How and to what extent was the post-war consensus on welfare challenged during the Thatcher years?
The post war consensus was the period of political history which emerged in the difficult years following World War II. Britain returned home victorious from war but in a state of social and economic un-rest. The people of Britain had a strong sense of solidarity at this time and begun to reject previous decades’ laissez faire philosophy and non-interventionist government policy. The population’s expectations of the state were high and people had a clearer understanding of the relationship between the state and its citizens. It is argued that attitudes changed due to new accessibility to information people had, such as the Beveridge Report, and they wanted the government to respond (Titmuss, 1950). The public pushed for a greater state intervention to ensure the economic and social wellbeing of the citizens. One of the main policies of the post war consensus was the evolution of the new welfare state which was based on the principles of equal distribution of wealth, equality and the public responsibility for those unable to provide a decent standard of living for themselves. This new collectivist approach covered areas such as education, unemployment, health, housing and poverty that were thought important to overcome to enjoy a reasonable standard of living. The post-war consensus prevailed from 1945 until the election of the Conservative government led by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Thatcher challenged the welfare state mainly through privatisation of UK services and abolishment of the Keynesian full employment practice. This essay will look at how and to what extent the post-war consensus on welfare was challenged during the Thatcher years.
The war created a housing problem as many homes were bombed, leaving thousands of people homeless. Following this there was a population boom in the 1940’s as Britain began to recover from the war. The government tackled the housing shortage with a large-scale housing programme which seen the removal of slums and the building of thousands of new homes across the country. The Town and Country Planning Act (1947) saw 1.25 million council houses built between 1945 and 1951 (Kavanagh, D. (1992)). The idea of this social housing programme was to provide cheap and affordable housing for all while maintaining a decent standard of living. The production of houses was slower than planned but the standard for accommodation was set out in the Dudley Report of 1944 and the government were sticking to it. The Labour Minister of Health at the time, Aneurin Bevan, said, 'while we shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build, we shall be judged in ten years' time by the type of houses be build' (Foot, 1973, p.82).
Tenants rented properties from the government for an affordable fee and everyone’s general taxation covered costs. In the most part this programme held strong until Thatcher came into power. Thatcher’s Conservative government out rightly rejected the post-war consensus policy of local councils being landlords and wanted to completely abolish the notion of council housing all together and return ownership to private landlords and citizens. Henceforth came the “Right to Buy” scheme which gave the public the option to buy their council house at a discounted price. On top of this council rent increased and subsidies to tenants were cut whereas subsidies were being offered to home owners and those wishing to purchase their own home. All of this encouraged privatisation of British homes and challenged the previous consensus on welfare by increasing public ownership and reducing local authorities’ responsibility and reducing their expenditure. This was Thatcher’s “greatest political success on social policy” (Fraser, D. (2009), as it showed a complete reform of the housing system in Britain.
New social policies were implemented after the war. The Education Act 1944 included the abolishment of school fees and the introduction of scholarships for university students. Education was governed by local authorities and it became a duty to provide secondary education on an equal level across all schools for free (Board of Education (1943)). Thatcher’s education policies in the 1980s were to convert the school system from a public service into a market, and to transfer power from local authorities to central government as she felt that Labour run constituencies were blocking central government’s role in education and wanted to return a greater onus to parents on the running of schools (Chitty C (2004)). Thatcher also returned control to parents on the decision on which school there child would attend which challenged the equality structure of the post war consensus. Schools were given the right to reject control of the local authority and be a grant maintained school funded by central government. This challenged the power of the local authority and the teachers which is a complete reverse on the policies of the post war consensus regarding education. Thatcher also went on to cut student grants and stopped students from claiming benefits during holiday periods. This challenged the post war consensus policy on welfare by moving away from the equal education for all structure as the poorer sector of the population were once again unable to afford the same educational standards as the wealthier percentage of the population. This therefore in turn is damaging to the welfare status of the poorer percentage of the population.

The post war consensus policy of “full employment” stated that all eligible people who wanted to work could find work at the prevailing wage rate. The National Insurance Act 1946 laid out the principle of universally paying a flat rate contribution which in turn when required would cover all possible causes of need, including periods of interruption to wages. This ensured the welfare of all members of society. Thatcher held the Keynesian full employment structure of the post war consensus in dis-regard. She set about lowering inflation rates to try and re-establish a stable economy. By raising interest rates she slowed down economic productivity which led to soaring unemployment figures. As unemployment rates soared as did increased public expenditure. From this arose the “benefit culture” where for many people they were better off on benefits than in low paid employment. To tackle this Thatcher made changes to the system which only paid out benefits on the basis of an individuals want and willingness to find work, these changes were put forward in the Social Security Act (1989). This was different to the previous post-war consensus where benefits would last as long as the interruption to earnings. In terms of social care, the imposed privatisation of many services saw a rise in private sector care with a change from social workers providing care to them purchasing care. This led to a shift away from the post war consensus of “traditional” social care which had evolved over the past few decades where citizens received personal communication with social services such as counselling. The Conservative government at this time also made a shift of the provision of care of disabled persons and incapacitated persons, from the public to the private sector. Again these shifts to privatised social care and changes to benefit schemes challenged the equality aspect of the post war consensus on welfare, if you could afford better care you could get bett

The war had introduced the public to healthcare they had never experienced before due to the need to attend to casualties from bombing raids and the use of such services highlighted the need for a wider spread provision of healthcare (Titmuss, 1950). In the years that followed the war, the main political parties of the time agreed that along with recovering from the war, the welfare of British citizens was a priority. The Beveridge Report of 1943 set out the guidelines for the progress of post-war Britain. One of the main discussion points from the report being disease. When Labour came to power in 1945 they introduced the National Health Service, where previously healthcare had been administered through insurance based schemes with the poor not being able to afford medical bills or supplies, the new scheme was funded purely through taxation making everyone eligible for treatment, much like the modern day NHS as we know it (Fraser, D. (2009). When Thatcher came to power, her original plans to abolish the NHS and implement privatisation of healthcare were swiftly abandoned after the realisation of the difficulties facing the American healthcare system (Sullivan, M. (1996) and backlash from the public. She went on to reform the NHS by implementing internal market reforms under the influence of the Griffiths report (1983) (Manfred Davidmann (1985)). The healthcare system under the post-war consensus gave more responsibility to general managers and increased competition for contracting services such as cleaners. This however, gave rise to local differences in the standard of care as local authorities providing care competed. Thatcher did not implement as many changes on the NHS as she may have planned and in some ways caved to public pressure to ensure the continued practice of a free and national health service.
It can be seen that Thatcher did, in various ways challenged the post-war consensus. She implemented policies, which only a few years earlier would have been deemed unthinkable politically. However, the changes implemented were not a sudden change as public opinion had been questioning the consensus for a number of years prior as Britain spiralled into social and economic decline in the early 1970’s. This was even shown by the Labour party in 1975 when they abandoned Keynesian Full Employment policies. I feel the controversies of many of Mrs Thatcher’s decisions were due to the complete reversing and large scale changes of many of the policies which had been in place for the past 30 years. These changes signalled the end of the post-war consensus on many terms. The extent to which the Thatcher years challenged the consensus can be measured by the success of the government policies of the time. With the continued public support for the welfare state, in particularly the NHS, student maintenance grants and tax relief it made it difficult to implement reforms as planned by Mrs Thatcher’s government. However, the radical changes made by Mrs Thatcher to housing policies show a significant change in social policy.

* Fraser, D. (2003) The Evolution of the British Welfare State, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 3rd.Edition * Sullivan M. (1996) The Development of the British Welfare State, Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall * Kavanagh, D (1990) Thatcherism and British Politics: End of Consensus? Oxford: Oxford University Press * Dolowitz, David P. British Employment Policy in the 1980s: Learning from the American Experience. Governance, Volume 10, Number 1, January 1997 , pp. 23-42(20)

* Titmuss, R.M. (1950) Problems of Social Policy, London: HMSO and Longman and Green and Co.

* Foot, M., 1973, Aneurin Bevan. A Bibliography. Vol. One: 1879-1945, Vol. Two 1945-60, Four Square. * Manfred Davidmann (1985). Reorganising the National Health Service: An Evaluation of the Griffiths Report (Second edition) * Board of Education (1943) White Paper Educational Reconstruction Cmd. 6458 London: HMSO