Back to the future: 1979-1989
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Rethinking 1980s social policy

The struggle from powerlessness to participation.

Essay

This is an essay about the radical change that UK social policy underwent in the 1980s.

As soon as you write down the words, social policy, they feel like jargon. But I believe, and it shapes what I am writing here, that social policy then as now, is far too important a subject for all of us to be left to the self-appointed 'experts', of whatever ideological position, who historically have tended to dominate it. So here I want to look beyond the conventional wisdoms about Mrs Thatcher's political New Right social engineering. Instead I want to focus on how things seemed to ordinary people during that time, drawing on a unique evidence source — how the changes that were made relate to what they said they wanted and make connections with today's complex and uncertain times, politics and attitudes to welfare.

Putting it simply, social policy is about how we look after each other in society; what help you can get beyond your personal or family resources, if things go wrong, you face difficulties or when one of those big events happen to us in life; from being born and having children, to having no money or needing somewhere to live, getting ill, being disabled or indeed, dying. Specific social policies, include housing, education, health, social care, planning, recreation and income maintenance.

Although social policy doesn't usually make the headlines, unless something goes really wrong, or a particular group becomes the target for media sermonising, it is probably the government policy that has most impact on most of our lives. The 1980s witnessed enormous changes in social policy which continue to affect us all. Housing, social security, health and education policies all underwent fundamental change, impacting on the lives of all of us — impacts we are still feeling today. While major events like the Falklands/Malvinas War, globalisation, the emergence of AIDS and the stock market crash of 1987 may still feature more strongly in folk memory and formal histories, it is doubtful that many of us can claim that we have not been significantly affected by these policy changes. Unless you are very, very, rich or powerful, the likelihood is that they now still have a bearing on where and how you live, what your job is like and how pleasant or otherwise your older age is likely to be.

They certainly had big effects on me and my life. Some of the worst things that happened to me, happened to me in the 1980s — struggling to cope, living on benefits and ending up in the psychiatric system. This is not my story — it's about something much bigger, but I won't be writing as academics often do as though I stood outside these events in lofty isolation. That's because apart from my own personal experience, the often dramatic changes taking place intersected with my life in two very particular ways. The first was because of where I lived and the second the work I was doing.

North Battersea — A case study

I have lived in Battersea in London most of my life. I grew up there, went to school and got my first job there, serving at the department store Arding and Hobbs, now Debenhams. It is also where we brought up our four children — in a damp, neglected privately rented flat, where the plaster was falling off the walls. North Battersea is part of the London Borough of Wandsworth. I used to joke that while I'd stayed, Battersea had moved on. In 1977 two of us set up a local community project, Battersea Community Action, because we were concerned that no one was listening to what local people had to say. We wanted instead to try and find out what they wanted for the future and to work with them to achieve the kind of changes they hoped to see.

From having a left-wing Labour council in the 1970s with a strong socialist history, which left us with street names like Freedom and Reform Street, in 1978, North Battersea, with the election of a hard-right Conservative council became part of 'Mrs Thatcher's 'favourite' borough. The Conservatives have remained in power through the 1980s to the present. From being an 'inner city area' ranked high on indices of poverty and deprivation then, North Battersea has since become a polarised place, with an inadequate and diminishing stock of devalued 'social housing' and an expanding international housing market, where the price of a terraced house round the corner from me currently hovers around the £1 million mark. When a local 19 year-old was stabbed to death outside his family home, 'The Sun' headlined it as 'near Prince George's (£17,000 a year prep) school' in an article published on 6 February 2019.

A different side to the story — what local people said

Back in 1977, we quickly had our chance to check out local views when the Labour council organised a major consultation with people over their local plan for North Battersea — a requirement under planning legislation. This had already been four years in the making and now involved an enormous 'public participation' exercise. It was a key opportunity to find out what local people themselves had to say about their lives and experience in relation to current policies and politics — both of which would shortly be radically reversed.

In the autumn of 1977, during the period of the council consultation exercise, we interviewed a representative sample of 637 people in 580 households in an in-depth survey — 'A Say In The Future' — which extended over the whole of North Battersea. We encouraged interviewers to record people's comments verbatim to give a real feel of what they felt. While this included some young people under the age of 18 we carried out an additional small-scale survey of 31 youngsters at school and in a youth club, to compensate for their tendency to think it was their parents we wanted to speak to. We wanted to find out local people's views about the participation exercise, what say they felt they had in their community, what they felt about local services and what they wanted for the future. As documented in Beresford and Croft's 1978 report, there was a remarkable consistency in people's responses regardless of age, housing tenure, gender and ethnicity. To the best of my knowledge it is the only such study undertaken at this time, offering a kind of situation report on ordinary people's views just ahead of the major political and social policy reforms that were shortly to take place in the UK, thus offering first-hand evidence from an area that was to be in the vanguard of these changes.

The Battersea I knew as a child was a thriving, mixed area, with large-scale industrial employment and busy shopping areas. By the time we carried out the 'A Say In The Future' survey in 1977, it had changed enormously. 70 per cent of the 35,000 people in North Battersea lived in council housing about half in inadequately maintained high-rise estates. During the 1960s many Black Commonwealth citizens had moved to the area, industry was undergoing a process of severe decline and a parallel process of gentrification had started, leading to an increasing polarisation of the population between poor and better off. Now North Battersea was designated a deprived inner-city area high on indices of poverty and disadvantage.

It is also important to say something more about the politics of Wandsworth's last Labour council to date. It was a left-of-centre council (some of its members went on to be part of Ken Livingstone's radical Greater London Council). It saw itself as strongly committed to its electorate, especially its more deprived members. It strongly supported the voluntary and community sectors, had established law and advice centres as well as its own community social work and community development teams to help people deal with their difficulties and had developed social services with a high public reputation. Compared with some local authorities it carried out its responsibilities for public participation in planning thoroughly and seriously. It's important to keep this in mind, when looking at the results of our local survey. The consultation was widely advertised — in local and London media, with posters and leafleting, as well as literature in council offices and the local library, encouraging people to phone or write in with their views, to take part in public meetings and visit the public exhibition that had been organised. There were 'policy forums, street meetings and a self administered residents' survey'.

The sense of disaffiliation

So what were the key findings from the study I was involved in? First, very few local people got involved in the public participation exercise. Despite all the council's publicity only about a third even knew about the exercise — only about one per cent — 450 people out of the 35,000 living in the area — took part in it in any way and they were grossly unrepresentative with a predominance of middle-class participants. Groups associated with the greatest needs were least likely to take part. There was only a handful of Black people and no local youngsters present at the public meetings.

But perhaps much more important, the exercise seemed to be undermined from the start by local people's distrust of and disaffiliation from the local authority. Their responses to questions we asked about this offer clear measures of their sense of estrangement from it. Thus:
57 per cent thought the Planning Department knew little or nothing of what they wanted.
Only 2 per cent felt it was well informed,
94 per cent thought that the Council didn't ask them what they wanted,
62 per cent thought that the Council look little or no notice of their needs and wishes.

The strength of people's feelings was clear from their comments:
' … There's nothing in it for me. They take no notice of us.' (young Rastafarian).
' … the Council takes no notice … I know you mean well dear, but there is no point.' (older woman)
'They know but they take no notice.'
'They don't know a lot or there wouldn’t be these tower blocks.'
'The Council are good at telling off those who are easily told off, but they aren't so good at playing their part.' (council tenant).
'You're the first person to ever ask.'
'They only ask for objections to their plans.'
'Maybe they do (take notice) but they can't do much.'
'Yes (they may take notice), if they have the money.'
'As a public relations exercise they take notice, but very little really.'
'Not much (notice), or they wouldn't have built this estate.'

What was surprising was the essential hostility towards the council reflected in local people's comments. As we wrote at the time, 'the prevailing emotion encountered in interviewing was anger against the council, often turning into resignation in older people'. A powerful picture emerged of distrust and dissatisfaction. It was clear that most local people had no sense of involvement in local affairs. While council tenants might have particular grievances because of the nature, poor maintenance and repairs of their housing which many commented on, negative attitudes to the council were not confined to them, but much more widely spread among the people we spoke with.

Crucially what the public participation exercise showed up was that most local people had no real sense of involvement. Nor was it just the inadequacy of existing methods of participation that seemed to account for this, but something more fundamental; people's negative feelings about the council. Their replies to our questions revealed an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. Most people felt they had little or no say in decisions affecting their area.

The desire to be listened to

Yet when we asked people if they wanted to have more say in decisions affecting Battersea, two thirds said they did — 73 per cent if we exclude middle-aged and older people who tended to be less demanding and assertive. The most militant groups in this and other issues tended to be families with children, especially small children and Black and minority ethnic residents. A conventional argument to explain low responses to participation exercises has been that people are apathetic. What came across much more strongly from this evidence was that people felt disempowered and that they wouldn't be listened to. But many made clear that they wanted to be heard and have a real say in local affairs. People also had realistic proposals to offer about how this might be achieved, for example:

'Council should listen to people.'
'More small meetings in small localities, especially on estates to find out what people want.'
'Only way is by people getting together and talking.'
'By taking the residents' views into account earlier.'
'More liaison from the 'higher-ups' — the management.'
'We need a good TA (Tenants Association) with a rep from each block.'

When it was published in 1978, our survey gained high visibility in Battersea, Wandsworth and beyond, with feedback to participants, a local shop front exhibition and articles in the community, local, and national press, specialist media and planning journals. We shared our findings with the local authority and its planning department, although we got little response from them.

The coming of a new politics

Less than a year after carrying out the survey, the local Labour council was unexpectedly voted out and replaced with a hard-line Conservative council which promised to reverse their policies. A year later, in 1979, Mrs Thatcher came to power. Before then Conservative governments had pursued social policies based on what was called a 'welfare consensus'; that is to say they essentially accepted the principles of Labour's post-war welfare state; its health and welfare system, albeit there might be differences in the priority and resources they gave it. Mrs Thatcher had always opposed the welfare state, would have destroyed it if she could and now set out to reverse its principles. She saw 'nanny' state welfare as creating 'dependency', burdening taxpayers, wasting public money, stifling the creation of wealth and rejected the state as an inefficient and wasteful supplier of services. Instead her goals were to cut public expenditure and services and switch to the market for the provision of public goods and services and expect people to pay for the support they received. In this way, as she saw it, they would secure choice and control as consumers, pay less tax and escape the 'paternalism' she saw as inescapable with state intervention — as described in 'All Our Welfare: Towards participatory social policy', published 2016.

Listening politics or just another ideology?

Looking back it's easy to interpret the findings of 'A Say In The Future' as stark writing on the wall for Wandsworth's Labour council and a powerful warning that we could expect a dramatic shift in national politics. People felt ignored and without any say. State planning and services were failing disastrously to deliver what they wanted. The calls of the new political right for a very different kind of politics and public policy can perhaps be seen to resonate very closely with public demands like those of people living in North Battersea. Indeed, this is the conventional view of the politics of the 1980s. At last, public dissatisfaction with contemporary policy and politics was being heeded. But on closer examination they may convey a very different message. There is a very different lesson to be learned from the actual evidence, which with the benefit of hindsight from our present vantage point may make a lot more sense.

In Battersea and Wandsworth, the new council policies were sold as cutting bureaucracy, reducing state waste and interference, cutting taxes and giving local people more choice and control. For a time the local authority was able to boast that its council tax was the lowest — even now it highlights that it is much lower than many others, as reported in an article in 'The Independent' published 19 February 2019. This of course has had a big appeal for the better-off voters who increasingly moved into Battersea in the 1980s.

But it did little or nothing to make possible the greater say local people pressed for in our survey. The issues that they identified as needing improvement in North Battersea were:

  • Shopping
  • Facilities like playspace and clubs for young children
  • Provision for teenagers and young people
  • Street cleaning
  • Social and recreational facilities for local people
  • Repairs to council housing and estates.

None of these improved in North Battersea in the years following the Conservative council's election. Instead they generally got worse during the 1980s. Amenities and services rapidly deteriorated as the new council imposed unprecedented cuts in expenditure. North Battersea quickly lost public libraries, halls, laundries, baths, nurseries, law centre and community projects — all this in an area already identified as having exceptional needs. Social services were reduced in scale and quality and charges were increased. The council's commitment to the privatisation of services (which began with street cleaning) spread rapidly, without any discernible improvement in services, rather, generally the opposite and the lowering of pay and conditions for local workers. This is a trend that continued through the 1980s to the present.

A new housing policy — solution or problem?

One key change did take place, however, which seemed to gain much local support; this was Wandsworth's policy of council house sales, which formed the basis of Mrs Thatcher's subsequent council house sales policy. Now tenants could buy their homes with a huge discount. As we saw with the families of our children's Black and white friends and classmates, this meant that now at last they could move out of North Battersea, buy their own homes in more desirable areas and get on the housing ladder, instead of being stuck in neglected and devalued council estates. Less often talked about were the huge bills that new owner-occupiers in North Battersea could now face for estate repairs and maintenance as the council forced them to finance it, or those who became homeless because they couldn’t really afford to buy even at a discount.

But Mrs Thatcher's 1980 'right to buy' was a short-term gain. Instead of the nation of owner-occupiers Mrs Thatcher promised, we have increasingly become a nation of insecure and over-charged short-term private tenants. In 1979 42 per cent of Britons lived in council homes. In 2016 that figure was less than 8 per cent (according to an article published in 'The Guardian' on 4 January 2016). Home ownership levels peaked at 71 per cent in 2003 in England and have since slipped back to 64 per cent, their lowest level since 1987 (reported in an article from 'The Guardian' published 26 February 2014). More than 40 per cent of former council houses are now rented out by private landlords, many of them in the hands of large property developers (reported by 'The Guardian' in an article published 19 January 2019). Levels of homelessness and overcrowding have increased year on year.

Instead of council housing there is now 'social housing', which has become a euphemism for accommodation for poor marginalised people with nowhere else to go. So-called 'affordable housing' is beyond the reach of people on average incomes. Housing has once again become a commodity, with people buying to rent to compensate for the decline in value of pensions. The situation is even more extreme in North Battersea where, as we have seen, the population is now largely polarised between rich and poor; 'social' and 'luxury' housing. Its most extreme manifestation is the massive Battersea Power Station/Nine Elms Road Development, one of the biggest in Europe, where a vast concentration of high cost housing, most of it 'dark' (that is, unoccupied housing built with overseas money for speculative profit) is being built (the subject of an article published in 'The Guardian' on 26 January 2018).

The new local council and national politics largely did no more to deliver what people wanted than their predecessors had done. More than that, and perhaps most important, the 1980s Thatcherite reforms did little or nothing to challenge the powerlessness that people, particularly disadvantaged groups, reported experiencing. In fact a case can be made that they made it worse.

Same old planning without participation

In North Battersea, the process of drawing up a new local plan continued under the new Conservative council. As we wrote in a new introduction to a second edition of 'A Say In The Future' in 1982, the new plan was radically different from its predecessor. Now the emphasis was on spending cuts and how the private sector would meet need. Unlike Labour's earlier plan, it met with strong organised opposition from trades unions, voluntary and community groups. As a result a local public inquiry was held. In his report the inspector stated that his recommendations 'might give rise to the need to make more drastic revision of the plan than might normally be expected'. The Leader of the council complained to the government and the Inspector was subsequently admonished by the junior minister who stated that:
(he) 'made an error of judgement … (going) outside the proper bounds of his function … I need hardly add that these policies accord with those advocated by the government' (cited on page iii of Beresford and Croft's 'A Say in the Future' report from 1982).

When Michael Heseltine, the then Secretary of State for the Environment visited North Battersea after the Inspector reported and local people questioned him in the street (including the author), reminding him what his Inspector had said about the Borough Plan and unmet local housing need, he replied, 'He has his opinion. I have mine'.

So much for the revised 'New Right' plan reflecting local views any more than Labour's had before it.

The 1980s hidden history — beginning to listen to people

During this same period however, real progress was being made in the UK in the direction highlighted by people in North Battersea with their calls for more say and involvement and more user-friendly policies and services.

First, beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s, was the emergence of what have come to be called new social movements. These were both identity-based — the Black civil rights, women's and LGBTQ movements and issue-based — the anti-nuclear and environmentalist movements. They went beyond traditional political and labour movements, working to redefine people's identities and secure equal treatment regardless of difference and diversity. They drew on their direct experience and sought more say and control, committed to self-organisation, collective action and self-advocacy. They set in train a different kind of research and knowledge production based on people's first-hand viewpoints and the experiential knowledge of groups facing discrimination and exclusion. Among these movements were the welfare service user movements, like the disabled people's, people living with AIDS, grey power/older people's and mental health service user/survivor movements, demanding different models of understanding and support and calling for more control over support, services, policy and politics which had been meant to serve but often marginalised them. Fresh approaches to providing services which sought to meld individual enthusiasm with economic sustainability also developed and flourished in the expanding canal and heritage railway movements.

More collaborative approaches to organisations and services were also developed which challenged the increasing New Managerialism and bureaucratisation associated with the politics of the New Right, like cooperatives, patch and self-management. Initiatives like the London Weekend Return Group began working out how state and public services could involve both workers and service users on more equal terms. The high-profile Lucas Aerospace Alternative Plan prefigured how redundant military industry could be restructured to produce goods for a socially useful and sustainable economy. The feminists who developed 'Beyond The Fragments' sought ways of achieving solidarity while valuing difference, instead of mirroring traditional discriminations (as described in 'All Our Welfare: Towards participatory social policy' published 2016).

From Thatcherism to a truly different politics

However, these changes were generally not associated with the politics of Mrs Thatcher. Her consumerist rhetoric quickly showed itself to be a busted flush. The public service 'customer' did not become king or queen as promised. The National Health Service was starved of resources and overloaded with hierarchy. Human resource issues and the chasing of diversionary ‘targets’ undermined quality and efficiency. Privatising public transport and utilities did not result as promised in a 'thousand flowers blooming', but rather the replacement of an underfunded state system with a new, inefficient corporatism preoccupied with profit.

Instead these democratising developments, reflecting the same concerns and priorities as the people we interviewed in North Battersea, were more often associated with grassroots movements, trades unions, state workers and service users and people committed to the welfare state. They were concerned with reforming the welfare state rather than destroying it and returning to the problems of poverty, ill-health and insecurity under the market between the wars. This is where the pressure for the kind of change local people wanted seems to have been coming from. Ironically, in view of much conventional thinking, these stakeholders were also among some of the most trenchant critics of 1980s politics and social policy.

The lesson from history

Thus the often-overlooked contradiction of Thatcherite 1980s domestic policy: while it continues to be seen as reflecting public dissatisfaction with the statist politics that had gone before, in fact it can also be seen as itself no less at odds with what people wanted. Instead its reforms appear more to be underpinned by a desire to return to the pre-welfare state inequalities and exclusions operating under an unfettered market associated with the poverty, want and other giant evils named by William Beveridge. It is also a reminder that a radical re-examination of 1980s social reform is of much more than academic interest. The destructive effects of the 1980s are still with us. The conflict then between people's calls for democratisation and right-wing populist government's determination to cut back the state and return to the unfettered market of the past, is if anything even more relevant and acute today both in the UK and internationally than it was then. If we want to make better sense of this and deal with it more effectively, we may do well to rethink prevailing interpretations of 1980s politics and policy and listen more carefully to first-hand warnings from history, like those available from folk in North Battersea. This is not about the benefit of hindsight, but taking seriously the warnings people gave us at the time.

See also:

Further reading

  • 'All Our Welfare: Towards participatory social policy' by Peter Beresford, (Bristol : Policy Press, 2016) [National Library of Scotland shelfmark: PB8.216.108/1].
  • 'A Say In The Future: Planning, participation and meeting social need' by P Beresford and S Croft, (London, Battersea Community Action, 1978).
  • 'A Say In The Future: Planning, participation and meeting social need' Second edition, with a new introduction, by P Beresford and S Croft, (London, Battersea Community Action, 1982).

 

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