 417-24.
43· The Support of these men for the new EPA research discussed on p. 134 is
seen in A. H. Halsey, 'Notes on a meeting with Planning Branch', 19 Dec 1967, and
in a letter from Morrell to Michael Young (17 Jan 1968).
44· See C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London: Jonathan Cape,
1956).
45· For Bevan's views, seeR. Barker, Education and Politics: I!}Ofr1951: A Study of
the Labour Party (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 100.
46. HCD 743, col. 767.
47· See, for instance, Crosland's testament to his discussions with Young in The
Future of Socialism, p. 235·
48. HCD 743, col. 755·
49· For reactions to Gordon Walker's first press conference as Secretary of State
for Education, see Education and TES, 17 Nov 1967; discouraging comments on
EPAs also came in a letter from the minister to Young, 4 Oct 1967.
50. For ministerial complaints about poor attendance at the debate, see Shirley
Williams, HCD 743, col. 838, and Crosland, quoted in Kogan, Politics of Education,
p. 166.
51. Report of the Sixty-Sixth Annual Conference of the Labour Party (1967), pp. 126--35·
52. For Boyle's testimony on the impact of educational sociologists on his own
thinking, see Kogan, Politics of Education, pp. 91-2.
53. Conservative Party, Action .Not Words ( 1966); for the Conservatives' welcome
of Plowden, see Boyle, HCD 743, col. 738; also Anne Corbett, 'The Tory
Educators', New Society, 22 May 196g.
54· Boyle was the only person to refer to EPAs at Conservative party conferences
(Conservative Party Annual Coriference Report, 1967, p. 61, and 1g68, p. 46).
55· TES, 2june 1g67; Education, 7 Apr 1967; Guardian, 15 Sep 1967; TES, 1 Mar
1968. The lukewarm response can also be seen in the growing bitterness of the EPA
 Poverty, Politics and Policy
advocates; see, for instance, reports of their 1968 press conference (Guardian, 11Jan
1g68 and TES, 12 Jan 1g68).
56. The proposal is detailed in chapter 5 of the Plowden Report.
57· Ibid., ch. 4 and Appendix 4· For the particular importance of this in EPAs,
see para. 47·
58. SeeJ. A. C. Griffith, Central Departments and Local Authorities (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1966).
59· SeeR. A. Manzer, Teachns and Politics in England and Wales (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1970) and R. D. Coates, Teachns' Unions and Interest
Group Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
oo. Figures in this paragraph calculated from DES, Statistics on Education: 1973
(London: HMSO, 1974), Vol. 1, Table B; Statistics on Education: 1972 (London:
HMSO, 1975) Vol. 6, Table 2(2); and Statistics on Education: 1973 (London:
HMSO, 1975) Table 1(1).
61. Education: A Framework for Expansion (London: HMSO, Cmnd 5174, 1972),
para. 4·
62. Calculated on basis of projected costs provided in the Plowden Report, Table
43. p. 450.
63. See Crosland, HCD 743, col. 750.
64. See, for instance, Lady Plowden's comments in Guardian, 11 Jan 1g68.
65. Plowden Report, paras 153-4, 16g--7o.
66. NUT, 'Unions Comments .. .', p. g; AEC 'Memorandum .. .'; for ILEA
opposition, see Education, 7 July 1g67, p. 1. On general LEA opposition to
centralisation, see Maurice Kogan, Educational Policy-making (London: Allen &
Unwin, 1975), ch. 6.
67. HCD 743, col. 756. For a satire on the government's refusal to initiate a co-
ordinated programme, see Education, 17 Nov 1g67.
68. HCD 755, cols 1651-2. For similar refusals to seek to influence LEAs on
specific parts of the proposal, see also HCD 700, cols 1002-3; and 8o6, col. 453·
6g. Plowden Report, para. 13g; also paras 1o8o-5.
70. Ibid., para. 17o(iv).
71. AEC, 'Memorandum .. .'.
72. DES, The School Building Survey, 1g62 (London: HMSO, 1965); NUT, The
State of Our Schools (1962); CACE, Half Our Future.
73· For useful statistical material on these pressures, see DES, Reports on Education,
No.71.
74· DES Circular 11/67. I am indebted to the Department for checking the files
on the origins of this clause.
75· HCD 743, col. 756.
76. See, for instance, Estimates Committee, Session 1966-67, Fifth Report.
77· Crossman diary, 17 Nov 1g66.
78. Guardian, 3 Feb 1g67.
79· Crossman notes a lengthy argument in cabinet on this (Diary, 19July 1g67).
So. HCD 751, cols 56-8.
81. Letter from Young to Crosland, 30 Aug 1967.
82. DES, Reports on Education, No. 71.
83. Plowden Report, paras 158--62, 170.
84. DES Circular r /67 and DES Letter to Chief EducationOfficers (RS 26/g) 13
June 1g68.
 .Notes 179
85. AEC 'Memorandum .. .'.
86. For the rejection of the supplement in immigrant areas, see The Teacher, 20
Jan 1967; NUT coolness to the EPA version is seen in ibid., 13Jan 1967. On the
NUT's general salary goals, see Manzer, Teachers and Politics, ch. 5·
87. For an account of the bargaining, see The Teacher, 1 Mar 1968.
88. HCD 76g, col. 167; and 773, cols 8go-1.
8g. Michael Young, Poverry Report 1974 (London: Temple Smith, 1974), p. 175·
go. Education, 20 Jan 1967. On the background to the dispute, see Manzer,
Teachers and Politics, pp. 103-7.
91. NUT, Annual Report 1¢7, pp. 46-7. The union was particularly upset at the
idea that teachers agreeing to work with aides would receive higher pay. See also
AEC, 'Memorandum .. .'.
92. HCD 8o6, col. 453 (written answers); also 743, col. 761.
93· NUT, 'The Union's Comments .. .'. On teachers' attitudes towards such
participation, see Kogan, Educational Policy-making, pp. 57--61; and Young and
McGeeney, Learning Begins at Home.
94· HCD 753, col. 588.
95· Plowden Report, para. 165.
g6. HCD 743, cols 756--9. On the factors blocking expansion of nursery
education, see T. Blackstone, A Fair Start (London: Allan Lane, Penguin, 1971).
97· DES Evidence to the Expenditure Committee (Public Expenditure Sub-
Committee) Session 1971-72, p. 47· For the Plowden Report's estimate of the
needed places, see Table 36, col. 11.
g8. Eric Midwinter, Projections (London: Ward Lock Education, 1972); Prioriry
Education (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1972); and Education and the
Communiry (London: Allen & Unwin, 1975).
99· DES, 'Memorandum on Nursery Education', Expenditure Committee
(Public Expenditure Sub-Committee), Session 1971-72; also the testimonyofJ. R.
Jameson andJ. D. Brierly.
100. A. H. Halsey, 'Memorandum on Pre-School Provision in EPAs', (no date);
'Notes on Meeting with Mrs. Thatcher', (26July 1972); 'Notes on Draft Circular
on Nursery Education', (7 Sep 1972). The Projects' findings were published in A.
H. Halsey (ed.), Educational Prioriry (London: HMSO, 1972)
101. Education: A Framework for Expansion, para. 28.
102. Their reservations were detailed in a letter from J. R. Jameson (Assistant
Secretary, Schools Branch) to Halsey, 25 May 1972; and DES Minute from
Jameson to Rodwell, 4July 1972.
103. Observer, 17 June 1973. The NUT's position is outlined in its pamphlet,
Provision of Pre-school Education (no date).
104. Draft Circular on Nursery Education, 22 Aug 1972; DES Circular 2/73·
105. HCD 758, cols 203-4 (written answers).
106. See, for example, Education, 24 Mar 1g67.
107. Halsey, Educational Prioriry, pp. 145-8.
108. See, for example, DES Letter (K 21/13/3) to LEAs concerning the salary
supplement (28 Mar 1968).
109. The greatest variation involved immigrant settlement as a criterion.
(Statutory Instruments 1968, No. 375; DES Circularg/68; Guardian, 14 Aug 1973).
110. DES, Output Budgeting for the Department of Education and Science (London:
HMSO, 1972).
I8o Poverty, Politics and Policy
I I I. In addition to the references cited in note 23, see A. Little and C. Mabey,
'Reading Attainment and Social and Ethnic Mix of London Primary Schools', in
D. V. Donnison and D. Eversley (eds), London: Urban Patterns, Problems and Policies
(London: Heinemann, I973); D. V. Donnison, 'Policy for Priority Areas', Journal
rif Social Policy, 3, (I974), I27-35; H. Glennerster and S. Hatch (eds), Positive
Discrimination and lnequaliry (London: Fabian Society, Research Series 3I4, I974);
B. Tizard, Pre-school Education in Great Britain; a review rif research (London: Social
Science Research Council, I974); J. H. Barnes and H. Lucas, 'Positive Discrimi-
nation in Education', in J. Barnes (ed.), Educational Prioriry: Vol. 3 (London:
HMSO, I975); Sally Holtermann, 'The Welfare Economics of Priority Areas',
Journal rif Social Policy, 7 (I978), 23-40.

5 THE SOCIAL POLICY PROCESS

1. See Homer Barnett, Innovation: The Basis of Cultural Change (New York:
McGraw-Hill, I953), p. I85.
2. See, for instance, the figures on the newspapers and journals read by senior
civil servants in Richard Rose, Politics in England, 2nd edn. (Boston: Little, Brown,
I974), P· 236.
3· At a later stage Titmuss also became vice-chairman of the Supplementary
Benefits Commission, and in the I970s Donnison became chairman.
4· See John Steinbruner, The Cybernetic Theory rif Decision-making (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, I974), ch. 4·
5· Heclo depreciates the importance of electoral competition in social policy on
the grounds that advocacy and enactment of social insurance did not ensure
electoral victory and that social programmes were often restricted rather than
expanded in anticipation of voters' reactions. Modern Social Politics in Britain and
Sweden (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, I974), pp. 288-g3. However,
the first objection seems too crude a measure, as the parties involved might have
believed that their social policy initiatives would help them electorally. And the
second objection in fact admits indirect electoral influences; surely an analysis of
the growth of social policy should explain why it did not grow faster.
6. In comparing British and Swedish housing policy, Headey argues that
'Labour have not sought to play an agenda-setting role and, by default, have
allowed issues to be defined mainly by interests concerned to expand
the ... market.' While the evidence here generally points in the same direction,
two qualifications are critical. First, while parties do not play a comprehensive
agenda-setting role, they at least do so intermittently. Second, those who set the
broader social policy agenda are not universally dedicated to expanding market
relations. (Bruce Headey, 'Governing Parties as Agenda Setters', paper presented
to the American Political Science Association meetings, Washington, I977·)
7· Brian Abel-Smith, Labour's Social Plans (London: Fabian Society, Tract 369,
I966).
8. Punnett argues that these problems make detailed planning an unwise strategy
for opposition parties. R. M. Punnett, Front-Bench Opposition (London: Heinemann,
I973), PP· 205-I5.
9· Quoted in L. J. Sharpe, 'The Social Scientist and Policy-making', Policy and
Politics, 4 ( I975), p. I9. Sharpe provides an interesting comparison of the role of
social science in the American and British policy processes.
 Notes 181

10. The first of these alternatives can be seen in Donnison's chairmanship of the
Supplementary Benefits Commission. The second can be seen in an exchange
between Townsend and departmental statisticians; see Peter Townsend, 'Politics
and the Statistics of Poverty', and the rejoinder by DHSS statisticians in Political
Quarterry, 43 (1972), 103-12 and 232-5.
11. For a similar example in the case of racial discrimination, see Nicholas Deakin,
Colour, Citi~enship and British Sociery (London: Panther Books, 1970), p. 111.
12. Compare this with the range of approaches considered by the non-
departmental task force that drafted the American War on Poverty; see James
Sundquist and C. Schelling (eds), On Fighting Poverry (New York: Basic Books,
I96g).
13. Central Policy Review Staff, A Joint Framework for Social Policy (London:
HMSO, 1975).
14. Robert Pinker, Social Theory and Social Policy (London: Heinemann, 1971),
P· ••4·
15. For examples in other western societies, see Arnold Heidenheimer, Hugh
Heclo and Carolyn Adams, Comparative Public Policy: The Politics of Social Choice in
Europe and America (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975).
16. On this general question, see David Donnison, 'Research for Policy', Minerva,
X (1972), 519-36.
17. For this debate, see Mark Abrams and Richard Rose, Must Labour Lose?
Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 196o); W. G. Runciman, Relative Deprivation
and Social Justice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1g66); John Goldthorpe,
David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer and Jennifer Platt, The A.flluent Worker in the
Class Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1g69);John Westergaard,
'The Rediscovery of the Cash Nexus', in Ralph Miliband and John Saville (eds),
Labour and Inqualiry (London: Merlin Press, 1970).
18. Pinker, Social Theory and Social Policy; Margaret Wynn, Famiry Policy (Har-
mondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, 1972).
19. Peter Townsend and N. Bosanquet (eds), Labour and Inequaliry (London:
Fabian Society, 1972).
20. J. C. Kincaid, Poverry and lnequaliry in Britain (Harmondsworth, Middx.:
Penguin, 1973).
Index
NOTE . Personal names appear in the index in the style that was correct at the time
of the reference.
Abbot, Douglas, 86, 89, I 72n. See also
Ministry of Social Security
Abel-Smith, Brian, 7, I 46, I 73n; re-
discovery of poverty, 6g-73, I II;
conflict over poverty line, 76; defi-
nition of poverty, 85; and poverty
policy, 86-7
Administrative information: weakness
of, 20-3, 69, 76-7, I II, I36, I48--g
Administrative structures: impact on
policy, 8--g, 87-8, 94--6, I 23-36,
IS0-2. See also Board oflnland Rev-
enue; Department of Education and
Science; Lord Chancellor's Depart-
ment; Ministry of Housing and Local
Government; Supplementary Bene-
fits Commission; Local authorities;
Local Education Authorities
Advisory Centre for Education, 111
Allaun, Frank, 59--61
Andrew, Sir Herbert, 120. See also De-
partment of Education and Science
Association of Education Committees
(AEC), I I7, 126, 128, 131
Association of Municipal Corporations
(AMC), 118
Awareness, see Policy phases
Barber, Anthony, 84
Beer, Samuel, 8
Bevan, Aneurin, 17; and rent regu-
lation, 4 7-54 passim; and education,
121
Beveridge, Lord, 5, 83-4; Beveridge
Report, 67, 70, 83, 95
Board oflnland Revenue: and the 1965
Rent Act, 43, 46; and poverty, 66, 87,
8g; oppostuon to clawback, 88--gs
passim, 103, 107-8, I 73n
Boyd-Carpenter, John, 58, 68
Boyle, Sir Edward, 68, 11o-1I, I22,
I42
Bramall, Ashley, 40, 51
Brooke, Henry, I9, 21, 24, 25, sB
Brown, George, So, 103, I 75n
Burnham Committee: and EPA salary
supplement, I23, 131-2, 137
Burt, Sir Cyril, 114
Business, 78, 97, 99, I52-3, 174n
Butler, David, 27--g
Cabinet, 9, 147-8; and 1965 Rent Act,
ss-7; and poverty, 99-105; and
EPAs, 129-30, 14 7
Callaghan, James, 94, I42; and rents,
33; electoral sensitivity of, 94, 96-8;
and poverty, 94-105; and clawback,
94--6, 99-108; and means-testing,
98--g; and social service expendi-
tures, 96-8; and EPAs, 125, I29-30
Central Advisory Council on Edu-
cation, 109-I2, 114, I28, 148--g. See
also Plowden Council
Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG):
formation, 72; campaign, 72-3, 75,
1oo-1 , 108, 109, I 11; proposals
advanced by, 87--g2 passim, 100,
140
Civil servants: role of, 8--g, 148-52; and
rent policy, 22, 30, 35--6; and pov-
erty, 86-7; and EPAs, 12o-1,
126-37 passim. See also Admin-
istrative structures; Administrative
information
 Index
Clawback: invention of, 93; conflict
over, 93-6, gg-105; implementation,
107; public reaction, 107-8, 173n,
175n. See also Family allowances; Tax
allowances, childrens'
Committee on Higher Education
(Robbins), 111, 114
Community Action Programme, 109
Conservative Party: and private rented
housing, 16, 32-3; and 1957 Rent
Act, 16-18; and Rachmanism, 27;
and 1965 Rent Act, 5~, 65, 147;
and poverty, 68, 75-6, 89, 101, 107,
122, 146; and EPAs, 121-2, 128, 130,
146--7
Crosland, Anthony: and poverty, 98,
103-4; and EPAs, 116--17, 121-2,
129-37 passim, 142, 143, 147
Crossman, R. H. S., 8, 14, 27, 30, 34,
35, 37, 38, 44,86--7, 142, 143, 171n,
1 74n; choice of advisers on rents, 39-
40, 44, 140; attitude to rent problem,
38, 44-5, 164n; and rent formula,
46--50, 59; and rent machinery, 51-
4, 147· 152i and cabinet, 55-7i and
Parliament, 57-62; reaction to rent
decisions, 63-5; and poverty, 74-5,
8o, 89, 91, 97-108 passim
Definition of the problem, see Policy
phases
Department of Education and Science
(DES): background of officials, 120,
1nn; and intellectuals, 120, 142; and
EPAs, 121, 126--37 passim
Deutsch, Karl, 4, 144, 158n
Donnison, David, 7; and housing sur-
veys, 21-2; as member of Milner
Holland Committee, 36; as adviser to
Crossman, 39-42, 141, 143; and rent
determination, 37, 59; and rent
machinery, 51; as member of Plow-
den Council, 111, 120, 142; and
EPAs, 113, 115-I7; as chairman of
Supplementary Benefits Commis-
sion, 181n
Downs, Anthony, 8
Education Act, 1944, IIo-11
Educational Priority Areas (EPAs):
proposed, 109-16, 123; social scien-
tists' role in, 110-13, 140; political
response to, 116-23i costs of, 125;
implementation, 123-37; impact of,
136--8
Embling, John, 120, 1nn. See also
Department of Education and
Science
Family allowances, 66--7, 88, go-108,
172n; and public opinion, 91, 96,
175n; decision to increase, 102-3,
129. See also Clawback
Fletcher, Leonard, 12o-1, 1nn. See also
Department of Education and
Science
Floud, Jean, 111, 176n
Gaitskell, Hugh, 18, 21, 97
Gardiner, Lord: and 1965 Rent Act, 54,
55, 57; and poverty, 103
Glazer, Nathan, 6
Goodman, Arnold: as adviser to Cross-
man, 39-42, 141, 143; attitude to
rents, 38, 46, 48, 59; and rent officers,
51-2
Gordon Walker, Patrick: and poverty,
76, 84, 96, 99-105passim, 173n; and
EPAs, 122
Greenwood, Anthony, 33, 34, 103
Gunter, Ray, 87, 103
Halsey, A. H., 111;andEPAs, 116--17,
122, 134-7, 141, 142, 143, 15o-1
Hart, Judith, 78, 85, 106
Harvey, Audrey, 24
Hayward, Sir Isaac, 21
Head Start, see United States of
America
Headey, Bruce, 18on
Healey, Denis, 103, 174n
Heath, Edward, 74, 84
Heclo, Hugh, 5, 144, 18on
Herbison, Margaret: as Minister of
Social Security, 72, 85-7; and pov-
erty, 74-5,87, 89-g6passim, 147; and
cabinet deliberations, gg-108; re-
signation, 102
 Index
Houghton, Douglas: and 1965 Rent
Act, 55; as co-ordinator of social
services, 71, 85--6; and poverty, 88-
94· g6; removed from cabinet, gg; as
chairman of PLP, 1o 1
Housing, private rented: decline of, 14-
15; demand for, 14-15, 18; slum
conditions, 14-15, 23-4; electoral
importance of, 17-19, 27-31, 57;
homelessness, 2o-1; harassment, 23-
4, 26; Housing Action Areas, 109
Innovation: definition of, 12-13, 16on;
in 1965 Rent Act, 14, 54; in claw-
back, 66, 108; in EPAs, 109-10;
origins, 139-40, 150
Interest groups: impact of, g, 152-3,
16on; weakness of poor as, 68, 116,
139, 152. See also Advisory Centre for
Education; Association of Edu-
cation Committees; Association of
Municipal Corporations; Business;
Child Poverty Action Group; Land
societies; Landlord associations;
Tenant associations; Trade Unions;
Teachers
Jarret, Sir Clifford, 86. See also Ministry
of Social Security
Jeger, Lena, 59, 61, 75, go
Jenkins, Roy, g8, 102-5, 142
Jones, Sir Elwyn, 42, 54-5, 57
Joseph, Sir Keith, 21, 26, 33
Kaldor, Nicholas, 93, 103
Kogan, Maurice, 113
Labour Party: and private rented hous-
ing,33-5;and 1957RentAct, 16-19;
and Rachmanism, 25-30; and draft-
ing of lg65 Rent Act, 43· 5$ response
to 1965 Rent Act, 59--61, 63-5; and
poverty, 68, 71-2, 74-5, 100, 16gn;
and social service expenditures, g6-
8, 115; and means-testing, 8g---go,
104-5; and EPAs, 121-2
Landlord associations, 19, 26-7, 33, 43,
47
Land societies: Chartered Auctioneers'
and Estate Agents' Institute
(CAEAI), 43; Royal Institution of
Chartered Surveyors (RICS), 37, 43,
59
Lee, Fred, 100
Lewin, Herbert, 86. See also Ministry of
Social Security
Lindblom, Charles, 4
Littlewood, Sir Sidney, 63-4
Lloyd, Denis: as adviser to Crossman,
39-40; and rent determination, 46,
166n
Local authorities: and housing prob-
lems, 2o-1; and 1g65 Rent Act: 43,
53• 167n
Local Education Authorities (LEAs):
role, 116-17, 124-8 passim; and
EPAs, 126, 13o-7 passim; and nur-
sery education, 134-6.SeealsoAssoci-
ation of Education Committees
(AEC)
London School of Economics, 7, 21, 36,
73· 140
Lord Chancellor's Department: and
rent regulation, 42, 52-5 passim
Lynes, Tony: as a civil servant, 86-7,
88; as CPAG secretary, 73, 100, 143
MacColl, James, 45
MacDermott, Niall, 55, 57
March, James, 4
Media: and Rachmanism, 25; and Mil-
ner Holland Report, 57; and 1g65
Rent Act, 58-9; and poverty, 72-3,
n. 92, IOij and EPAs, 117, 119,
176n; as channels of communication,
142-3
Mellish, Robert, 21, 23, 34
Milner Holland Committee, 26, 36, 40,
141, 147, 148; report of, 26, 28, 37-8,
52-3, 57-8; and rent determination,
37, 46, 48-9; and rent machinery, 51
Ministry of Housing and Local Govern-
ment, 20-2, 30; and drafting of 1g65
Rent Act, 41-2; and rent determi-
nation, 46-50 passim; and rent ma-
chinery, 51-4 passim. See also Sharp,
Dame Evelyn
J86 Index
Ministry of Social Security: organis-
ation, 85-7; and poverty, 76-7, 87--g,
I70n
Mitchison, G. R., I7, 34
Morrell, Derek, I2o-I, I77n. See also
Department of Education and
Science
Moynihan, Patrick, 6
National insurance, 66, I 02
National Superannuation, 7I, 77, go
Negative income tax, 88, I4I, I72n
Nevitt, Adelia, I 74n
Nursery education, I32--6
Owen, David, 75, go, 92
Parkin, Ben, 23, 25, 27, 6I
Pike, Mervyn, 84
Pilcher, C. D.: as adviser to Crossman,
37-8, 40, I4I, I43i and rent de-
termination, g8, 48--g, 59
Pinker, Robert, I52
Plowden Council: appointment, I IO,
I2o; membership, I I0-11, I20; re-
port, I I5-I6, I25, I28, I36-7; politi-
cal response to, I I6-23, I49· See also
Central Advisory Council on Edu-
cation; EPAs
Plowden, Lady: chairman of CACE,
I IO and EPAs, I I6-I7, I I9, I34-5
Policy-making: as an intellectual pro-
ce~,4-7,9,54-5,62, Io6, IIO, I39-
44, I54--6; and uncertainty, 4-5, g8-
g, 62, 86, I4I-4i as an institutional
proce~, 7--9, 29-3I, 62, 106, 110,
I37--9, I44-56. See also Innovation;
Policy phases; Policy types
Policy phases, 10; awarene~, I5-30,
68-73, I Io-Ig, I40, I45, I48; sali-
ence, I5-I9, 27-30, 74-82, I I6-23,
I45, I4g-5o; definition of the prob-
lem,gi-8,44-5,82-5, IIg-I6, I4o-
I; specification of alternatives, g8-
55, 85-gg, I23-37, I4I, I46, I5o-3;
choice, 55--62, 99-105, I23-37
Policy types, I I-I2, I53-4; regulation,
I I; income transfers, I I, 66-7; ser-
vices, I I, 10g-10
Political parties: impact on policy, 8,
I44-8. See also Conservative Party;
Labour Party
Poor Law, I834, 5, I43
Positive discrimination, see Educational
Priority Areas
Poverty: rediscovery of, I-2, 66-73;
and poverty line, 70, 76, I49i politi-
cal importance of, 74-82; definition
of, 82-5; and conflict over policy, 85-
gg; and cabinet deliberations, gg-
I05j and policy decisions, I 02-g;
policy impact on, 106, 108; political
consequences of, 106-8. See also I965
Rent Act; EPAs
Powell, Enoch, 33, 58, I33
Price, Donald, 6
Protection from Eviction Act, go, 57
Public opinion: role of 8, I45--6; and
rents, I7-I9, 27-3I, 43, 49-50, 57,
62; and poverty, 78-8o, 87, gi-2, g6,
I 7 m; and social services, 8o-2, 97-8;
andEPAs, II7-I9, I76n
Punnett, R. M., I8on
Rachmanism, I2, 23-7, 34, 43, 46, 73,
I48
Raison, Timothy, I I3
Rent Act, I957: p~age of, I6-I8;
consequences, I8-go
Rent Act, I 965: drafting of, go-55; and
'fair rent', 34, 44-5, 48-5o; and rent
determination, 45-5 I; and rateable
value, 46, 56, 6o; rent machinery,
5I-4; rent officers, 52-3, 62; Rent
~~Qlent Committees, 53-4, 62;
approval by cabinet, 55-7; conflict in
Parliament, 57--6I; amended at Re-
port Stage, 6I; consequences of, 62-
5; impact on rents, 62-5, I 66n; politi-
cal reactions to, 63-5
Robinson, Kenneth, Iog, I04
Rogerson, John, 4I, 59· See also Mi-
nistry of Housing and Local
Government
Ross, William, 55, I 03
Rowntree, Seebohm, 5, 7, 70
Salience, see Policy phases
 Index
Schelling, Thomas, 16on
Sharp, Dame Evelyn, 20; and rent
policy, 30, 35--6, 42, 51, 53i re-
lationship with Crossman, 39-42. See
also Ministry of Housing and Local
Government
Short, Edward, 122
Silverman, Julius, 59
Simon, Herbert, 5
Social scientists: impact on policy, 5-7,
14o-4, 149, 155--6; and 1965 Rent
Act, 21-2, 3o-1, 36-44, 62; and
poverty, 6g-73, 86-7, g8-g, 106, 108;
and EPAs, IIo-18, 137-8
Specification, of alternatives, see Policy
phases
Steinbruner, John, 4
Stewart, Michael: and rents, 24, 34,
ss--6; and poverty' 103-4
Stokes, Donald, 27-g
Supplementary benefits, 66, 88, 106
Supplementary Benefits Commission,
70, 71, 8g, go
Tax allowances, children's: and social
benefits, 66, 88, go-2, 94-5. See also
Clawback; Negative income tax
Teachers: National Union of Teachers
(NUT), 117, 126-36 passim, 150,
153; National Association of Head
Teachers (NAHT), 117
Tenant associations, 19-20, 43
Thatcher, Margaret, 135
Titmuss, Richard, 7, 39; and redis-
covery of poverty, 6g-73, 140; and
definition of poverty, 85; poverty
policy, 88; as vice-chairman of Sup-
plementary Benefits Commission,
18on
Townsend, Peter, 7; and rediscovery of
poverty, 6g-73, 111; conflict over
poverty line, 76, 18m; definition of
poverty, 85; poverty policy, 86-7
Trade unions: Trades Union Congress
(TUC), and poor, 68-g, n; and
social policy, 77, gg, 152-3; support
for clawback, Ioo-I, 104, 15o; and
EPAs, 117
Treasury: and 1g65 Rent Act, 43, 55;
and poverty, 85, 8g, 93; and claw-
back, 95--6, 102-3; and EPAs, 119
United States of America: and poverty
programmes, 3, 6, 87-8, 109, IIS-
I6, 119, 123, 138, 141
Urban Programme, 109, 127, 133, 137
Vickers, Sir Geoffrey, 4, 144, 158n
Waddell, James, 41 . See also Ministry of
Housing and Local Government
Wage stop, 6g, 148
Walley, Sir John, 8o, 84, 91, 92. See also
Ministry of Social Security
Weaver, Toby, 120, 177n. See also De-
partment of Education and Science
Welfare State: undermining assump-
tions about, 1-2, 66-7, 109-10, 139;
socio-economic determinants of, 2-
3i Marxist interpretations of, 3-4;
political determinants of, 4-g, 13g-
55
Williams, Shirley, 119, 132
Wilson, Harold, 25--6, 27, 34, 46, 147,
I6m; and 1965 Rent Act, s6; and
poverty, 72, 74, 91, IOI-2, 103-4,
108, 147
Young, Michael, 7, 175n; member of
Plowden Council, 111, 120, 142; and
EPAs, 113, II6-I7, 122, 130, 134