Liz Kendall’s announcement in the House of Commons that £5bn needed to come off the welfare bill by 2030 was made in defiance of a strong Labour tradition. There is a storm to come on this question because the defence of welfare has for a long time been a core Labour idea.
At best, Kendall’s proposals can be complimented as being brave. Incapacity benefits as part of Universal Credit will be cut for new claimants by more than £2,000 a year and frozen for existing claimants. The top rate of Universal Credit for the most disabled will be cut. The Personal Independence Payments (PIP) assessment will be reviewed, and eligibility tightened so that, from November 2026, only the most severely disabled will qualify. Jobseekers’ Allowance (JSA) and Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) will be merged into a new unemployment benefit that pays more but lasts for a limited time.
The already brewing rebellion on the Labour backbenches shows that this is not going to be easy. There is, it should be said, a strong Labour tradition to which the work and pensions secretary, can appeal. The clue to that tradition is in the name of the party. This is after all, the Labour party, the party of work which, one could argue, has foolishly allowed itself to become the party of welfare.
This tradition of Labourism is one that Gordon Brown mined in his early years as chancellor of the Exchequer. The early New Labour years were all about work—a cardinal labour value if ever there was one—and this is why Kendall has introduced a “right to try” work for the disabled which will allow benefit claimants to try working without the fear of losing their financial support. The Department for Work and Pensions has earmarked £1bn to help people find jobs.
So Kendall is not without intellectual resources. There is a strong case that the welfare bill is growing too quickly and that it is a poor use of money to spend more on welfare than on defence. Yet this is still going to be a hard sell within the Labour party and that is in no small part due to the intellectual legacy of Richard Titmuss (1907-1973). Perhaps more even than William Beveridge, Titmuss is the founding inspiration of Labour welfarism. Beveridge, of course, defined the contours of the post-war welfare state enacted by the Attlee government—but if we are to understand the Labour party’s attitude towards welfare, then Titmuss is the surer guide.
Although, like so many Labour intellectuals, he ended up as a professor at the London School of Economics (LSE), Titmuss took a curious route. He left school at 14 with no formal qualifications, after illness curtailed his attendance. But he then set about educating himself in social policy, working for 16 years for a large insurance company as an actuary.
In 1938 Titmuss published Poverty and Population, an early study of the regional differences between the North and the South of Britain. His great volume, the one that secured his reputation within the British left, and won for this auto-didact the coveted title of Professor of Social Administration at the London School of Economics, was Problems of Social Policy, published in 1950.
In this book, as in all his work, Titmuss is a chronicler of social justice. In Essays on the Welfare State (1958) and Commitment to Welfare (1968) he set out the value of public obligation that a government owed to its least fortunate citizens. In his most important book, The Gift Relationship, Titmuss made his philosophy of altruism in social and health policy explicit. In this, as in all his work, Titmuss makes a strong defence of the values of public service over private or commercial forms of care. It is a case that Labour people have always echoed.
Titmuss was a practical, rather than a systematic, thinker. In his own lifetime, he was often criticised by other academics for his resolutely non-theoretical approach. In that regard Titmuss lived out Keir Hardie’s observation that the British—and the Labour family—are “a practical people, not given to chasing bubbles”. Titmuss served on a number of government committees on the health service and social policy, a subject he could be said to have invented. It was a subject to which he lent the Labour party his considerable moral authority.
And that moral example can often be uncomfortable for reform-minded Labour ministers. There was a case in point last week when Wes Streeting, the health secretary, announced the abolition of the arms-length administrative body NHS England and declared his intention to use more private sector capacity in the health service. When this intention is translated into actual policy, Labour MPs can be relied upon not to like it. They can be sure that Richard Titmuss, who always proclaimed his belief in universal services provided by the state, would not have approved either.
That said, there is a strange twist on this story which shows that there are always alternative arguments open to reforming Labour ministers. Streeting’s instincts may be far from those of Richard Titmuss but they are closer to those of Julian Le Grand.
Le Grand, a former health adviser to Tony Blair in 10 Downing Street, was the author of The Strategy of Equality, which set out the extent of the middle-class domination of the welfare state and Of Knights And Knaves, a study of the motivation of public servants, which made the case for the use of market mechanisms in public policy. Le Grand has a long association with the LSE where he has the resplendent title of the Sir Richard Titmuss Professor of Social Policy.
