The post-war Labour Government has often been criticized for its failure to remove the means test from social security. Labour ministers, however, had no reason to anticipate the problems which were later to arise in the administration of means tested social assistance. The experience of the supplementary pension scheme during the war had indicated that there would be few problems of take-up or stigma if old people were required to claim assistance as a supplement to their pensions. Furthermore, the abolition of the household means test in 1941 was believed to have removed the cause of much of the bitterness surrounding the means test in the 1930s. A further, crucial, point is that the assistance scale was not seen as a poverty line, but was believed to provide more than a bare subsistence income. Indeed, the recent opening of the official records of the period has revealed that the 1948 scale was not based upon the subsistence diets calculated by Beveridge, and the comparisons which have often been made between the benefits rates proposed by Beveridge and those introduced in 1948 are of little value, whatever price index is used to express the Beveridge figures in 1948 prices.

The system of personal taxation in the United Kingdom is under attack because of the way in which it discriminates between taxpayers on the basis of sex and marital status. Criticisms are allied with proposals for reform, all of which are primarily concerned with the social effects of changing the system. In this paper the various proposals have been categorized under the heads ‘conservative’, ‘radical’, and ‘moderate’ according to the social implications of the changes they advocate. Each set of proposals is discussed and evaluated in terms of revenue costs and savings to the Exchequer and real costs and benefits to the community. The proposals of the recent Green Paper are categorized as conservative and discussed under that head.

It is often argued that there are significant differences in the costs of providing public and non-public services. However, these arguments have almost invariably been based on crude comparisons of bald expenditure figures of rather dubious validity. In this paper we describe and apply a conceptual framework which attempts to place such inter-sectoral comparisons on a more reliable basis. Our application is to day care services for elderly people provided by local authority social services departments, area health authorities and voluntary organizations, although the framework has much wider relevance. Our results provide clear evidence to refute the oft-made assumption that voluntary services are universally cheaper than their statutory counterparts. Standardizing costs for the dependency characteristics of users and the activities of day units, we find that voluntary-statutory cost differences are dependent upon the scale of operation. Small voluntary units certainly enjoy a cost advantage, but larger voluntary units are unlikely to be cheaper, and are probably more expensive, than local authority units of a similar scale.

This paper examines the incomes of men retiring before age 65, using FES data for years 1970–77. The findings are that such men generally rely on state benefits for most of their income. In particular, it seems that many of the early retired are receiving benefits related to ill-health which suggests that early retirement decisions are attributable more to poor health than to any voluntary desire for increased leisure by those who can afford not to work. It is found that the incomes of the early retired improved over the 1970s relative to average eararnings, but this may be due to a rise in levels of state benefit rather than private sources of income. Incomes of this group have generally been lower than for men over age 65. There is, however, a small number of early retired men with very high incomes and extensive private support, but this is only about ten per cent of the group.