TWO weeks before Christmas 1942, the Church Times devoted its leader column to a 299-page government report that, despite its unprepossessing name, had people queuing up for a copy.
Sir William Beveridge’s Social Insurance and Allied Services, which would go on to sell half a million copies, was, the newspaper determined, “a serious and laudable effort to give practical expression to those principles of human fellowship which the Christian part of this nation, at least, must profess”.
The report, underpinned by a vision to eradicate the “five giants” of idleness, ignorance, disease, squalor, and want, proposed a contributory system of social insurance and welfare that applied from the cradle to the grave. While observing that there would always remain “ample scope” for benevolence, the leader commented that “private charity has never covered, nor can it ever hope to cover, more than a very small part of the national field. . .
“Christians can do nothing but welcome the use of State organisation when the State is rightly fulfilling the task imposed on it by God,” it concluded.
IN ESPOUSING such sentiments, the paper was in tune with the then Archbishop of York, William Temple, who had argued in his Lent Book a year earlier that the State was “a servant and instrument of God for the preservation of justice and for the promotion of human welfare” (Citizen and Churchman, 1941). Beyond the Church, concerns about the limits of private charity and demands that the State play a more substantial part in guaranteeing a “national minimum” had a long history. “It is far better that the poor should look to the State, to whose coffers they contribute as citizens, than be thrown back upon uncertain and ill-regulated private charity,” a Church Times book review of 1930 suggested.
Polling carried out by the British Institute of Public Opinion and Mass-Observation (documented in Dr Chris Renwick’s Bread for All: The origins of the welfare state), two weeks after the publication of the Beveridge report, found support for the proposals “high across social classes”.
“People’s views on whether the Report should be implemented do not seem to have been directly influenced by their calculation of whether they personally are likely to gain or lose,” the pollster Henry Durant observed. “They seem to have approached the question from the angle of the public good.”
MORE than eight decades on, how has the Welfare State fared? When it comes to eradicating “want”, reports from the charitable sector paint a bleak picture. In 1901, Poverty: A study of town life, a survey of almost 50,000 families in York carried out by a team led by the Quaker philanthropist Seebohm Rowntree, suggested that about 30 per cent were living in poverty.
In 2023, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, founded by Seebohm’s son, reported that approximately 3.8 million people had experienced destitution in 2022, including about one million children (News, 20 September). This was almost two-and-a-half times the number of people in 2017, and nearly triple the number of children. The charity defines destitution in two ways: “Lack of access to at least two of six items needed to meet your most basic physical needs to stay warm, dry, clean and fed (shelter, food, heating, lighting, clothing and footwear, and basic toiletries) because you cannot afford them” and “Extremely low or no income indicating that you cannot afford the items described above”.
The most common source of income for all destitute households was social-security benefits (72 per cent), prompting the charity to warn that “the basic rate of social security is now so low it fails to clear the extremely low-income cash threshold set for destitution.”
In an election briefing published in June, the Resolution Foundation, a think tank focused on improving the living standards for people on low to middle incomes, referred to rising destitution, record homelessness, and child poverty, as “just the sharpest evidence that the current safety net is inadequate”. Unemployment benefits offer earnings replacement of 17 per cent for a private-sector worker on average earnings, compared with the OECD average of 57 per cent. With policies including the two-child benefit cap, the Government had “broken the link between entitlement and need for some of the most vulnerable households”.
OASISOasis youth work under way
The Government can, however, point to some successes. The Resolution Foundation notes that successive Conservative governments have boosted pay for the lowest earners with “ambitious increases” in the minimum wage. A report by the think tank Theos published earlier this year, Working Five to Nine, noted that, 40 years ago, rates of unemployment were nearly four times what they are now, and that the proportion of low income jobs (by hourly pay) is now the lowest it has ever been (8.9 per cent rather than the 21.8 per cent of 1997).
While cuts have been made, spending on benefits stands at levels unforeseen in the 1940s. Partly as a result of rising life expectancy, the total is forecast to stand at 11 per cent of GDP in 2024-25. Real spending on working-age incapacity benefits and disability benefits is set to rise to £63 billion by 2029.
When it comes to the “jewel in the crown” of the Welfare State, the latest British Social Attitudes survey found public satisfaction with the NHS stood at 24 per cent, down by 29 percentage points in three years (an “unprecedented collapse” according to The King’s Fund), while just 13 per cent were satisfied with social care. But support for its principles remains strong: more than 90 per cent support universality, and more than 80 per cent support its being tax-funded and free at the point of use.
WHEN asked about the state of the safety net provided by the Welfare State, the Rector of Stoke St Michael’s, Coventry, the Revd Claire McArthur, questions whether it exists: “It’s so limited in terms of the resources families need to get.” She thinks of families with four children living a “hand to mouth” existence. People come to her when they are in crisis, she reports. “The conversations I have are, ‘Claire, I’ve got no bus fare to get the kids to school. Can you give me a pound, two pounds, because I don’t get paid till next week.” Others run out of food.
The help provided by the Church is born out of relationships, she reports. “You get to know what their needs are. You have to respond quite quickly. You have to drop everything, or find somebody in the church who is trusted.” This might entail doing a food-shop, or providing money to enable a mother to finish cleaning clothes for school on Monday.
But the challenges are numerous. While foodbanks are running throughout the city, accessing them often requires money for public transport. Those working feel ashamed to go, she says, while supermarkets on estates command “super-high” prices. Another issue she mentions is the challenge of benefit sanctions for those living “hand to mouth” and “chaotic” lives. Both budgeting and cooking are important skills that can be omitted in education.
Across the country, the Church is providing a huge amount of care, ranging from toddler groups to schools, she says. She collects clothes and beds for refugees daily, while a community garden has been established at the rectory. She is also involved in “Destination Ball Hill”: a campaign to improve an area where a many refugees have been resettled. Her sense is that much of churches’ is “undercover”, even though “We are right in the heart of it.”
IT IS now a well-established axiom that, in recent years, there has been an expansion in the contribution made by the Church of England — and other Churches — to addressing social need. The latest Statistics for Mission (2022) reported that, of the 13,000 churches that responded to the question, 77 per cent were involved in at least one project, and half were running at least one, including lunch clubs, night shelters, and debt advice.
Statistics from the Church Urban Fund (CUF) suggest that the proportion of C of E parishes involved in supporting a foodbank or a similar food-poverty initiative has more than doubled, from 33 per cent in 2011 to 78 per cent in 2021.
“This growth in social action is not planned — a tactical attempt to soften the Church of England’s image,” a recent Theos/CUF report on social action (Growing Good: Growth, social action and discipleship in the C of E) observes (News, 13 November 2020). “Rather, it has come in response to economic and political contingencies. This means the social action of churches is often a factor of congregations just trying to deal with what is in front of them.”
Staff and patients in the charity ward at Guy’s Hospital, Southwark (c.1880)
Commentary about this response has tended to reveal two concerns. One is that the extent of the Church’s action is an indictment of state failure, and risks complicity in a wider abrogation of care. “I dream of empty night shelters,” the Archbishop of Canterbury told the Trades Union Congress (News, 14 September 2018).
Another is that there is nothing distinctively Christian about the action: a concern summarised by the Archbishop’s warning that, “if Jesus isn’t at the centre of the Church, we are simply Rotary with a pointy roof.” In parallel with the upsurge in social action can be seen a further precipitous drop in worshippers. “This is the paradox facing the Church of England in 2020,” the Theos report observes. “The national Church of a nation which is increasingly reliant on its social action and yet less and less spiritually connected to it.”
Growing Good, which drew on three years of interviews with more than 350 people in 66 parishes, concludes that social action could serve as a route to church growth in both numerical and spiritual terms. It is “one of the key ways in which congregations can build wider networks of relationships which can result in people initiating a faith journey and joining the church”.
The report includes the story of a woman who came regularly to a church coffee morning, but asked whether a cross on the wall could be removed, because she was uncomfortable with it. “Whilst they refused, this was a wake-up call for volunteers here that in their eagerness to welcome the whole community, they had not differentiated themselves enough from any other civic institution, to the point where those visiting did not recognise the spiritual value of the place.”
It was “paramount”, the author, Theos’s senior researcher, Hannah Rich, wrote, that the Church be “confident in its spiritual and practical identity as a national religious institution as it seeks to mediate the same relationships of state v. church social action once again”.
WHILE the mediation of such relationships has been subject to much commentary, the assessment made in For Good: The Church and the future of welfare (Canterbury Press, 2017; Books, 9 February 2018) offered a rare note of provocation. Against a tide of reports critical of the Government’s social-security reforms, the book concluded that meeting the needs of the sick, unemployed, low-paid, and elderly was “bankrupting the whole nation”.
Its authors were three Christians deeply engaged in social action: the Vicar of St Martin-in the-Fields, the Revd Dr Samuel Wells, and Russell Rook and David Barclay, two partners at the Good Faith Partnership. While agreeing that the Church should “hold the state to account” in addressing the five great evils identified by Beveridge, they cast a critical eye over a “preponderance of recent Christian reports on welfare” that had “little or nothing to say about the role that local churches can or should play in addressing poverty or cultivating social goods.
“The danger is that, for all their growing social impact, churches become defined more by what they believe about the State’s role than what they believe about their own.”
The authors argued: “There is no use hand-wringing and despairing that our nation can no longer afford the blanket of well-intentioned anomalies, compromises, and inconsistencies we call the welfare state. We can focus on scarcities all we like, but the secret of happiness and the key to the Kingdom is to enjoy the things that God gives us in plenty.”
The Welfare State “cannot heal the profound wounds in our lives made by the breakdown or absence of companionship, trust, healthy mutual reliance, and practices of kindness”, they warned. “Efficient bureaucracy can never supply what only human touch and genuine encounter can offer.”
SEVEN years on, Dr Wells still has some “hard things” to say about the Church’s approach to both the State and social action. Among them is a call to maturity. There can be something “contradictory”, he suggests, in the Church’s enjoying the privileges of establishment, including access to ministers of state, while also “behaving like a teenager throwing rocks from the outside”.
One option is to serve a function similar to that of a loyal opposition, “trying sympathetically to recognise the Government has a bunch of difficult choices to make”. Operating only in protest mode, he suggests, risks absorbing the message that “the whole world had to change. . . There is nothing wrong with me: I am just pointing out how wrong you guys are.”
St George’s, LeedsCharity shop run to support St George’s Crypt, Leeds
But his preferred model for the Church is the power of example: “If you don’t like what the rest of the world is doing, then do better yourself.” He refers to the example of Oasis St Martin’s Village in Tulse Hill, south London, which will offer mentoring and therapeutic care to young people struggling with or absent from mainstream education and their families. Until this summer, the building was home to St Martin-in-the-Fields High School for Girls, established in 1699, but closed owing to low pupil numbers. Dr Wells was a school governor, and the new project represents a partnership between the St Martin-in-the-Fields Foundation, the local authority, and Oasis.
It’s an example, he suggests, of the more “sophisticated” approach to social action exemplified by Oasis, a charity founded by a Baptist minister, the Revd Steve Chalke, almost 40 years ago. From one hostel for homeless young women in Peckham, it has expanded exponentially, to include 52 local academy schools, and 18 community hubs, including drop-in centres and supported housing projects.
The press release announcing the new centre in Tulse Hill described it as a response to the new Labour Government’s manifesto commitment to a new Young Futures programme, with a network of hubs reaching every community: a framing typical of Mr Chalke’s skill in forging relationships with local and central government and in gaining access to funding in the process. It also speaks of the scale of his ambition for the Church in the UK.
THE contention of Mr Chalke’s latest book — A Manifesto for Hope (SPCK, 2023) — is that “many of our government-funded systems are failing the most vulnerable and disadvantaged.” Society is, it argues, “side-lining our greatest asset; local people. We have a stark choice — to keep pouring money into policies we know aren’t working, or to invest in new and better ways that really improve people’s lives.”
Beveridge’s vision was always predicated on partnership with the voluntary sector, he says, but this was jettisoned by a government that wanted to “professionalise everything. . . They believed that engaging local people, voluntary groups, faith organisations, churches, was too subjective.”
He refers to the introduction of prescription charges as evidence that, “from the start, it wasn’t quite working.” In conversation with Tony Blair in the early 2000s, Mr Chalke suggested that the creation of the NHS had “denuded” the Church of its mission, leaving it “squeezed to the margins of delivery”, while the Government, for its part, needed a partner. “Tony said to me, ‘You are right, Steve. The Welfare State needs two parents.’ That’s it, really.”
St George’s, LeedsScene in St George’s Crypt, Leeds
Running foodbanks and debt-advice services are “both wonderful things in themselves”, he says. “But there is no real engagement with government. It’s not partnership: it’s the Church doing a bit in the corner. I do not mean that in any discrediting way. . . But the heavy lifting, alongside the NHS, on education, the care of the elderly, where you are entering policy areas, that’s a different ball game. And the Church and others have got squeezed out of that. And, until they are back, we are in trouble, and so is society.”
Partnerships such as the one behind the Tulse Hill centre — of which, he hopes, more will be rolled out — are not easy, he says, “because the Government kind of sends you the messages ‘We know what we are doing.’ We’ve had to push into it.” But Oasis already has youth workers attached to the A & E departments of two London hospitals, who mentor young people suffering from anxiety or depression, and is opening a secure school for young offenders, Oasis Restore (News, 21 July 2023). Future plans include working alongside GPs on social prescribing.
What about the risks of co-option by the Government? “The greater risk for the Church is to retire from public service,” he says. For those worried about losing the ability to offer a prophetic challenge to the Government, he suggests that, currently, “the Church isn’t heard. . . It’s a voice bleating in the corner.” It is having “skin in the game” that gets you heard.
He recalls how, years ago, he found himself in Croydon at a bus stop emblazoned with a local-elections poster that asked: “What takes just two minutes but lasts four years?”
“That is a very modern and very deficient view of democracy,” he argues. “Before the Welfare State, nobody would have ever said ‘It’s up to the Government to do it.’ They would all have said, ‘It’s partnership.’ . . You need to create democracy by empowering people.”
IT IS a view of civic action which carries echoes of the “big society” advocated by Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, when he was Prime Minister. Delivering the Hugo Young lecture at the offices of The Guardian in 2009, he called for a “thoughtful re-imagination of the role, as well as the size, of the State”. The new Government’s alternative to big government was not no government, he explained, but “the big society”. He sought “a national life expanded with meaning and mutual responsibility”.
It came three years after the publication of a booklet, Compassionate Conservatism, from the Right-leaning think tank Policy Exchange, co-written by the journalist Janan Ganesh and the future Conservative MP Jesse Norman. They warned that the “invasive” State that had grown under New Labour “disrupts the voluntary bonds between people, linking them upwards to the government rather than sideways to each other”.
Social ties were weakening, they said. The public related to government “almost as spoilt teenagers relate to their parents: on the one hand, loudly cursing its interference; on the other, quietly counting on it”. Compassionate Conservatism, in contrast, “locates moral responsibility primarily at the level of the individual, not at that of the state. . . it is at root a view about what we, the people, can do for ourselves: how we can directly improve the society, the environment, the relationships and institutions in which we find ourselves.”
The “big society” received a mixed response from the Church. General Synod members were among those who welcomed the opportunities that it offered to expand social action (News, 26 November 2010; Comment, 9 August 2013). The former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Williams gave it “two-and-a-half cheers”, expressing concern that it could be an “alibi for cost-cutting” and a government “hand-washing exercise” (News, 30 July 2010). Regeneration and social action needed government investment: “otherwise it will be delivered at lower standards, more patchily, and less accountably.”
Episcopal voices soon joined those of Christian charities in expressing alarm at the Government’s cuts (News, 11 November 2010). Others argued that only the State was strong enough to offer protection against the “aggressive market forces” at work in the 21st-century economy (Comment, 11 February 2011).
FOR historians of the Church, the “big society” raised questions about the feasibility of resurrecting an earlier, centuries-old, approach to welfare. The survey of services offered by the Victorian Church, set out by the historian Dr Frank Prochaska in Christianity and Social Service in Modern Britain: The disinherited spirit (Books, 2 November 2006), puts in perspective accounts of today’s social action. It includes: schools for the poor, temperance societies, soup kitchens, maternity charities, crèches, coal clubs, clothing clubs, and medical clubs, alongside savings banks, provident clubs, and pension societies.
Household visitors alone (“the most significant contribution made by organised religion to relieving the ills of society”) numbered 74,000 in 1910. “The Victorians equated their civilisation with the proportion of national activity given over to benevolent causes, just as a later generation would equate it with the welfare state,” he observed.
The book is a hymn to the civic institutions of the country, which, Dr Prochaska argues, played a crucial part in the creation of a vibrant democracy, occupying, in the words of the historian Quentin Skinner, a “moral space between rulers and ruled”. To most Victorian Christians, he writes, “the state was an artificial contrivance, useful in punishing sinners, but incapable of redemptive action.”
The remedy to social problems was to be found in personal reformation, aided by charity. Such action also entailed greater interaction between social classes: munificence was shown not through the redistribution of wealth through taxes, but in face-to-face encounters.
While acknowledging the clear limits of this approach — the education of poor children, for example, was “patchy, partial and precarious”, with a focus on moral improvement rather than the development of the mind — the book is also something of an elegy, both for society (“If by the push of a ministerial button a programme of social progress could be set in train, was there any need to look after thy neighbour?”) and for the Church (“Rarely has a British institution so willingly participated in its own undoing”).
It was the part played by religion in welfare, he argued, that made it “relevant”. Christian leaders “failed to appreciate the consequences of endorsing a collectivist, secular world without redemptive purpose”. Christianity became increasingly “a private matter of individual conscience”.
FOR Ms Rich, the hypothesis that the relationship between the rise of the Welfare Atate and the decline of the Church was causative is questionable. But she believes that “we could make a stronger case for the Church influencing what the State does, in terms of its expertise and its role in understanding communities.” The Beveridge reforms were underpinned by conversations throughout the country exploring what was happening on the ground, she reflects. “It strikes me that one of the institutions that is still doing that is the Church. The Church has something to say in this conversation, not necessarily always something to do.”
There is a risk, she suggests, that the Church gets “a little bit too comfortable with providing foodbanks and not challenging the reasons why they are needed. . . Some of that is that they fulfil a need for the people who are volunteering there as well as the people who come there.”
One of the findings of another of her reports, Volunteering After the Pandemic: Lessons from the homelessness sector, was the emergence of tensions between the preferences of volunteers and of guests when it came to night-shelter models (News, 29 September 2023). While the latter preferred the model that operated during the pandemic (their own room in a hotel or hostel), volunteers missed the communal nature of the previous approach, with guests staying at an area’s churches in rotation. Among the report’s recommendations was the need for “close examination of why people volunteer and and whether, at times, this can even be unhelpful for those being supported”.
What about the suggestion in For Good that the “contradiction” model of social action, in which churches stand against government policies that they consider unjust, can be “addictive”? “We can get quite addicted to doing the stuff at the expense of calling out the State,” Ms Rich argues. “It boils down to why we are doing it. Are we doing it for ourselves, and the boost we get from being the people filling the gaps, or from being the people that are shouting about it?”
THE extent to which the Church can “fill the gaps” raises practical questions about capacity. We are far from the Victorian Christianity in which, as Dr Prochaska documents, armies of volunteers stood ready to deliver everything from maternity advice to palliative care. While many of the social-action projects run by churches draw on volunteers from outside the worshipping community, the fact remains that the median worshipping community numbers 37. A 2022 Theos report exploring the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on civic society (News, 7 November 2022) warned that “the margins of community groups are often small enough that one individual volunteer is the difference between a project functioning and not.”
CLAIRE MCARTHURThe Rector of Stoke St Michael’s, Coventry, the Revd Claire McArthur
A social action approach that focused on “meeting needs” could, Dr Wells argued in For Good, risk despondency: while it “might be a fine place for Churches to start their social action . . . it is not a destination by itself and if it becomes one it can only lead to more depression and despair as congregations find that they cannot in fact plug the gaps appearing in the welfare safety net.”
Speaking today, Dr Wells reflects that such experiences can have a theological root: “There is a danger that we don’t believe that Christ takes away our sins; so we’ve got to do it . . . that somehow the Father will accept the sacrifice of my exhaustion because somehow the sacrifice of Christ has not been sufficient.”
He speaks from experience: “The times when I have burnt out have tended to be the times when I felt it all depended on me: ‘These people’s lives will be ruined unless I work 16 hours a day.’ . . . It tends to focus on the person who is doing the work more than the people in need. And, actually, it shows very little faith in the power of the Holy Spirit to work through surprise and accident to transform situations that are beyond my capacity.”
He remains “very suspicious” of the word “fix”: “Many things can’t be fixed. . . So how am I disposed towards it? Do I throw myself in front of the train as a sacrificial gesture? . . . Or do you say, ‘What is a sustainable way to allow the Holy Spirit to work through me, through us, so that we can collaborate with other people already working in this area?’”
An approach closer to Christian discipleship is, he suggests, to “spend time in places of adversity and in solidarity with people facing hardship in ways that allow the wonders of God’s realm to surface — not least through the people we might otherwise think of as needy and simply the recipients of our care”.
AS THE Labour Government gets its feet under the table, the relationship between Church and State is undergoing another resetting. Mr Chalke’s diary is already filling up with meetings with ministers. Ms Rich, who has criticised Labour’s retention of the two-child benefit cap (Comment, 18 August 2023), pushes back against suggestions that the Government can expect less criticism from the “lefty” Bishops’ Bench. “They should be that grit that makes the pearl,” she says. “There should be some friction there, whoever is in power.”
Those expecting a dramatic reversal of the previous government’s policies are likely to be disappointed. The Resolution Foundation has calculated that, on current plans for tax revenues, there may be “sharp cuts” to funding for unprotected departments, including local government. Headwinds are far from gentle. The last Parliament was the worst for income growth since at least the 1950s, while the Institute for Employment Studies has reported that the share of people in the labour force is now the lowest that it has been since 1998 (it is notable that most of the references to Beveridge in the Church Times archive concern his commitment to tackling unemployment).
“It’s going to be pretty tough for the next ten years,” Dr Wells predicts. “I think we shouldn’t be in the conversation unless we’ve got some really imaginative ideas about how some things could be done very much better.”