Social Policy in UK: Key Concepts, Developmental History, Ideological Aspects, Impacts and Challenges

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SOCIAL POLICY IN UK

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The society has many issues that need to be eradicated in order to maintain a balanced and
harmonious social environment. Social policies work as the agent of abolishing social evils or
issues from the society. Thus, the implications of social policies are as relevant in developing
countries as in developed countries like UK. So, in this study, the key concepts of social policies
have been discussed. In addition, the developmental history of social policy has been illuminated
in the context of UK social policies. Apart from that, some important ideological aspects of
social policies and their missions have been elaborated. In this regard, the neo liberal perspective
and the third way perspective of social policy have been contrasted. On the other hand, the
impacts of social policies in UK have been identified further in this study. For that reason, many
alarming social issues of UK, like unemployment, gender discrimination and so on, have been
described here. Moreover, the challenges and issues related to implementation of social policies
have been highlighted in this study.
It is difficult to define what social policy is because the implications of the term changes
according to what society they belong to or they work for. In order to simplify, it can be said
social policies are a certain kinds of governmental or public policies that works to benefit the
people of a particular society where they live in. however, this term also refers to all the related
legislations, guidelines or principles that somehow put an impact on the living standard of the
social beings or contribute to improve social welfare. So, it can be said that the idea of social
welfare gave birth to the introduction of social policies globally. According to Keck and
Sakdapolrak (2013), social welfare includes all the social policies that have the capability or aim
to fight for healthy life style, income maintenance, social work, equal wages, social services,
education and more. Additionally, the issues faced by older people, marginalized people, or
disable people also fall under the coverage of social welfare.
In the context of UK, the term social policy revolves around those important human needs that
need to be mitigated in order to have a balanced societal state. These needs continue to be
changed as per the time but still there are some unchanged human needs such as globalization,
migration, economic challenges, security, physical and mental well being and so on. According
to Anderies et al. (2013), the motto of these policies is to eradicate any kind of inequality that
hinders any particular individual or a group of people to access social opportunities. Thus, these
policies minutely evaluate the present condition of the civil society, the international

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organizations, national governments so that they can come up with relevant solutions to support
the social beings to improve their life course (Spicker, 2019). Moreover, social protection is the
ultimate aim of social policies that are driven by various ideologies such as Marxism, liberalism,
socialism and the notion of democracy.
The origin of social policy in the world can be traced back to the reign of Umar al-Khattab in the
6th century. The main purpose of the initial social policy was referred to governmental
intervention to improve human welfare that gave birth to social policies of the democratic era. In
the western nations, the inauguration of social policies started with the involvement of socialists
such as Auguste Comte in the time of industrial revolution (upet.ro, 2019). At this time, many
legislative changes have been initiated in UK that led to the introduction of reforms like Poor
Law System and more. On the other hand, G. B. Shaw, Sidney Webb and G. Wallas were the
founders of the famous social policy department in London. The main purpose of this initiative
was to look after the reasons behind social inequality and poverty. This department has been
continuing to work for social welfare since 1912 with the same motto (Platt, 2019). One of the
interesting turn of social policy is that gradually it became the concern of not only the
government but also of private institutions. Consequently, both the public and private sectors
joined hands to help the society become more balanced and just.
Europe is the continent where almost each country has their own self governed social protection
policies for promoting justice, equality and solidarity. UK is one of those places that saw a huge
development in social policies especially after the World War 2. The purposes of social policies
were initially to look after whether each and everyone in the society have a minimum level of
income or not (cambridge.org, 2019). Thus, social equity was the first step of social policy in
UK. Balance of public finance was given the utmost value in making of the social policies here
although many other concerns started to be added in the list as time passed gradually. As a result,
social policies after 1997 started to cover every possible challenge that the contemporary society
was facing. For example, new tax codes have been generated and many benefits started to be
distributed among the socially and economically deprived group of people (Spicker, 2019).
Finally, other issues like child care, family support also have been taken into consideration and
acts like Employment Act 2002, Beveridge scheme, the NHS and many more have been issued
under the name of social protection policies in UK.

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Social policies, in UK, have always been driven by various diverse kinds of ideological
perspectives. The perspectives have been mainly influenced by political perspectives or political
positions. Thus, the left wing and the right wing in UK showed two different sets of ideologies
regarding the notion of social welfare and social policies. For example, right wingers believe that
institutional welfare is needed to improve the condition of the society by giving governmental
grants and things of that sort. On the contrary, left wingers are in the support of the fact that it is
important for every people to have social security where they can be financially able to buy food
from the private markets (pearsoned.co.uk, 2019).
Among the most prominent ideology behind social policy is Marxist ideology that focuses on the
unequal distribution of wealth in the society. According to this ideology, the society is dominated
by the economically powerful class while the economically challenged class becomes the
marginalized section of the society. The problem of this structure of the society lies in the fact
that the dominant class controls the means of all kinds of production and thus the working class
always gets exploited by them in one way or another (Jost, Gaucher and Stern, 2015). This
situation is still visible in today’s UK and in other places although the forms of exploitation has
been changed and modified. Thus, the person, who believes in this ideology, focuses on how to
reduce the gap between these two social classes so that the power balance can be restored.
However, the believers of neo-Marxism try to come up with new policies that will be helpful for
legitimating the capitalist mode of society by providing pensions and other welfare policies.
Another significant ideological perspective behind social policy is socialism that seeks a
collective form of social improvement. Thus, there are three socialist values related with this
ideology and they are fraternity, equality and liberty. As mentioned by Dey (2014), the believers
of socialism see freedom as one of the basic rights and thus they try to empower the socially
deprived section of the society to be able to live freely. On the other hand, reduction of social
disadvantage based on any kind of discrimination is strictly handled by the socialists who believe
in socialism. Moreover, the operation of social policies is based on providing services to improve
mutual support and aid to maintain solidarity in the society.
Liberalism is another ideology that have impacted some of socialists who believe that social
welfare can only be established if each and every individual is able to exercise their rights. Thus,
unlike the above mentioned ideologies, this ideology gives more importance to the individual