Introduction and Overview

This piece of work will discuss what poverty is and will compare and contrast three main theories and what their view on poverty is. These theories will be the New Right approach, Social Democratic and Feminism. Each approach will have a study support the theory, as well as an evaluation.

Social policy is guidelines and legislation that have an affect on everyday's people's welfare. Government and businesses all have policies which effect families and individuals. The aim of social policy is to improve human welfare in areas such as; health, education, housing, unemployment and pensions. (Blakemore,K and Griggs 2007)

The welfare state and social policy came about after the war, Britain was in a poor state, so many people were deprived and living in poverty. Therefore, in 1942 the government set the Liberal Politician William Beveridge the task of finding out the problems and discovering how to make Britain a better place to live in. Beveridge wrote a report called "The Social Insurance and Allied Services Report" (better known as the Beveridge Report) which stated that there were five giants’ evils that had to be addressed.

 

The first giant evil Beveridge came up with was Want, this dealt with poverty. Beveridge found a lack of income in a family i.e. if family members were out of work and had no income then this led to people living in poverty. To tackle this problem Beveridge suggested a combination of mean tested benefits given to people who earn under a certain amount. The next giant evil brought forward, was disease, this looked into health. As a result of this evil the NHS was introduced a health service available to all. The third giant was ignorance which is also known as education. This was tackled through state education particularly state funded secondary education. Another giant evil brought forward by Beveridge was squalor; this was concerned with housing, to deal with this problem Beveridge, proposed a programme to build affordable council owned housing to rent. The final giant was Idleness which dealt with unemployment. Beveridge aimed to get full employment for Britain to tackle this giant evil. These five combined all made up the welfare state: social security, National Health Service, free education, council housing and full employment (Haralambos & Holborn, 2008).