The election of a Labour government in July 2024, following fourteen years of Conservative (and Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition) rule, represented a potential turning point in the direction of British social policy, or at least a pause in relentless attacks on the foundations of the welfare state. Previous Labour governments under Tony Blair (1997–2007) and Gordon Brown (2007–2010) had themselves reshaped social policy in ways that often ran counter to the traditional politics of the left, but had nevertheless produced some improvements in social outcomes. The Blair and Brown years had witnessed an increased reliance on markets and quasi-markets in the delivery of public services, particularly the NHS (Paton, Reference Paton and Casey2009) and social care and an emphasis on individualisation of responsibility through, for example, active labour market policies (Waltman, Reference Waltman and Casey2009) alongside increasing reliance on conditionality (Dwyer, Reference Dwyer2016). These trends ran alongside the government’s focus on a social investment approach in early years interventions (Bradshaw et al., Reference Bradshaw, Glendinning, Maynard and Bennett2015), real reductions in child and pensioner poverty, and improvements in public services leading to high levels of public satisfaction (Kavanagh and Cowley, Reference Kavanagh and Cowley2010). In addition, the introduction of a National Minimum Wage and a relative stabilisation of social inequality up until the onset of the 2008 global financial crisis represented positive outcomes in the assessment of New Labour’s social policy record (for a concise summary, see Lupton et al., Reference Lupton, Hills, Stewart and Vizard2013). In the following decade-plus of austerity, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and increasing social division, the welfare state suffered unprecedented challenges under less-than sympathetic Coalition and Conservative governments that sought to limit social expenditure (with the exception of the state pension) and to further expand conditionalities within the welfare system. At the same time, the consolidation of welfare myths – for example regarding the alleged generosity of benefits for migrants and people out of work – has created political conditions that make it harder to have an informed discussion of social policies and their importance for the collective management of social risks affecting all members of society (Hills, Reference Hills2015).
The social policy challenges faced by Labour in 2024 were hence extensive, within a much more restricted fiscal space than in 1997, with lower levels of economic growth and higher levels of public debt. On the one hand, societal problems associated with the traditional ‘five giants’ of health, education, housing, employment, and poverty had grown significantly, as illustrated, for example, in exacerbated health inequalities and access barriers to the health service, a multifaceted housing crisis, underemployment and stagnant wages, and growing child poverty. On the other hand, the UK fared badly in its ability to address what Greener (Reference Greener2022) has identified as the ‘New Five Giants’ of inequality, preventable mortality, crisis of democracy, job quality, and environmental degradation, which he argues highlight structural shortcomings of the British welfare system in the first decades of the twenty-first century. With a backdrop of environmental crisis, global insecurity, ongoing concerns regarding the sustainability of higher public debt in the context of adverse market reactions, and the rise of nativist and xenophobic politics, it seems the gulf between the need for more ambitious and comprehensive social policy interventions and the political conditions for developing these is increasingly large.
Labour’s 2024 general election manifesto (Labour, 2024), even though it stood under the headline ‘Change’, indicated a limited appetite for an ambitious reform agenda with regard to social policy. Among the six ‘First Steps’ of an incoming Labour government, only the pledges to reduce NHS waiting times and to recruit 6,500 new teachers related directly to social policy, while among Labour’s five longer-term strategic missions, building ‘an NHS fit for the future’ featured as the sole link to social policy. This aligned with Keir Starmer’s overall objective to transform both the heart of the party, its internal organisation and membership, and its external perception, in the hope of speaking to the doorstep concerns of voters, particularly around prudent fiscal management, the NHS, crime and policing, and migration, while offering little policy detail that may be used against the party during the election campaign. This shift, which incorporated a marginalisation of the left of the party and a prioritising of issues that had previously preoccupied predominantly right-leaning voters, meant that in the run-up to the election, there was a mixture of faith, hope, cynicism, and concern amongst supporters of progressive social policies.
About a third of the way through its term in office is, therefore, a significant point at which we as an academic community can assess the progress of the Labour government. Here we can reflect on both the challenges that existed for the incoming government, how Labour promised to address such challenges, what constraints on policy have looked like, and what has been achieved so far. This early assessment is crucial for academics and the wider policy community in order to (re)evaluate the direction of political travel, to consider ongoing key problems and the adequacy as well as focus of policy responses. It also serves as an important source of information for undergraduate and postgraduate students of social policy, offering a critical review of the state-of-play in a number of highly relevant social policy areas.
Contributions to this themed section come from those engaged and active in the Social Policy Association’s Policy Groups – research groups established by members and funded by the Social Policy Association to reflect on essential social policy areas in the 2020s, and to enhance evidence for effective policy-making. The coverage here does not therefore reflect the traditional ‘five giants’, nor does it claim to offer a comprehensive assessment, but rather focuses on policy areas identified by the academic community as particularly significant for social policy in the current policy landscape. All articles, despite their differences in scope and approach, address the following three broad questions and their associated fields of enquiry: What are the main social policy challenges in the respective policy area? To what extent and how has the Labour Party considered these challenges, and what policy responses has it proposed during the 2024 election campaign? Since taking office, what actions have been taken, what is the potential and limits of these actions, and what is the general direction of travel with regards to the specific policy area?
Following this introduction, the ‘state of the art’ article by Kevin Farnsworth examines the 2024 Labour Manifesto to provide context for the vision of the party at the point of election and reflect on its wider social policy implications. By employing discourse analysis methods and computer-aided language models, Farnsworth shows how the 2024 manifesto represented a significant shift in Labour’s policy positioning, aligning more closely with New Labour and, on some issues, recent Conservative platforms rather than more traditional Labour stances on social policy. Whilst the manifesto aimed to come across as a cautious, sensible platform to reassure voters – including those in the centre ground – after years of economic crisis and political volatility, in practice it also signalled ‘a new rightwards shift in the party’s historical, ideological contestations’. This included committing towards – among other things – tight public spending, tax freezes, private-sector-led ‘growth’, protection of the pensions triple-lock, and a more hostile immigration environment (also in relation to access to welfare). As observed in the article, the first few months of the Labour government indicate the manifesto was more than just words.
Addressing economic inactivity through reforming welfare alongside workers’ rights and responsibilities has been a key objective of the Labour government, as reflected both in the manifesto and its first year in office – illustrated, for example, by the Employment Rights Act and ill-fated attempts at reforming disability benefits. In the second article, Sioned Pearce and co-authors situate these policy initiatives in the context of longstanding labour market insecurities, and discuss measures taken by the government to enhance working conditions, notably related to ‘insecure work’, to address income insecurity, to reform disability-related entitlements, and to tackle economic inactivity of young people. The authors highlight the tensions between continuity (for example, with respect to conditionalities and activation) and change, and analyse key policy interventions with regards to employment by categorising them within three distinct domains: policy areas where change has been implemented; areas constrained by structural or fiscal limitations; and areas that the government has strategically avoided.
Labour entered government in the context of a widely discussed housing ‘crisis’ about which quantifiable promises to the electorate had been made. In the third article in this section, Steve Rolfe and co-authors consider the extent to which market failure is amenable to the market solutions advanced in policy developments since the 2024 election. Tracing both the quantity and quality dimensions of housing inadequacy and the policy passivity of previous governments in this domain, the authors suggest a relatively ambitious approach to tackling housing supply and access with greater central control. Focusing particularly on housebuilding and issues in the private rented sector, the article highlights active policy developments that do address real problems. However, in identifying the many and multifaceted character of the housing ‘crisis’, the analysis also shows that continued reliance on a flawed market model is unlikely to produce promised results.
With regard to pensions, the overall system inherited by the Labour government has been characterised by increasing workplace pension participation and a general reduction in pensioner households living in poverty. Still, the article by Athina Vlachantoni and Suzy Morrisey sheds light on the complexities, inequalities, and challenges hidden behind broader trends and statistics, as well as highlighting the increasingly important role of pension policy in electoral and political debates (also as a result of the growing proportion of older voters in the UK). By applying the framework put forward by the Pensions Policy Institute, the authors look at issues of adequacy, fairness, and sustainability. Whilst the latter point has seen some significant interventions by the government (with a focus on state pensions), issues of adequacy and fairness still require a step change and, as Vlachantoni and Morrisey suggest, a consideration of gender and ethnic inequalities, of the variability of housing wealth, and of the socio-economic differences between current and future cohorts of pensioners.
The contested realm of family policy is one where governments may seek to change and shape behaviour as much as support the needs of society’s social units, but are consistently outpaced by social change beyond their control. ‘Family’ is also a policy domain where policy-makers’ intervention and the principles that underpin it have wide-ranging consequences across multiple dimensions of inequality. In their contribution, Anna Tarrant and co-authors focus on a single aspect of policy relating to families – parental leave – to illustrate both the trajectory of policy reform in this totemic area of gender inequality in employment, and to set this in the context of wider debates on the nature and substance of policies to resolve the competing demands of caring and working. Their analysis indicates that the government’s approach to parental leave does not yet provide the break from incremental and unambitious reform that is needed to tackle embedded inequalities in care and work.
The last article explores the Labour government’s tax policies, a topic that cuts across the other social policy areas discussed in this themed section due to its impact on government revenue and thus the government’s ability to commit additional public expenditure towards social policy priorities. Analysing the election manifesto and Labour’s commitment to fiscal credibility and prudence as well as taxation and spending decisions in office, Sally Ruane and co-authors explore the difficult fiscal and economic conditions in which the government has had to operate, and demonstrate the vagueness of commitments regarding taxation in the run-up to the election. They summarise Labour’s tax policies during the first twelve months and provide an analytical lens to interpret their underpinning objectives and political considerations. The authors thus show the extent to which tax policies up to this point have been marked by a degree of incoherence and narrowness, while lacking a clear narrative in support of more far-reaching or more radical tax reforms.
The themed section ends, as usual, with an annotated list of useful additional sources, which we encourage readers to consult for further analysis and commentary on the evolving landscape of British social policy and its political underpinnings.
Readers of the articles in this themed section will see a range of cross-cutting considerations that merit further research. Labour’s attempts, visible throughout the different policy areas under discussion here, are to balance fiscal prudence and incremental change with pressure to respond to a deeper need for a societal vision of a better future. In the context of radical disruptions both domestically (around, for example, political polarisation) and internationally (due to the emergence of more volatile and uncertain geopolitics), this raises the question of the real and imagined limits of the British state’s capacity to deliver the level of social protection and public services that its people expect. Issues of radical reordering and temporal urgency also come to the fore, as an incremental repair of the eroded fabric of the social protection system is an undertaking that requires more than one term in office. Consequently, such a project necessitates a political narrative capable of binding together divided political blocs and societal groups to retain a sufficiently large coalition of voters and supporters. Moreover, with regard to the different social policy areas addressed in this themed section, the classic tension between continuity and change is clearly present, as policies remain rooted in diverse path dependencies whilst responses are sought to changing socio-economic conditions and evolving societal challenges. Beyond the UK, it is also clear that the problems faced by the Labour government in rethinking, redesigning, funding, and politically defending a welfare system capable of dealing with current social policy problems are obviously not unique to this one government. It is important, therefore, in the midst of the current reordering of international relations, and the global conditions that underlie many national problems, that policy investigations and analyses also seek answers beyond national borders.
