Social Policy in the UK: History, Evolution, and Impact

SOCIAL POLICY
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Social policies play a great role in flourishing the wellbeing of the citizens of every state. This is
so because every state battles with some universal and some specific social issues that need to be
taken care of in order to sustain a welfare state. United Kingdom is one of those states where
social policies have a lot of potential to solve the alarming social issues. So, in this study, various
aspects of social policies have been explored in the context of UK based social policies. For that
reason, the history of social policy practices in UK has been presented along with the evolution
of social policy. On the other hand, some prominent social evils have been identified such as
poverty and social exclusion. Furthermore, the effects of such social evils have been identified.
Additionally, the role of social policies in eradicating such social issues has been illuminated
further in the study. Social policies can be guided by various ideologies. However, it has been
noticed that the ideology namely neo-liberalism highly inspires the social work practices in UK.
So, the notion of this ideology has been explained in this study. In order to be more specific, the
ongoing debates around this ideological perspective have been identified and discussed in the
context of UK.
Social policies refer to those principles, activities or guidelines within a governmental setting
that helps in building a welfare state through providing social services for the weaker section of
the society. In the context of UK, a welfare state aims at protecting the well-being of the
inhabitants who have various needs that includes mainly economical needs (Spicker, 2019).
Thus, the purpose of social policy is to come up with many grants or action plans that can help in
mitigating the needs of that section of the society so that social equality can be achieved. In UK,
the welfare state has been founded in 1942 through the introduction of Beveridge Report and has
been facilitated by the 1948 Labour administration.
UK social policies have been initially directed through the Poor Laws that were inaugurated in
1598 and were valid till 1948. This particular legislation was far less detailed and looked after
very little areas of social issues such as helping the poor to get jobs and more of that sort. This
had its drawbacks and thus a new Poor Law was introduced in 1834 that dealt with the ongoing
social changes brought up by the contemporary new industrial revolution (Hickey and Du Toit,
2013). This set of social changes has been prominent since now because poverty, unemployment
and other social issues got their new masks after the industrial revolution in UK.
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Gradually, it has been noticed that poverty was not the only social concern and rather the society
needed much more help such as health care, child care, and social inclusion and more from their
governmental bodies. Finally, the welfare state, founded after 1948, updated their social
responsibilities and understood that the aim of social policies includes educational opportunities,
housing bills, healthcare services, and social security and so on. On the other hand, it has also
been recognized that each and every social need is connected with each other and thus no single
solution can be helpful for bringing the essence of a welfare society into reality (Dowling and
Harvie, 2014). However, Poor law emphasized visualization of these areas of social services that
has been highly criticized by the new social workers of UK.
If we look closer into the availability of social policies in UK then it can be noticed that the
social policies can be divided into certain sections such as education, healthcare, social diversity
maintenance, economical support, housing, pension, childcare, disability and so on. Based on
this demarcation of social services in UK, one of the most important characteristic of social
policy is to solve the issue of social exclusion on the basis of social inequality of many sorts.
There is a very slight but strong difference between the concept of social differences and social
inequalities. Social inequality happens when a particular person o a group of people becomes
marginalized in the society for being different than others (Collins and Haudenhuyse, 2015). For
example, people become victims of social inequality for belonging from different genders, social
classes, and races or from poor economical statuses. Among them, income differences are one of
the issues that hinder the equal distribution of resources and opportunities in the society.
As a result, one section of the society becomes poorer day by day and one section becomes richer
and thus the dream of a welfare society cannot be achieved with people having unequal amount
of wealth. This kind of economical issues results in poverty that depends upon not only
economical statuses but also on unemployment issues and on the social evil of social exclusion
(Fitzpatrick, Bramley and Johnsen, 2013). So, in other words, it can be mentioned that traditional
social policies of UK helps in solving the issues related to childhood nutrition, transport,
unemployment, disability, minority and more. Social policies intend at improving the condition
and life standards of the poor people in UK through the legislative act called the New Labour.
The aim of this foundation has been to eradicate child poverty from the society of UK within 20
years from the time it has been inaugurated. For that reason, the New Labour has been started
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